With the release of Brave 1.19 today, Brave has become the first major browser maker to support IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol meant for accessing decentralized or censored content. From a report: Released in 2015, IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System. It is a classic peer-to-peer protocol similar to BitTorrent and designed to work as a decentralized storage system. IPFS allows users to host content distributed across hundreds or thousands of systems, which can be public IPFS gateways or private IPFS nodes. Users who want to access any of this content must enter an URL in the form of ipfs://{content_hash_ID}. Under normal circumstances, users would download this content from the nearest nodes or gateways rather than a central server. However, this only works if users have installed an IPFS desktop app or a browser extension. Brave says that with version 1.19, users will be able to access URLs that start with ipfs://, directly from the browser, with no extension needed, and that Brave will natively support ipfs:// links going forward. Since some major websites like Wikipedia have IPFS versions, users in oppressive countries can now use Brave's new IPFS support to go around national firewalls and access content that might be blocked inside their country for political reasons and is available via IPFS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The source code of mobile apps and internal tools developed and used by Nissan North America has leaked online after the company misconfigured one of its Git servers. ZDNet reports: The leak originated from a Git server that was left exposed on the internet with its default username and password combo of admin/admin, Tillie Kottmann, a Swiss-based software engineer, told ZDNet in an interview this week. Kottmann, who learned of the leak from an anonymous source and analyzed the Nissan data on Monday, said the Git repository contained the source code of: Nissan NA Mobile apps, some parts of the Nissan ASIST diagnostics tool, the Dealer Business Systems / Dealer Portal, Nissan internal core mobile library, Nissan/Infiniti NCAR/ICAR services, client acquisition and retention tools, sale / market research tools + data, various marketing tools, the vehicle logistics portal, vehicle connected services / Nissan connect things, and various other backends and internal tools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany's biggest air-ambulance operator has ordered two electric air taxis to evaluate their potential in a pioneering role speeding doctors to patients. From a report: ADAC Luftrettung, part of the country's leading motoring association, will begin testing the 18-rotor Volocopter GmbH aircraft from 2023 after the simulation of 26,000 emergency responses in two cities indicated that it could fulfill a rapid-transport role currently performed by a costlier helicopter fleet. The joint announcement Tuesday provides further evidence of the commercial potential of vertical takeoff air taxis, coming less than a week after Singapore said it plans to launch the world's first such service. Germany may need more than 250 bases for the craft, according to ADAC, which plans to operate them alongside its choppers. Though the VoloCity model has no room for a third person in its cabin with the pilot and medic, only 25% of helicopter missions today require a casualty to be evacuated by air, it said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the pandemic still in full swing and the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine just starting to ship in the United States, Google has pushed back the planned return to the office by a few months, to September 2021. From a report: But even as it extends the remote work period for most of its staff, Google is laying out a series of proposed changes that may substantially alter how its employees and people at other technology companies will work. In an email to the staff on Sunday night, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, said the company was testing the idea of a "flexible workweek" once it is safe to return to the office. Under the pilot plan, employees would be expected to work at least three days a week in the office for "collaboration days" while working from home the other days. "We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being," Mr. Pichai wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. "No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model -- though a few are starting to test it -- so it will be interesting to try."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Pornhub is removing all videos on its site that weren't uploaded by official content partners or members of its model program, a fundamental shift in the way one of the largest porn sites in the world operates. This means a significant portion of its videos will disappear. On Sunday evening, before the content purge, Pornhub hosted around 13.5 million videos according to the number displayed on the site's search bar, a large number of them from unverified accounts. On Monday morning, that number was down to 3 million, meaning Pornhub removed most of the videos on its site. "As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," according to Pornhub's announcement. "This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute." Pornhub made the policy change last week to ban all unverified users from uploading or downloading content to the site, and said it would expand its moderation efforts. But by Thursday, Mastercard and Visa announced that they'd both stop processing payments with the site altogether. Visa's announcement specifically stated it would drop all of the Mindgeek network, which includes a number of adult sites, including Redtube, Youporn, XTube, and Brazzers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Services from Alphabet's Google experienced widespread outages around the world, preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other services. From a report: Errors ranged from "something went wrong" on YouTube, to "there was an error. Please try again later," when attempting to log into the company's mail product from about 6:30 a.m. in New York. Google tools were failing to load for users in the U.S., the U.K. and across Europe, but began functioning again for many people after about an hour. Google confirmed there was an outage for the majority of its services according to a Workspace Status Dashboard, which monitors the health of its products, but just before 8:00 a.m. it said functionality was restored to the "vast majority" of users. "We will continue to work toward restoring service for the remaining affected users," it wrote in a post on its service status page. It hasn't said what caused the problems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The iPhone's original -- and unofficial -- app store has sued Apple, accusing the company of having a monopoly on the distribution of apps. Cydia, an app store created and launched in 2007 by Jay "Saurik" Freeman, one of the original jailbreakers filed the lawsuit against Apple on Thursday. From a report: "Were it not for Apple's anti competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution, users today would actually be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice," the lawsuit reads. Before Apple created the App Store, Freeman and a group of iPhone hackers created an unofficial app store where users that were willing to jailbreak -- a technique to exploit one or more bug to disable the iPhone security mechanism called code-signing enforcement that allows for only Apple-approved code to run on the phone -- could download and install apps. In 2010, according to Freeman, Cydia had around 4.5 million users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter thegreatbob shares a report: The General Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has turned 25. A brief celebration post detailed how the package started life as a July 1995 Usenet thought bubble by then-student Peter Mattis, who posted the following to several newsgroups: Suppose someone decided to write a graphical image manipulation program (akin to photoshop). Out of curiosity (and maybe something else), I have a few (2) questions: What kind of features should it have? (tools, selections, filters, etc.) What file formats should it support? (jpeg, gif, tiff, etc.)" Four months later, Mattis and fellow University of California Berkeley student Spencer Kimball delivered what they described as software "designed to provide an intuitive graphical interface to a variety of image editing operations." The software ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HPUX 9.05, and SGI IRIX. The answer to the file format support question turned out to be GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and XPM. The rest is history. Richard Stallman gave Mattis and Kimball permission to change the "General" in its name to "GNU", reflecting its open-source status. Today the program is released under the GNU General Public License. As the program added features such as layers, it grew more popular and eventually became a byword for offering a FOSS alternative to Photoshop even though the project pushes back against that description. The project's celebration page says volunteers did their "best to provide a sensible workflow to users by using common user interface patterns. That gave us a few questionable monikers like 'Photoshop for Linux', 'free Photoshop', and 'that ugly piece of software'. We still can wholeheartedly agree with the latter one only!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head. The service, now merged haphazardly with YouTube Music, recalled the early days of Google, when they sometimes just made cool internet things. It made it nearly a decade, though -- pretty impressive for a one of their products. I'll just say it up front: I'm a lifelong music pirate. Oh yes, I've reformed in recent years, but I've got a huge library of tracks that I've cultivated for decades and don't plan to abandon any time soon (likewise you can pry Winamp from my cold, dead hands). So when Google announced back in 2011 I could stream it all to myself for free, it sounded too good to be true. And indeed it was a relic of the old Google, which was quite simply all about taking things that are difficult to do yourself (find things online, set up a new email address, collaborate on a spreadsheet) and make them easier. Google Music -- as we'll call it despite it having gone through several branding changes before the final indignity of being merged into another, worse service as a presumably short-lived tab -- was not first to the music-streaming or downloading world by a long shot, but its promise of being able to upload your old music files and access them anywhere as if they were emails or documents was a surprisingly generous one. Generous not just in that it was providing server space for 20,000 songs (!) for free and the infrastructure for serving those songs where you went, but in its acknowledgement of other models of owning media. It didn't judge you for having 20,000 MP3s -- they weren't subjected to some kind of legitimacy check, and they didn't report you to the RIAA for having them, though they certainly could have. No, Google Music's free media locker was the company, or at least a quorum of the product team, announcing that they get it: not everyone does everything the same way, and not everyone is ready to embrace whatever business model tech companies decide makes sense. (Notably it has shifted several times more since then.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Gizmodo Australia reports: On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP. Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window's XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote 'sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked'. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent, assisting in its spread. While there is no confirmation that this code is definitely Windows XP, independent researchers have begun to pick through the source code and believe it stands up to scrutiny. The Windows XP source code is not the only code which might have leaked. A screenshot of the torrent files contains files and folders named, Xbox, Windows Research Kernel, MS DOS 6.0, Windows NT 3.5 and 4 source code, Windows Embedded and CE and many others. If true, that could spell a disaster for Microsoft because large chunks of Windows XP source code are still used in Windows 10, and as for Open Source, this leak could become a boom for Wine development because Microsoft is notorious for having a great number of internal APIs and various hacks in their APIs which make it difficult to reimplement them properly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plastic face shields are almost totally ineffective at trapping respiratory aerosols, according to modelling in Japan, casting doubt on their effectiveness in preventing the spread of coronavirus. From a report: A simulation using Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer, found that almost 100% of airborne droplets of less than 5 micrometres in size escaped through plastic visors of the kind often used by people working in service industries. One micrometre is one millionth of a metre. In addition, about half of larger droplets measuring 50 micrometres found their way into the air, according to Riken, a government-backed research institute in the western city of Kobe. This week, senior scientists in Britain criticised the government for stressing the importance of hand-washing while placing insufficient emphasis on aerosol transmission and ventilation, factors that Japanese authorities have outlined in public health advice throughout the pandemic. As some countries have attempted to open up their economies, face shields are becoming a common sight in sectors that emphasise contact with the public, such as shops and beauty salons. Makoto Tsubokura, team leader at Riken's centre for computational science, said the simulation combined air flow with the reproduction of tens of thousand of droplets of different sizes, from under 1 micrometre to several hundred micrometres.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government is working on updating its technology laws so it can ban the use of modern internet protocols that can hinder its surveillance and censorship capabilities. According to a copy of the proposed law amendments and an explanatory note, the ban targets internet protocols and technologies such as TLS 1.3, DoH, DoT, and ESNI. Moscow officials aren't looking to ban HTTPS and encrypted communications as a whole, as these are essential to modern-day financial transactions, communications, military, and critical infrastructure. Instead, the government wants to ban the use of internet protocols that hide "the name (identifier) of a web page" inside HTTPS traffic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Users have found a major bug in Apple's iOS 14 iPhone software. The free software upgrade, which Apple made publicly available last week, includes features many users had long asked for, such as better ways to organize apps, living programs called widgets on the home screen, and the ability to change which default apps the phone uses to browse the web or send an email. That last one doesn't appear to work. From a report: A growing chorus of Twitter users has been posting about the bug in Apple's default email and default web browser options. What happens is that whenever they set the default browser to Google's Chrome, for example, it works as expected, and tapping any link in an app or browser will open Chrome on the iPhone. But then if they restart the phone, iOS 14 changes that default back to Apple's Safari. "We are aware of an issue that can impact default email and browser settings in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. A fix will be available to users in a software update," Apple said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today launched Android 11, the latest version of its mobile OS, and pushed the source code to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). From a report: Unlike previous major versions, Android 11 is not only arriving as an over-the-air update to Pixel phones first, but also on OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Realme phones "with more partners launching and upgrading devices over the coming months." That's a major departure for Android, updates for which take months to arrive thanks to carriers and device makers dragging their feet. It doesn't help that Android is the dominant mobile operating system available on thousands of different device configurations, powering over 2.5 billion monthly active devices. [...] Android 11 brings a long list of new features. Google originally split them into three themes: People, Controls, and Privacy. But there is also support for 5G, new screen types, and call screening. There's even a frame rate API for helping apps and games adopt variable refresh rates, which will be a big focus over the next few years as phones and TVs adopt the feature from computer monitors. Google also expanded the Neural Networks API for running computationally intensive machine learning operations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Italy's competition authority has opened an investigation into cloud storage services operated by Apple, Dropbox and Google, in response to a number of complaints alleging unfair commercial practices. From a report: In a press release announcing the probe, the AGCM says it's opened six investigations in all. The services of concern are Google's Drive, Apple iCloud and the eponymous Dropbox cloud storage service. As well as allegations of unfair commercial practices, the regulator said it's looking into complaints of violations of Italy's Consumer Rights Directive. A further complaint alleges the presence of vexatious clauses in the contract. All three cloud storage services are being investigated over complaints of unfair practices related to the collection of user data for commercial purposes -- such as a lack of proper information or valid consent for such commercial data collection -- per the press release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The vast majority of reports published by the cyber-security industry focus on high-end economic espionage and state-sponsored hacking topics, ignoring threats to civil society and creating a distorted view of the actual cyber threat landscape that later influences policy-makers and academic work. From a report: In an article published in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, a team of academics made up of some of today's biggest names in cyber-security and internet research fields analyzed 700 cyber-security reports published over the last decade, between 2009 and 2019. "The reports we collected were derived from two types of sources: first, commercial threat intelligence vendors (629 reports), and second, independent research centers (71 reports)," academics said. In addition, the team also examined helpline data from AccessNow, a digital rights advocacy group, in order to understand the true digital threats, as reported by the end-users themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. From a report: China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch's website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14. Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch's visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents. At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch's registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Mxolosi saw a Tecno W2 smartphone in a store in Johannesburg, South Africa, he was attracted to its looks and functionality. But what really drew him in was the price, roughly $30 -- far less than comparable models from Samsung, Nokia, or Huawei, Africa's other top brands. [...] But its success can come at a price. Mxolosi, an unemployed 41-year-old, became frustrated with his Tecno W2. Pop-up ads interrupted his calls and chats. He'd wake up to find his prepaid data mysteriously used up and messages about paid subscriptions to apps he'd never asked for. He thought it might be his fault, but according to an investigation by Secure-D, a mobile security service, and BuzzFeed News, software embedded in his phone right out of the box was draining his data while trying to steal his money. Mxolosi's Tecno W2 was infected with xHelper and Triada, malware that secretly downloaded apps and attempted to subscribe him to paid services without his knowledge. Secure-D's system, which mobile carriers use to protect their networks and customers against fraudulent transactions, blocked 844,000 transactions connected to preinstalled malware on Transsion phones between March and December 2019. Secure-D Managing Director Geoffrey Cleaves told BuzzFeed News that Mxolosi's data was used up by the malware as it attempted to subscribe him to paid services. "Imagine how quickly his data would disappear if the subscriptions were successful," he said. Along with South Africa, Tecno W2 phones in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, and Myanmar were infected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.