Logitech makes some of the most popular webcams in the world, but using them on some of the most popular computers, like the M2 MacBook Air or M1 Pro MacBook Pro, is a less than stellar experience. From a report: Plugging one into any M1 or M2 Mac for a video call isn't an issue, but if you want to tweak in-depth settings or use some of these webcams' highlight features, doing that right now ranges from clumsy to impossible. That's because its most capable webcam software, Logitech Capture, isn't available on computers with Apple silicon. Logitech switched up its software plan for people who use newer Mac laptops and desktops without making much effort to tell anyone. Instead of offering Logitech Capture, its de facto software focused squarely on webcam settings and content creation features, it has two distinct and lesser Mac applications to choose from: Logi Tune and Logitech G Hub. Tune is a confusing app that lets you toggle settings for Logitech gadgets, with calendar integration added in, for some reason. G Hub was built for gamers who want to tweak RGB lighting and sensitivity settings for gaming-focused products and, now, webcams. Each app's interface looks different and lets you switch different settings, so you've got a choice with which app you use -- too much choice, if you ask me, given how limited the functionality is within each one. But neither offers as many options as Logitech Capture. You can access basic settings, like the ability to zoom in for a tighter crop or make a host of adjustments to the picture settings (or set them to auto settings), but you can't adjust the frame rate or the resolution. What that means is people who own an M1 or M2 Mac cannot utilize its face-tracking feature or switch between horizontal or vertical orientations on a nice, relatively high-end webcam like the $160 Logi StreamCam.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as "ESPN8: The Ocho," you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing. Or you might have seen "Excel Esports: All-Star Battle," a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. It's just the latest mainstream acknowledgment of Excel as a viable, if quirky, esport, complete with down-to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks. [...] Featured in this all-star battle was 2021 FMWC World Cup winner Diarmuid Early, an FMWC grandmaster from Ireland who claims 10,000 hours in Excel. (He would be Lambda if he were a function, he said.) The winner of the first championship in 2020, Joseph Lau (28,600 hours, Isological), also competed, along with six other highly ranked function warriors. Diarmuid took a commanding lead in the first slot-like task, racking up more points more quickly in a first round than anyone has in an FMWC competition. Others faced the kinds of challenges that regular users see in less combative Excel work. Polish competitor Gabriela Stroj told the hosts that "one stupid error" -- leaving a formula linked to the wrong sheet -- likely cost her hundreds of points. David Brown from the US said that his major problem was pasting from his 32-bit Windows-based Excel to the official online Excel answer sheets, which left his formulas treated as text. The top four of the eight competitors moved on to round 2, simulating a yacht regatta in Excel. Diarmuid and third-ranked Andrew Ngai made it through. The two competed on creating a score-tracking mechanic for an entirely Excel-based retro-style 2D platformer, "Modelario." Ngai eked out the win, although with only 411 of a total 1,000 possible points. Ngai's reward for a more than two-hour cell-based marathon: a trip to Tucson, Arizona, for the FMWC finals. You can watch the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle, which ESPN edited down to 30 minutes, here. You can also try the Excel tasks used in last weekend's battle yourself, as the organizers (the Financial Modeling World Cup) made all three of them available to download.

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With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, on Monday the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums issued a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortium's assets being transferred to the CXL consortium. From a report: With this integration, CXL is set to become the dominant CPU-to-device interconnect standard, as virtually all major manufacturers are now backing the standard, and competing standards have bowed out of the race and been absorbed by CXL. Pre-dating CXL by a few years, OpenCAPI was one of the earlier standards for a cache-coherent CPU interconnect. The standard, backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM, among others, was an extension of IBM's existing Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology, opening it up to the rest of the industry and placing its control under an industry consortium. In the last six years, OpenCAPI has seen a modest amount of use, most notably being implemented in IBM's POWER9 processor family. Like similar CPU-to-device interconnect standards, OpenCAPI was essentially an application extension on top of existing high speed I/O standards, adding things like cache-coherency and faster (lower latency) access modes so that CPUs and accelerators could work together more closely despite their physical disaggregation.

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The system for getting donated kidneys, livers and hearts to desperately ill patients relies on out-of-date technology that has crashed for hours at a time and has never been audited by federal officials for security weaknesses or other serious flaws, according to a confidential government review obtained by The Washington Post. From the report: The mechanics of the entire transplant system must be overhauled, the review concluded, citing aged software, periodic system failures, mistakes in programming and over-reliance on manual input of data. In its review, completed 18 months ago, the White House's U.S. Digital Service recommended that the government "break up the current monopoly" that the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit agency that operates the transplant system, has held for 36 years. It pushed for separating the contract for technology that powers the network from UNOS's policy responsibilities, such as deciding how to weigh considerations for transplant eligibility. About 106,000 people are on the waiting list for organs, the vast majority of them seeking kidneys, according to UNOS. An average of 22 people die each day waiting for organs. In 2021, 41,354 organs were transplanted, a record. UNOS is overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), but that agency has little authority to regulate transplant activity. Its attempts to reform the transplant system have been rejected by UNOS, the report found. Yet HRSA continues to pay UNOS about $6.5 million annually toward its annual operating costs of about $64 million, most of which comes from patient fees. "In order to properly and equitably support the critical needs of these patients, the ecosystem needs to be vastly restructured," a team of engineers from the Digital Service wrote in the Jan. 5, 2021, report for HRSA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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David Matthews writes via Nature: See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there's no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel. [...] Now, a funding initiative hopes to help ease that burden. [...] In January, Schmidt Futures, a science and technology-focused philanthropic organization founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, launched the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS), a network of centers across four universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Each institution will hire around five or six engineers, says Stuart Feldman, Schmidt Futures' chief scientist, with funding typically running for five years and being reviewed annually. Overall, Schmidt Futures is putting US$40 million into the project, making it among the largest philanthropic investments in this area. The aim is to overcome a culture of relative neglect in academia for open-source scientific software, Feldman says, adding that support for software engineering is "a line item, just like fuel" at organizations such as NASA. "It's only in the university research lab environment where this is ancillary," he says. [...] Those setting up VISS centers say Schmidt Futures' steady, relatively long-term funding will help them to overcome a range of problems endemic to academic software. Research grants rarely provide for software development, and when they do, the positions they fund are seldom full-time and long-term. "If you've got all of this fractional effort, it's really hard to hire people and provide them with a real career path," says Andrew Connolly, an astronomer who is also helping to set up the Washington centre. What's more, software engineers tend to be scattered and isolated across a university. "Peer development and peer community is really important to those types of positions," says Stone. "And that would be extraordinarily rare in academia." To counter this, VISS centers hope to create cohesive, stable teams that can learn from one another. [...] Dario Taraborelli, who helps to coordinate another privately funded scientific-software project at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in California, says that such initiatives fill a key gap in the scientific-software ecosystem, because funding agencies too often fail to prioritize crucial software infrastructure. Although there are now "substantial" grants dedicated to creating software, he says, there's precious little funding available to maintain what is built. Computer scientist Alexander Szalay, who is helping to set up a VISS centre at Johns Hopkins, agrees, noting that very few programs get to a point where enough researchers use and update them to remain useful. "They don't survive this 'Valley of Death,'" he says. "The funding stops when they actually develop the software prototype."

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slack_justyb writes: Thunderbird 102 has been released with some new UI improvements and new features. There has been a change in the icons, the layout of the address book has been upgraded to feature a more modern UI, and a new UI feature known as the spaces toolbar to get around Thunderbird. New features include an updated import and export wizard, a UI for editing the email header settings, and Matrix client support within Thunderbird, which is a messaging system using HTTPS that is similar to Discord if you've used that. Finally, the Thunderbird Twitter account released the first screenshot of the new UI that is being targeted for the 114 release. For those wondering what the Thunderbird team has done and is doing, you can always head over to the planning section of the developer site. The roadmap are things they're working on the current release and the backlog are the things they are working towards.

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Microsoft updated the Microsoft Store policies yesterday to prohibit publishers from charging fees for software that is open source or generally available for free. They're also no longer allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products. gHacks reports: If you have been to the Microsoft Store in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that it is home to more and more open source and free products. While that would be a good thing if the original developer would have uploaded the apps and games to the store, it is not, because the uploads have been made by third-parties. Even worse is the fact that many of these programs are not freely available, but available as paid applications. In other words: Microsoft customers have to pay money to buy a Store version of an app that is freely available elsewhere. Sometimes, free and paid versions exist side by side in the Store. Having to pay for a free application is bad enough, but this is not the only issue that users may experience when they make the purchase. Updates may be of concern as well, as the copycat programs may not be updated as often or as quickly as the source applications. Open source and free products may not be sold anymore on the Microsoft Store, if generally available for free, and publishers are not allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products anymore. The developers of open source and free applications may charge for their products on the Microsoft Store, the developer of Paint.net does that, for example. If Microsoft enforces the policies, numerous applications will be removed from the Store. Developers could report applications to Microsoft before, but the new policies give Microsoft control over application listings and submissions directly.

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Nolan Lawson, writing in a blogpost: Anyone who's worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it's big, it's complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to "fix" the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is... to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds. This might go on for several years. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs -- a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the "big diagram of boxes and arrows" problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch. As disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity ("The old code works fine!" "No wait, the old code is terrible!"), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. Will this cycle go on forever, though? I'm not so sure. Right now, the software industry has been in a nearly two-decade economic boom (with some fits and starts), but the one sure thing in economics is that booms eventually turn to busts. During the boom, software companies can keep hiring new headcount to manage their existing software (i.e. more engineers to understand more boxes and arrows), but if their labor force is forced to contract, then that same system may become unmaintainable. A rapid and permanent reduction in complexity may be the only long-term solution. One thing working in complexity's favor, though, is that engineers like complexity. Admit it: as much as we complain about other people's complexity, we love our own. We love sitting around and dreaming up new architectural diagrams that can comfortably sit inside our own heads -- it's only when these diagrams leave our heads, take shape in the real world, and outgrow the size of any one person's head that the problems begin. It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say "no" to new boxes and arrows. To say, "No, we won't solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven't imagined yet." Or to say, "Let's go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it." Or to just say, "Let's do less instead of more."

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Instant messaging app Telegram, which is used by over 500 million active users, said on Friday it's working on a premium tier, but plans to keep many of the current features available to existing users. In a post, Telegram Pavel Durov wrote: Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled. And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone. After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That's why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first. Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don't subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way. While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority.

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GitHub has announced that it will sunset Atom, the text editor for software development that the company introduced in 2011. In a blog post, GitHub said that it will archive the Atom repository and all other repositories remaining in the Atom organization on December 15, 2022. From a report: Atom served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for thousands of apps including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, GitHub's own GitHub Desktop. But GitHub asserts that Atom community involvement has declined as new tools have emerged over the years. Atom itself hasn't seen significant feature development for the past several months beyond maintenance and security updates.

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Apple announced some major new features for Mail that finally bring the email app closer to parity with Gmail and other popular email clients. From a report: Perhaps the most useful will be an undo send feature, which will let you call back an email within 10 seconds of hitting the send button. A "remind me" feature will let you set a time for an email to come back to the top of your inbox. A new scheduled send feature that allows you to specify exactly when an email should go out. And Mail will even tell you when it thinks you've forgotten to include an attachment.

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Capital One, a major player in America's banking industry with $434 billion in assets and more than 100 million customers, is launching Capitol One Software, "a business that develops and sells software products to companies scaling up their use of data and cloud computing," reports Forbes. From the report: The new venture, which has been created by Capital One's CEO and founder, Rich Fairbank, is based at the company's headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and has its own dedicated personnel as well as access to software developers in Capital One's 12,000-strong technology team. Its first product, Capital One Slingshot, helps companies speed up their adoption of Snowflake, a popular cloud data platform, and manage costs associated with it. [...] Ravi Raghu, the head of Capital One Software, says executives at Capital One see its creation as a natural evolution of the overall company's digital journey. "We've been talking of Capital One as a technology company for a while now. The best proof of that is [to become] a technology company that's actually selling software. That innovation just runs in our DNA." Still, making Capital One Software a success will be no slam dunk. The markets the new business is targeting are big but they are also full of formidable competitors whose sole focus is on software and there are significant costs associated with things such as building teams that consult with customers to help them get the most out of the products they buy. Capital One may also need to reassure investors, who have seen its share price fall by almost 12% this year to $127.86 at close of trading on May 31, that its move into the software business will not distract executives from its core finance ones, especially as the economy shows signs it may be tilting towards recession.

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ellithligraw writes: Analytics company Pixalate found that there are over 1.5 million abandoned iOS and Android apps. This analysis comes after Apple's announcement of changes to their App Store for abandoned apps, prompting a discussion on the Web. "Pixalate claims they crawled the App Store and Play Store to analyze all apps available for download based on their last update to determine their degree of 'abandonment,'" reports InfoQ. "Based on the previous definitions, Pixalate found over 650k iOS apps and about 870k Android apps to qualify as abandoned apps (haven't been updated in over two years). Of those, just about 180k iOS apps and 130k Android apps qualify as super-abandoned (haven't been updated in at least five years)." Note that according to Statista there are 4 million iOS apps, and 3 million Android apps available.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Russian troops stole almost $5 million worth of farm equipment from a John Deere dealer in the occupied city of Melitopol, Ukraine, only to discover that the machines have been shut down remotely, making them inoperable, according to a report from CNN. Some of the equipment, which comes with a remote locking feature and a built-in GPS, was tracked over 700 miles away in the Zakhan Yurt village of Chechnya. A source close to the situation told CNN that Russian troops gradually began taking machinery away from the dealer following their occupation of Melitopol in March. It reportedly started with two combine harvesters worth $300,000 each, a tractor, and a seeder, until troops hauled away all 27 pieces of equipment. Some of the equipment went to Chechnya, while others reportedly landed in a nearby village. "When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely," CNN's source told the outlet. Although the pieces of equipment were remotely disabled, CNN's source says that Russian troops may be trying to find a way around the block, as they're in contact with "consultants in Russia who are trying to bypass the protection."

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Senior figures in the Polish government indicated on Friday that the country had bought sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, but denied that it had been used against political opponents. Reuters reports: Reports from the Associated Press that NSO Group's Pegasus software was used to hack the phones of government critics, including a senator who ran the election campaign for the largest opposition party in 2019, have led to accusations that special services are undermining democratic norms. Government figures had previously declined to comment on whether or not Poland has access to Pegasus, citing laws on official secrets. In December, a deputy defense minister said Poland did not use Pegasus. However, in extracts from an interview with conservative weekly Sieci published on Friday, the leader of Poland's ruling nationalists Law and Justice (PiS) indicated that Polish services had the software. "Pegasus is a program that is used by services combating crime and corruption in many countries...It would be bad if the Polish services did not have this type of tool," Jaroslaw Kaczynski [leader of the Law and Justice party] was quoted as saying. He rejected opposition claims that Pegasus had been used against political opponents as "utter nonsense." Asked about Pegasus during a news conference, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said it would be a "disgrace" if Polish services did not have access to such surveillance technology.

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If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software, the next big thing won't matter, argues Dan Moren in an opinion piece for Macworld. From the report: Uneven distribution: As sci-fi writer William Gibson famously said, "the future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." While Gibson's comment resonates mostly on a socio-economic level that is borne out by Apple's not inexpensive technology, it's also embodied geographically by the company's work: if you're interested, you can see which Apple features are available in which regions. Many of these, of course, are due to restrictions and laws in specific regions or places where, say, Apple has not prioritized language localization. But some of them are cases where features have been rolled out only slowly to certain places. [...] It's surely less exciting for Apple to think about rolling out these (in some cases years old) features, especially those which might require a large degree of legwork, to various places than it is for the company to demonstrate its latest shiny feature, but it also means that sometimes these features don't make it to many, if not most of the users of its devices. Uneven distribution, indeed. To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all. [...] Shooting trouble: Sometimes what we're dealing with in the aforementioned situations are what we call "edge cases." Apple engineers surely do their best to test their features with a variety of hardware, in different places, with different settings. [...] Nobody expects Apple to catch everything, but the question remains: when these problems do arise, what do we do about them? One thing Apple could improve is the ease for users to report issues they encounter. Too often, I see missives posted on Apple discussion boards that encourage people to get in touch with Apple support... which often means a lengthy reiteration of the old troubleshooting canards. While these can sometimes solve problems, if not actually explain them, it's not a process that most consumers are likely to go through. And when those steps don't resolve the issues, users are often left with a virtual shrug. Likewise, while Apple does provide a place to send feedback about products, it's explicitly not a way to report problems. Making it easier for users to report bugs and unexpected behavior would go a long way to helping owners of Apple products feel like they're not simply shouting their frustrations into a void (aka Twitter). If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software [...] it at least owes it to its users to create more robust resources for helping them help themselves. Because there's nothing more frustrating than not understanding why a miraculous device that can contact people around the world instantaneously, run incredibly powerful games, and crunch data faster than a supercomputer of yesteryear sometimes can't do something as simple as export a video of a vacation. While Moren focuses primarily on unfinished features to help make his case, "there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse," says HN reader makecheck. "When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones." An example of this would be the current UX of notifications. "A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it," writes noneeeed. "But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparently all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups." "Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app," adds another reader.

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Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron sought to reassure users Wednesday that the company doesn't have impending plans to shift its business toward NFTs. From a report: In a tweet earlier this week, Citron shared an image of crypto wallet MetaMask integrated into Discord's user interface with the text "probably nothing" -- shorthand language in the NFT space for something that's about to be a big deal. He contextualized the previous tweet Wednesday evening, noting that Discord has "no current plans" to integrate crypto wallets into its app.

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During Adobe Max 2021 today, the company announced new features for Creative Cloud's various iPad apps, two more applications running natively on Apple Silicon Macs, and new web versions of some apps, among other things. Ars Technica reports: Adobe said it is adding or improving AI-driven tools across the suite, including an updated Object Selection Tool for Photoshop on Desktop. And some AI tools previously seen in Photoshop, like the Sky Replacement tool, are headed to Lightroom on Mac, iPad, and iPhone for the first time. The iPad version of Photoshop will gain support for RAW images and is getting several new tools and the ability to convert layers into Smart Objects. Illustrator for iPad is getting some improvements, too, most notably the ability to vectorize images and track version history and revert to earlier iterations. Further, After Effects and InDesign are getting Apple Silicon support on recent Macs. It's not all about native applications, though -- Adobe announced this week that it will bring versions of Photoshop and Illustrator to the web. The web versions won't be as robust as the desktop versions, but they will let you make minor edits and provide a way to share and discuss work with colleagues or clients. The apps will allow users to review work and leave comments without launching a native version of Photoshop -- think of it a bit like a stripped-down version of InVision that exists directly inside the Creative Cloud ecosystem. Adobe also said it's launching a system built into Photoshop that can, among other things, "help prove that the person selling an NFT is the person who made it," reports The Verge. "It's called Content Credentials, and NFT sellers will be able to link the Adobe ID with their crypto wallet, allowing compatible NFT marketplaces to show a sort of verified certificate proving the art's source is authentic."

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The creator of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and founder of the first virtual reality startup, Mark Pesce, opines an IEEE Spectrum piece that we need software updates forever. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the article: Device makers are apt to drop support for old gadgets faster than the gadgets themselves wear out. Consumers have relied on the good graces of device makers to keep our gadget firmware and software secure and up-to-date. Doing so costs the manufacturer some of its profits. As a result, many of them are apt to drop support for old gadgets faster than the gadgets themselves wear out. This corporate stinginess consigns far too many of our devices to the trash heap before they have exhausted their usability. That's bad for consumers and bad for the planet. It needs to stop. We have seen a global right-to-repair movement emerge from maker communities and start to influence public policy around such things as the availability of spare parts. I'd argue that there should be a parallel right-to-maintain movement. We should mandate that device manufacturers set aside a portion of the purchase price of a gadget to support ongoing software maintenance, forcing them to budget for a future they'd rather ignore. Or maybe they aren't ignoring the future so much as trying to manage it by speeding up product obsolescence, because it typically sparks another purchase. Does this mean Sony and others should still be supporting products nearly two decades old, like my PSP? If that keeps them out of the landfill, I'd say yes: The benefits easily outweigh the costs. The devilish details come in decisions about who should bear those costs. But even if they fell wholly on the purchaser, consumers would, I suspect, be willing to pay a few dollars more for a gadget if that meant reliable access to software for it -- indefinitely. Yes, we all want shiny new toys -- and we'll have plenty of them -- but we shouldn't build that future atop the prematurely discarded remains of our electronic past.

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An anonymous reader writes: Software used by the Department of Homeland Security to scan the records of millions of immigrants can automatically flag naturalized Americans to potentially have their citizenship revoked based on secret criteria, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. The software, known as ATLAS, takes information from immigrants' case files and runs it though various federal databases. ATLAS looks for indicators that someone is dangerous or dishonest and is ostensibly designed to detect fraud among people who come into contact with the U.S. immigration system. But advocates for immigrants believe that the real purpose of the computer program is to create a pretext to strip people of citizenship. Whatever the motivation, ATLAS's intended outcome is ultimately deportation, judging from the documents, which originate within DHS and were obtained by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Muslim Advocates through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. ATLAS helps DHS investigate immigrants' personal relationships and backgrounds, examining biometric information like fingerprints and, in certain circumstances, considering an immigrant's race, ethnicity, and national origin. It draws information from a variety of unknown sources, plus two that have been criticized as being poorly managed: the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, also known as the terrorist watchlist, and the National Crime Information Center. Powered by servers at tech giant Amazon, the system in 2019 alone conducted 16.5 million screenings and flagged more than 120,000 cases of potential fraud or threats to national security and public safety. Ultimately, humans at DHS are involved in determining how to handle immigrants flagged by ATLAS. But the software threatens to amplify the harm caused by bureaucratic mistakes within the immigration system, mistakes that already drive many denaturalization and deportation cases. "ATLAS should be considered as suspect until it is shown not to generate unfair, arbitrary, and discriminatory results," said Laura Bingham, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. "From what we are able to scrutinize in terms of the end results -- like the disparate impact of denaturalization based on national origin -- there is ample reason to consider ATLAS a threat to naturalized citizens."

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