TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has left the Chinese-owned video app firm just three months since joining, and only days since the company sued the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump over an executive order effectively banning it in the United States. He will be replaced by U.S. General Manager Vanessa Pappas on an interim basis, TikTok said in a statement. From a report: The resignation comes at a tricky time for super-fast growing TikTok as it tries to persuade both the United States and India that it is not a security threat, while at the same time holding discussions with prospective buyers following a second U.S. order demanding the sale of its U.S. operations. Mayer was Walt Disney's top streaming executive before becoming chief executive officer of TikTok and chief operating officer of parent ByteDance on June 1. "In recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes will require, and what it means for the global role I signed up for," Mayer said in a letter to employees.

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onyxruby writes: The DOJ has finally launched the precursor to an investigation into the mass deaths of senior citizens in nursing homes and long term care facilities. Roughly half of all COVID-19 deaths in the United Stated have occurred in nursing homes. The governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan are being requested to provide information to the DOJ. This will be used to determine if a formal investigation into the deaths of tens of thousands of elderly patients will be launched. From the release: "According to the Centers for Disease Control, New York has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, with 32,592 victims, many of them elderly. New York's death rate by population is the second highest in the country with 1,680 deaths per million people. New Jersey's death rate by population is 1,733 deaths per million people -- the highest in the nation. In contrast, Texas's death rate by population is 380 deaths per million people; and Texas has just over 11,000 deaths, though its population is 50 percent larger than New York and has many more recorded cases of COVID-19 -- 577,537 cases in Texas versus 430,885 cases in New York. Florida's COVID-19 death rate is 480 deaths per million; with total deaths of 10,325 and a population slightly larger than New York. The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is evaluating whether to initiate investigations under the federal 'Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act' (CRIPA), which protects the civil rights of persons in state-run nursing homes, among others. The Civil Rights Division seeks to determine if the state orders requiring admission of COVID-19 patients to nursing homes is responsible for the deaths of nursing home residents." In other COVID-19 related news, Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal, reporting that Abbott has been given emergency use authorization for a rapid antigen test. "They say: [it takes 5 minutes and costs only $5]," writes schwit1. "Greater than 95% sensitivity and no machine or lab required, adding they have the ability to make 50 million tests per month by October.

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British researchers have identified 50 new planets using artificial intelligence, marking a technological breakthrough in astronomy. CNN reports: Astronomers and computer scientists from the University of Warwick built a machine learning algorithm to dig through old NASA data containing thousands of potential planet candidates. It's not always clear, however, which of these candidates are genuine. When scientists search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), they look for dips in light that indicate a planet passing between the telescope and their star. But these dips could also be caused by other factors, like background interference or even errors in the camera. But the new AI can tell the difference. The research team trained the algorithm by having it go through data collected by NASA's now-retired Kepler Space Telescope, which spent nine years in deep space on a world-hunting mission. Once the algorithm learned to accurately separate real planets from false positives, it was used to analyze old data sets that had not yet been confirmed -- which is where it found the 50 exoplanets. These 50 exoplanets, which orbit around other stars, range in size from as large as Neptune to smaller than Earth, the university said in a news release. Some of their orbits are as long as 200 days, and some as short as a single day. And now that astronomers know the planets are real, they can prioritize them for further observation. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Microsoft's acquisition talks with TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance "ballooned" this summer after President Donald Trump intervened, according to a report from The New York Times, citing people familiar with the situation. ByteDance is being forced to sell TikTok's U.S. business by the Trump administration, which says the app's current ties to China make it a national security threat. An executive order signed by Trump on Aug. 6 means a sale must go through before Sept. 15. However, TikTok sued the U.S. government on Monday, alleging it was deprived of due process. The lawsuit could delay the ban, giving TikTok more time to get a better deal for the sale. When the deal talks began, Microsoft is said to have been reluctant to do any kind of large TikTok acquisition, due in part to the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, according to the Times report. However, a minority stake in the wildly popular video sharing app was viewed positively as it may lead to TikTok ditching Google Cloud, which it currently uses, and signing up to Microsoft Azure, instantly making it one of Microsoft's largest cloud customers. TikTok could also be integrated with Microsoft's $7 billion advertising business. Microsoft issued a statement on Aug. 2 about its pursuit to buy TikTok's U.S. business. However, on Aug, 3, Trump said he'd rather Microsoft, valued at $1.6 trillion, purchase the app that is used by 100 million Americans in its entirety. "I think buying 30% is complicated," Trump told reporters in the Cabinet Room at the White House. There are now several other bidders competing with Microsoft, with the main one being enterprise software firm Oracle. Netflix and Twitter have also been contacted by bankers and investors, but it's not clear if they're interested, according to the Times. In any case, deal talks between the parties have "morphed into a big, messy, political soap opera," according to the report.

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Colorado startup Boom Supersonic is planning to show off its XB-1 supersonic plane on October 7th, with flights planned for next year. Engadget reports: [Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl] describes himself as an Objectivist (a follower of the teachings of Ayn Rand) and previously worked for both Groupon and Amazon. He freely admits that, beyond his private pilots license, he does not have an aerospace background. During our talk, Scholl referenced SpaceX a number of times, and it's clear that Elon Musk's private spaceflight company is the model Boom is striving to emulate. "You know, when SpaceX got started, it was a joke that a startup could build a rocket," he said "and not that many years later, they're landing rockets vertically on pads." Scholl's ambition is to do for supersonic travel what SpaceX did, and is doing, for the space industry. One of the things that Scholl and Boom are banking on is the advances in computer-aided design and materials science. The single-seat, 71-foot long XB-1 is designed to test if these advances will make building a supersonic plane far more efficient and cheap than it was in the '60s. XB-1 will use a variety of molded carbon fiber composites for its body that should hold up better against the heat and stresses caused by supersonic flight. The company says that the plane should be able to withstand temperatures exceeding 300 Fahrenheit (148C). [...] XB-1 will be piloted by Commander Bill 'Doc' Shoemaker, a 21-year US naval aviator who led combat missions in an F-18 on a number of occasions. He has also served as a flight test instructor at the US Navy test pilot school and previously worked for Zee.Aero, one of (Google co-founder) Larry Page's self-funded flying car startups. If XB-1 proves successful, then Boom will move to begin building its full-size supersonic plane, Overture. Overture is a craft designed to seat less than a hundred people at "business class" levels of comfort. And for "business class" prices, they'll be able to fly from, say, Tokyo to Seattle in four hours and thirty minutes. Boom also promises its planes will use less fuel through a combination of efficient materials and better engines. Scholl said that the planes are powered with a "quiet, efficient turbofan system [...] a similar engine architecture to what you'd see on any large Airbus or Boeing wide-body aircraft today, just adapted for supersonic flight." And recently, Boom announced that it was teaming up with Rolls Royce to build an engine for Overture. Scholl says that Overture is going to be expensive, but that Boom's lack of a legacy is as much of a benefit as it is a burden. "We don't have to think about the 737 Max, we don't have to think about how to keep the factories running for our last-generation airplanes," he said, claiming that Boom has the "luxury of focus." Scholl expects Overture to cost just $6 billion to develop -- by comparison, a 2011 Seattle Times report claimed that Boeing's 787 Dreamliner cost $32 billion to design. But Scholl is planning to sell 2,000 Overture aircraft for "$200 million a pop," which he says is a "$200 [billion] to $400 billion market opportunity."

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Kanye West is being sued for pulling the tried-and-true Silicon Valley tactic of allegedly stealing trade tech secrets. Gizmodo reports: First spotted by TMZ, the suit is being spearheaded by small, Pennsylvania-based ecommerce company MyChannel (MYC, for short). MYC allege that after pouring millions of dollars and half a year's worth of work into mocking up a spiffy new site for Ye's online clothing store, the rapper stepped out on their contract. According to the lawsuit, West then took the company's ideas for himself, and from the sound of things, just... ghosted them -- breaking multiple promises, violating NDAs, and acting like a huge tool in the process. According to the [30+ pages of MYC's complaint], West initially contracted MYC back in the spring of 2018 with the promise that if the company created a juiced-up video platform for his e-commerce site, he'd not only, y'know, pay the company for its services, but would invest a hefty $10 million into the business. MYC also had West sign an NDA just to make sure that the company's proprietary video tech wouldn't be "ripped off" without any payment. Probably assuming that Kanye would keep his word, MYC says its team spent the next six months clocking 80 hour workweeks on the project, spending tens of thousands on the proposed video software in the process. Not only that, but because Kanye "demanded" that the team move its HQ from its home in Philly over to California, and later Chicago, living expenses sunk them even deeper into the hole. All told, MYC claims to have spent spent $7 million of its own funds before confronting West and telling him to make good on his end of the deal. Instead of fulfilling his side of the bargain, the suit describes how West -- who it's worth pointing out is a literal billionaire -- came up with some "untrue perceived slight," and cut all ties with MYC's team, leaving them stranded and in a mountain of debt. Meanwhile, West spent the months immediately afterward using what MYC describes as a near-carbon copy of their platform as part of the promotion for "Sunday Service," West's so-called pop-up church experience.

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More than 2,400 police agencies have entered contracts with Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition firm, according to comments made by Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That in an interview with Jason Calacanis on YouTube. The Verge reports: The hour-long interview references an investigation by The New York Times published in January, which detailed how Clearview AI scraped data from sites including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo to build its database. The scale of that database and the methods used to construct it were already controversial before the summer of protests against police violence. "It's an honor to be at the center of the debate now and talk about privacy," Ton-That says in the interview, going on to call the Times investigation "actually extremely fair." "Since then, there's been a lot of controversy, but fundamentally, this is such a great tool for society," Ton-That says. Ton-That also gave a few more details on how the business runs. Clearview is paid depending on how many licenses a client adds, among other factors, but Ton-That describes the licenses as "pretty inexpensive, compared to what's come previously" in his interview. Ton-That ballparks Clearview's fees as $2,000 a year for each officer with access. According to Ton-That, Clearview AI is primarily used by detectives. You can watch the full interview here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A browser fingerprinting script is a piece of JavaScript code that runs inside a web page and works by testing for the presence of certain browser features. In an academic paper published earlier this month, a team of academics from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, Davis, has analyzed how popular browser fingerprinting scripts are used today by website operators. Using a machine learning toolkit they developed themselves and named FP-Inspector, the research team scanned and analyzed the top 100,000 most popular websites on the internet, according to the Alexa web traffic ranking. "We find that browser fingerprinting is now present on more than 10% of the top-100K websites and over a quarter of the top-10K websites," the research team said. However, the research team also points out that despite the large number of websites that are currently using browser fingerprinting, not all scripts are used for tracking. Some fingerprinting scripts are also used for fraud detection since automated bots tend to have the same or similar fingerprints, and fingerprinting scripts are a reliable method of detecting automated behavior. Additional details about the team's research can be found in a paper named "Fingerprinting the Fingerprinters: Learning to Detect Browser Fingerprinting Behaviors," set to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, next year, in May 2021. If you're concerned about the findings, you can block fingerprinting scripts by enabling anti-fingerprinting protections in your respective browser settings or by installing an ad blocker extension.

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According to Variety, the sci-fi series "Altered Carbon" has been canceled at Netflix, after airing just two seasons. From the report: The second season of the sci-fi series aired on the streaming service back in February, while the first season aired in 2018. An anime special titled "Resleeved," which was set before the events of Season 1, was released in 2019. The series was based on the novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. It followed the adventures of interstellar warrior Takeshi Kovacs, who was played by Joel Kinnaman in Season 1 and by Anthony Mackie in Season 2. "Altered Carbon" took place in a futuristic world where the human mind has been digitized and a person can transfer their consciousness from one body to the next. According to an individual with knowledge of the decision, the decision to cancel the show was made due to Netflix's traditional approach of cost versus viewership of a series.

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Elon Musk has said that his secretive neurotech firm Neuralink will demonstrate a working "device," presumably a brain-machine interface, at 6PM ET on Friday. The Verge reports: Musk has spoken repeatedly about his belief that BMI devices are needed to help humans keep up with AI by supplementing our brainpower, but right now, his goal is much simpler: to create an implantable device that lets people control phones or computers with their mind. Musk initially announced the August 28th "progress update" back in July, and has now offered more details on what will be shown. He says the update will include the unveiling of a second-generation robot designed to attach the company's technology to the brain, and a demo of neurons "firing in real-time," though it's not clear exactly what is meant by this. Even compared to Musk's other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink is ambitious. The company wants to connect to the brain using flexible electrodes thinner than a human hair that it calls "threads." Current BMI devices use stiff electrodes for this job, which can cause damage. But inserting flexible electrodes is a much more delicate and challenging task, hence the company's focus on building a "sewing machine" like robot to do the job. Eventually, Neuralink hopes to make the installation process for BMIs as non-invasive as Lasik eye surgery, even removing the need to use general anesthetic. Musk has previously spoken about the need for an automated Lasik-like process for BMIs to overcome the constraints and costs involved with needing to use highly trained neural surgeons. But this isn't ready to be shown off yet, according to Musk. "Still far from LASIK, but could get pretty close in a few years," Musk tweeted in response to a followup question about the event. Keep your eyes on the company's YouTube channel, where Neuralink will likely stream Friday's event.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Average 5G download speeds in the U.S. are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The U.S. came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the U.S. The U.S.'s average 5G speed is 1.8 times higher than the country's average 4G download speed of 28.9Mbps. User tests in neighboring Canada produced a 4G average of 59.4Mbps and a 5G average of 178.1Mbps. Taiwan and Australia both produced 5G averages above 200Mbps, while South Korea and Saudi Arabia produced the highest 5G speeds at 312.7Mbps and 414.2Mbps, respectively. In the U.S., average download speeds for users who accessed 5G at least some of the time was 33.4Mbps -- that figure includes both their 4G and 5G experiences. This was the second lowest of the 12 countries surveyed by OpenSignal, with the highest speeds coming in Saudi Arabia (144.5Mbps) and Canada (90.4Mbps). The U.S. fared better in 5G availability, the percentage of time in which users are connected to 5G; the U.S. figure in that statistic is 19.3 percent, fifth best, with Saudi Arabia placing first at 34.4 percent and the UK placing last at 4.5 percent. OpenSignal says it collects "billions of measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally."

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For over six years, one Wikipedia user -- AmaryllisGardener -- has written well over 23,000 articles on the Scots Wikipedia and done well over 200,000 edits. The only problem is that AmaryllisGardener isn't Scottish, they don't speak Scots, and none of their articles are written in Scots. From a report: Since 2013, this user -- a self-professed Christian INTP furry living somewhere in North Carolina -- has simply written articles that are written in English, riddled with misspellings that mimic a spoken Scottish accent. Many of the articles were written while they were a teenager. AmaryllisGardener is an admin of the Scots Wikipedia, and Wikipedians now have no idea what to do, because their influence over the country's pages has been so vast that their only options seem to be to delete the Scots language version entirely or revert the entire thing back to 2012. This ridiculous situation was discovered by a redditor on r/Scotland who happened to check the edit history of one article. By the redditor u/Ultach's count, Amaryllis was responsible for well over one-third of Scots Wikipedia in 2018, but Amaryllis stopped updating their milestones that year.

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A new report suggests that over the next 30 years, at least 80% of the oil industry will be wiped out. From a news report: The oil industry is on the cusp of a process of almost total decimation that will begin over the next 30 years, and continue through to the next century. That's the stark implication of a new forecast by a team of energy analysts led by a former US government energy advisor, seen exclusively by Motherboard. 2020, the forecast suggests, will go down in history as the final point-of-no-return for the global oil industry -- a date to which we will look back and remember how the production of oil, as well as other fossil fuels like gas and coal, underwent a slow, but inexorable and largely irreversible decline. Along the way, some 80 percent of the industry as we know it is going to be wiped out. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be recognized as a principal trigger for this decline. The new era of oscillating social distancing rules and remote working has crushed once rocketing demand, at least temporarily. But in reality, the broad contours of this decline were already set in motion even before the pandemic hit. And the implications are stark: we are in the midst of a fundamental energy transition which will see the bulk of the fossil fuel industry gradually eclipsed in coming decades.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday morning, TorrentFreak began receiving reports from multiple sources that something big was happening in the shadowy world of top-tier piracy known as 'The Scene.' From the volumes of information received, the majority of sources indicated that many so-called 'topsites' and their members had disappeared or gone into hiding. The word was that several major movie release groups -- SPARKS, GECKOS and DRONES -- had been targeted in a series of raids and as a result, people were running for cover. Precisely where these raids or actions took place still isn't entirely clear. Multiple sources point to the Nordic region, particularly Norway and Sweden, but reports of disruption and/or action in the Netherlands and even Switzerland persisted across our confidential sources, all of whom demand anonymity.

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Jim Salter, reporting for ArsTechnica: A reader tipped us off today that HBO Max stopped working a couple of weeks ago for Linux users, under any Web browser. Any attempt to play back a video on the streaming service on a Linux system -- regardless of distribution or browser -- returns an error saying, "We're having trouble playing this video. Please try again later." Unfortunately, trying again later won't help -- the root cause of the problem is that the Widevine DRM attempting to protect HBO Max's content from pirates is refusing to recognize any Linux system as a known platform. We saw the same thing happen in January, when CBS All Access suddenly stopped working on Linux in the same way. When we asked CBS executives if they had enabled the Verified Media Path (VMP) requirement on their Widevine server, they suddenly clammed up -- but later that day, the service miraculously worked for Linux users again. We did verify that HBO Max will not work on Linux browsers and that the problem is -- once again -- Widevine DRM refusing to issue a license. Although HBO Max has not returned requests for comment at press time, it seems very likely that the cause here is the same as it was for CBS All Access back in January. It seems like somebody enabled Verified Media Path on the Widevine server, and since the Linux kernel is not a verified media path, Linux users can't get a license and can't watch the content.

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In a mindboggling and dangerous move, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week quietly reversed its recommendation on COVID-19 testing for those exposed to the virus. Now, the CDC says that exposed but symptomless people do not need to be tested. From a report: The change immediately alarmed and outraged public health and infectious disease experts. It is well established that SARS-CoV-2 -- the pandemic coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 -- can cause completely asymptomatic infections in some and spread from other infected people before they develop symptoms (so-called "pre-symptomatic transmission"). In fact, some modeling studies have suggested that pre-symptomatic transmission may account for nearly half, or even more, of SARS-CoV-2 spread. That information previously spurred the CDC to recommend testing for anyone that was known to have -- or even suspected to have -- close contact with an infected person (that is, be within six feet for 15 or more minutes). "Testing is recommended for all close contacts of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection," the agency said on its website as recently as August 22. "Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested."

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Google today released the alpha version of Jetpack Compose, its UI toolkit for helping developers "build beautiful UI across all Android platforms, with native access to the platform APIs." From a report: While an alpha release means it is definitely not production ready, Jetpack Compose promises to let Android developers build apps using "dramatically less code, interactive tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs." The alpha release also includes new tools including Animations, Constraint Layouts, and performance optimizations. Android Jetpack, which Google launched at its I/O 2018 developer conference, is a set of components for speeding up app development. Think of it as the successor to Support Library, a set of components that makes it easier to leverage new Android features while maintaining backwards compatibility. Jetpack Compose, which Google first showed off at its I/O 2019 developer conference, is an unbundled toolkit meant to simplify UI development by combining a reactive programming model with Kotlin.

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The open-source project behind Julia, a programming language for data scientists, has revealed which languages users would shift to if they decided no longer to use Julia. From a report: Julia, a zippy programming language that has roots at MIT, has published the results of its 2020 annual user survey. The study aims to uncover the preferences of those who are building programs in the language. [...] Last year, 73% of Julia users said they would use Python if they weren't using Julia, but this year 76% nominated Python as the other language. MATLAB, another Julia rival in statistical analysis, saw its share of Julia users as a top alternative language drop from 35% to 31% over the past year, but C++ saw its share on this metric rise from 28% to 31%. Meanwhile, R, a popular statistical programming language with a dedicated crowd, also declined from 27% to 25%.

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Facebook is warning advertisers that they can expect weaker ad performance from iPhone users once iOS 14 comes out next month and is telling them to create second advertiser accounts to contain the disruption. From a report: Many of Facebook's advertising partners rely on Apple's "Identifier for Advertisers" (IDFA) user tracking feature to, for instance, target would-be users by interest and see if they actually clicked on a mobile ad directing them to install a particular app. Changes to IDFA coming with iOS 14 will have a big impact on the marketing strategies for many businesses, and on Facebook's bottom line. In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook says it expects Apple's IDFA changes "will disproportionately affect [Facebook's] Audience Network of advertisers given its heavy dependence on app advertising." Reporter Sam Biddle comments: "What do you think you're saying about your company when things that protect an individual harm your business so drastically that you need to issue a warning?"

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The New Zealand stock exchange was knocked offline two days in a row due to a cyber-attack. From a report NZX said it had first been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack from abroad, on Tuesday. The exchange said the attack had "impacted NZX network connectivity" and it had decided to halt trading in cash markets just before 16:00 local time. Trading halted briefly for a second time, on Wednesday, but was back up and running before the end of the day. A DDoS attack is a relatively simple type of cyber-attack, in which a large array of computers all try to connect to an online service at once, overwhelming its capacity. They often use devices compromised by malware the owners do not know are part of the attack. Genuine traders may have had problems carrying out their business. But it does not mean any financial or personal information was accessed.

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