Social networking service Parler sued Amazon on Monday, accusing its web hosting service of breaking anti-trust laws in taking off the platform that is popular with many right-leaning social media users. You can read the court document here.

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A hacker took control of people's internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it. From a report: "Your cock is mine now," the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples. In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage -- a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely -- had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That's exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard. A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely "locked," and he "could not gain access to it."

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Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

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Mozilla developers plan to remove support for using the Backspace key as a Back button inside Firefox. From a report: The change is currently active in the Firefox Nightly version and is expected to go live in Firefox 86, scheduled to be released next month, in late February 2021. The removal of the Backspace key as a navigational element didn't come out of the blue. It was first proposed back in July 2014, in a bug report opened on Mozilla's bug tracker. At the time, Mozilla engineers argued that many users who press the Backspace key don't always mean to navigate to the previous page (the equivalent of pressing the Back button).

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Joseph Cox, reporting at Vice's Motherboard: One user travelled through a park a few blocks south of an Islamic cultural center. Roughly every two minutes, their phone reported their physical location. Another was next to a bank two streets over from a different mosque. A third person was at a train station, again near a mosque. Perhaps unbeknownst to these people, Salaat First (Prayer Times), an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was recording and selling their granular location information to a data broker, which in turn sells location data to other clients. Motherboard has obtained a large dataset of those raw, precise movements of users of the app from a source. The source who provided the dataset was concerned that such sensitive information, which could potentially track Muslims going about their day including visiting places of worship, could be abused by those who buy and make use of the data. The company collecting the location data, a French firm called Predicio, has previously been linked to a supply chain of data involving a U.S. government contractor that worked with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI. The news about Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, highlights not only the use of religious apps to harvest location data, but also the ease at which this sensitive information is traded in the location data industry. Motherboard is withholding some specifics about the dataset such as its exact size in order to protect the source, but the significance is clear: users of a Muslim-focused app are being tracked likely without their informed consent. "Being tracked all day provides a lot of information, and it shouldn't be usable against you, especially if you are unaware of it," the source said. Motherboard granted them anonymity to avoid repercussions from their employer.

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Twitter shares fell 7% in pre-market trading after the social media platform permanently banned outgoing President Donald Trump. From a report: The company confirmed its decision in a blog post on Friday, saying Trump's tweets breached policies by risking incitement to violence. It cited his posts on the riots in the U.S. capital last week. It's a watershed moment for technology platforms that have faced conflicting pressures on one hand to restrict misinformation and hate speech, and defend free speech on the other. Twitter was Trump's preferred channel for amplifying attacks on his rivals, spreading conspiracies and provoking other nations during his four years in power.

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The Turkish Competition Board said on Monday it launched an investigation into WhatsApp and its owner Facebook after the messaging app asked users to agree to let Facebook collect user data including phone numbers and locations. From a report: In a written statement, the Competition Board said it ruled the data-collection requirement should be suspended until the probe is complete. "The Competition Board has opened an investigation into Facebook and WhatsApp and suspended the requirement to share Whatsapp data," it said. WhatsApp updated its terms of service last Wednesday, allowing Facebook and its subsidiaries to collect user data. The deadline for agreeing to the new terms is Feb. 8.

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The Verge reports: The CEO of the conservative-friendly social app Parler said that all of its vendors have abandoned the company following recent bans from Google, Apple, and Amazon. "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us too, on the same day," Parler CEO John Matze said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday... Matze said that it was having difficulties finding a new vendor to work with. "We're going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible, but we're having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won't work with us. Because if Apple doesn't approve and Google doesn't approve, then they won't." But the app also has another problem, reports Mashable: The number two most downloaded free app in both Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store is an app called Parlor. That's Parlor with an "o," not an "e." Coincidence? We think not. Parlor is a "social talking app" in which people can get on and talk with strangers about different topics. It's been around for 10 years according to the app listing, and, Sensor Tower data indicates it had 40,000 downloads as of December 2020. Its reviews are not great to say the least, and it looks, well, pretty porn-y.

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Amazon, Walmart, and other companies are using artificial intelligence "to decide whether it makes economic sense to process a return," reports the Wall Street Journal: For inexpensive items or large ones that would incur hefty shipping fees, it is often cheaper to refund the purchase price and let customers keep the products. The relatively new approach, popularized by Amazon and a few other chains, is being adopted more broadly during the Covid-19 pandemic, as a surge in online shopping forces companies to rethink how they handle returns. "We are getting so many inquiries about this that you will see it take off in coming months," said Amit Sharma, chief executive of Narvar Inc., which processes returns for retailers... A Target Corp. spokeswoman said the retailer gives customers refunds and encourages them to donate or keep the item in a small number of cases in which the company deems that option is easier than returning the purchase. A Walmart spokeswoman said the "keep it" option is designed for merchandise it doesn't plan to resell and is determined by customers' purchase history, the value of the products and the cost of processing the returns... Processing online returns can cost $10 to $20, excluding freight, depending on the item, said Rick Faulk, chief executive of Locus Robotics, which uses robots to help automate returns.

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The Associated Press reports: New Zealand's central bank said Sunday that one of its data systems has been breached by an unidentified hacker who potentially accessed commercially and personally sensitive information. A third party file sharing service used by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to share and store sensitive information had been illegally accessed, the Wellington-based bank said in a statement. Governor Adrian Orr said the breach has been contained. The bank's core functions "remain sound and operational," he said... "The nature and extent of information that has been potentially accessed is still being determined, but it may include some commercially and personally sensitive information," Orr added... Dave Parry, professor of computer science at Auckland University, told Radio New Zealand that another government was likely behind the bank data breach. "Ultimately if you were coming from a sort of like criminal perspective, the government agencies aren't going to pay your ransom or whatever, so you'd be more interested probably coming in from a government-to-government level," Parry said.

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"It might be easier at this point to ask which tech platforms President Donald Trump can still use," jokes TechCrunch. The Wall Street Journal reports: Stripe Inc. will no longer process payments for President Trump's campaign website following last week's riot at the Capitol, according to people familiar with the matter. The financial-technology company handles card payments for millions of online businesses and e-commerce platforms, including Mr. Trump's campaign website and online fundraising apparatus. Stripe is cutting off the president's campaign account for violating its policies against encouraging violence, the people said... Stripe asks users to agree that they won't accept payments for "high risk" activities, including for any business or organization that "engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property," according to its website. TechCrunch fills in the rest of the story. "Sources told the Journal that the reason for the company's decision was the violation of company policies against encouraging violence.... "The deplatforming of the president has effectively removed Trump from all social media outlets including Snap, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and TikTok."

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"More than two months after Alex Trebek's death, fans of Jeopardy! finally got the chance to say goodbye," reports CBS News: A video tribute to the host closed Friday's episode of the quiz show, the final one that Trebek taped before pancreatic cancer claimed his life on November 8. The 90-second montage, set to Hugh Jackman singing the Peter Allen song "Once Before I Go," is a lighthearted and laughter-filled remembrance showing Trebek's changing look through his 36 years as host, with moustache and without, with black hair and with grey, with suits from several decades. It celebrated the wackier moments of the usually strait-laced Trebek, showing him verbally sparring with contestants and arm-wrestling with one. "You really make me feel inadequate," he tells a child contestant. "Sorry about that," she sassily answers. Trebek is shown walking on the set pants-less in one clip, dressed as the Statue of Liberty in another, and wearing the costume of a Trojan solider in another.... The show will continue next week with a series of interim hosts, starting with veteran "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings. The week's final Trebek episodes began Monday with the host urging viewers to give to others who were suffering during the coronavirus pandemic. "We're trying to build a gentler, kinder society, and if we all pitch in just a little bit, we're going to get there," Trebek said...

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Space.com reports: High above the North Pole, the polar vortex, a fast-spinning whirl of frigid air, is doing a weird shimmy that may soon bring cold and snowy weather to the Eastern U.S., Northern Europe and East Asia for weeks on end, meteorologists say. While it's not unusual for the polar vortex to act up, this particular reconfiguration — wandering around and possibly splitting in two — may be tied to climate change in the rapidly warming Arctic, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Massachusetts, part of Verisk Analytics, a risk-assessment company. "Expect a more wintery back-half of winter here in the Eastern U.S. than what we had in the first half," Cohen told Live Science. The Arctic is heating up faster than any other region in the world. As a result, sea-ice cover there is shrinking — in September 2020 and December 2020, the Arctic sea-ice cover shrunk to its second-lowest and third-lowest minimum on record for those months, respectively, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The warmer-than-usual temperatures in the Arctic are likely throwing the polar vortex out of whack, Cohen said... During the winter, a jet stream of air that keeps the polar vortex in place sometimes weakens, allowing the vortex's chilly air to extend southward... Disruptions to the polar vortex are key for forecasts, as about two weeks after they happen, the troposphere gets a wallop of weird weather, which can last for weeks. Because of this week's polar vortex disruption, "there's indications we'll see some colder weather within two weeks... in the Eastern U.S., Northern Europe and East Asia," Cohen said.

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CNN reports: When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs. No, really. The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about "unidentified aerial phenomena." It's a stipulation that was tucked into the "committee comment" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill. That report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee's directive... A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the news to the fact-checking website Snopes.

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"It's not enough to slash greenhouse gas emissions," warns a new article in IEEE Spectrum (shared by schwit1). "Experts say we need direct-air capture of atmospheric carbon." West Texas is a hydrocarbon hot spot, with thousands of wells pumping millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Permian Basin. When burned, all that oil and gas will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A new facility there aims to do the opposite. Rows of giant fans spread across a flat, arid field will pull carbon dioxide from the air and then pump it deep underground. When completed, the project could capture 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, doing the air-scrubbing work of some 40 million trees. Canadian firm Carbon Engineering is designing and building this "direct-air capture" facility with 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management. Carbon Engineering will devote much of 2021 to front-end engineering and design work in Texas, with construction slated to start the following year and operations by 2024, the partners say. The project is the biggest of its kind in the world and will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Carbon Engineering is among a handful of companies with major direct-air capture developments underway this year. Zurich-based Climeworks is expanding across Europe, while Dublin's Silicon Kingdom Holdings plans to install its first CO2-breathing "mechanical tree" in Arizona. Global Thermostat, headquartered in New York City, has three new projects in the works. All the companies say they intend to curb the high cost of capturing carbon by optimizing technology, reducing energy use, and scaling up operations.

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"With the runaway success of the new ARM-based M1 Macs, non-x86 architectures are getting their closeup," explains a new article at ZDNet. "RISC-V is getting the most attention from system designers looking to horn-in on Apple's recipe for high performance. Here's why..." RISC-V is, like x86 and ARM, an instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike x86 and ARM, it is a free and open standard that anyone can use without getting locked into someone else's processor designs or paying costly license fees... Reaching the end of Moore's Law, we can't just cram more transistors on a chip. Instead, as Apple's A and M series processors show, adding specialized co-processors — for codecs, encryption, AI — to fast general-purpose RISC CPUs can offer stunning application performance and power efficiency. But a proprietary ISA, like ARM, is expensive. Worse, they typically only allow you to use that ISA's hardware designs, unless, of course, you're one of the large companies — like Apple — that can afford a top-tier license and a design team to exploit it. A canned design means architects can't specify tweaks that cut costs and improve performance. An open and free ISA, like RISC-V, eliminates a lot of this cost, giving small companies the ability to optimize their hardware for their applications. As we move intelligence into ever more cost-sensitive applications, using processors that cost a dollar or less, the need for application and cost-optimized processors is greater than ever... While open operating systems, like Linux, get a lot of attention, ISAs are an even longer-lived foundational technology. The x86 ISA dates back 50 years and today exists as a layer that gets translated to a simpler — and faster — underlying hardware architecture. (I suspect this fact is key to the success of the macOS Rosetta 2 translation from x86 code to Apple's M1 code.) Of course, an open ISA is only part of the solution. Free standard hardware designs — with tools to design more — and smart compilers to generate optimized code are vital. That larger project is what Berkeley's Adept Lab is working on. As computing continues to permeate civilization, the cost of sub-optimal infrastructure will continue to rise. Optimizing for efficiency, long-life, and broad application is vital for humanity's progress in a cyber-enabled world. One RISC-V feature highlighted by the article: 128-bit addressing (in addition to 32 and 64 bit).

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"Turning digital data into profit," is the slogan of Cognesia, a data analytics company whose client list includes Visa, Rolls-Royce, and Toys 'R' Us. Now Variety reports: Brad Rukstales, the chief executive of a Chicago-area company that provides data-marketing solutions, said he was arrested Wednesday after he entered the U.S. Capitol alongside a mob of pro-Trump rioters seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election... "Our CEO, Brad Rukstales, participated in the recent Washington DC protests," Schaumburg, Illinois-based Cognesia said in a statement Thursday. "Those actions were his own and [and he was] not acting on behalf [of] Cogensia nor do his actions in any way reflect the policies or values of our firm..." Rukstales, in his own statement posted on Twitter, apologized for what he called "the single worst personal decision of my life." "In a moment of extremely poor judgment following the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, I followed hundreds of others through an open set of doors to the Capitol building to see what was taking place inside," Rukstales wrote. "I was arrested for the first time in my life and charged with unlawful entry." He continued, "My decision to enter the Capitol was wrong, and I am deeply regretful to have done so," adding that he "condemn[ed] the violence and destruction that took place in Washington." Twitter now reports that Cognesia's account "no longer exists." (This after their tweeted statement received dozens of unrelentingly negative comments.) Their LinkedIn profile includes a link to a more recent announcement that CEO Rukstales "has been terminated by the company's Board of Directors effective immediately," with their new CEO saying Rukstales' actions "were inconsistent with the core values of Cogensia. Cogensia condemns what occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, and we intend to continue to embrace the values of integrity, diversity and transparency in our business operations, and expect all employees to embrace those values as well." Thursday CEO Rukstales shared his memory of Wednesday's events with a local news crew. "It was great to see a whole bunch of people together in the morning and hear the speeches, but it turned into chaos... I had nothing to do with charging anybody or anything or doing any of that. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I regret my part in that." And Rukstales' written apology is still online. "Without qualification and as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, I condemn the violence and destruction that took place in Washington," Rukstales wrote. "I offer my sincere apologies for my indiscretion, and I deeply regret that my actions have brought embarrassment to my family, colleagues, friends and fellow countrymen..." "I have no excuse for my actions and I wish I could take them back."

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Programming columnist Mike Melanson describes the announcement of this year's programming language of the year: The TIOBE Index, the somewhat dubious ranking of programming language popularity according to search engine results, has announced its yearly proclamation of "language of the year," with the award going to Python for the fourth time in its history [more than any other programming language]. The title, the project leads write, "is awarded to the programming language that has gained most popularity in one year," with Python moving up 2.01% in 2020, which they attribute to "the ease of learning the language and its high productivity," alongside its numerous use cases. C++ "is a very close runner up" for programming language of the year, TIOBE tells us, "with an increase of 1.99%. Other winners are C (+1.66%), Groovy (+1.23%) and R (+1.10%)... "What else happened in the TIOBE index in 2020? C has become number 1 again, beating Java. Java lost almost 5% in only 1 year."

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"New data from EU satellites shows that 2020 is in a statistical dead heat with 2016 as the world's warmest year," reports the BBC (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): The Copernicus Climate Change Service says that last year was around 1.25C above the long-term average. The scientists say that unprecedented levels of heat in the Arctic and Siberia were key factors in driving up the overall temperature. The past 12 months also saw a new record for Europe, around 0.4C warmer than 2019... The Copernicus data comes from a constellation of Sentinel satellites that monitor the Earth from orbit, as well as measurements taken at ground level... Globally, the 10-year period from 2011-2020 is the warmest decade, with the last six years being the six hottest on record. The article points out that in some parts of Siberia and the Arctic, temperatures for the year were six degrees C above the long-term average. "This exceptional warming led to a very active wildfire season. Fires in the Arctic Circle released a record amount of CO2, according to the study, up over a third from 2019."

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After Wednesday's invasion by protesters, America's Capitol building is now grappling with "the process of securing the offices and digital systems after hundreds of people had unprecedented access to them," writes Wired. Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares their report: Rioters could have bugged congressional offices, exfiltrated data from unlocked computers, or installed malware on exposed devices. In the rush to evacuate the Capitol, some computers were left unlocked and remained accessible by the time rioters arrived. And at least some equipment was stolen; Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said in a video late Wednesday that intruders took one of his office's laptops off a conference table... Former Senate sergeant at arms Frank Larkin, who retired as Senate sergeant at arms in 2018, adds that cybersecurity is the next priority after physical security. In spite of this, the mob Wednesday had ample opportunities to steal information or gain device access if they wanted to. And while the Senate and House each build off of their own shared IT framework, ultimately each of the 435 representatives and 100 senators runs their own office with their own systems. This is a boon to security in the sense that it creates segmentation and decentralization; getting access to Nancy Pelosi's emails doesn't help you access the communications of other representatives. But this also means that there aren't necessarily standardized authentication and monitoring schemes in place. Larkin emphasizes that there is a baseline of monitoring that IT staffers will be able to use to audit and assess whether there was suspicious activity on congressional devices. But he concedes that representatives and senators have varying levels of cybersecurity competence and hygiene. It's also true that potentially exposed data at the Capitol on Wednesday would not have been classified, given that the mob had access only to unclassified networks. But congressional staffers are not subject to Freedom of Information Act obligations and are often much more candid in their communications than other government officials. Security and intelligence experts also emphasize that troves of unclassified information can still reveal sensitive or even classified information when combined... Kelvin Coleman, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, who formerly worked in the Department of Homeland Security and National Security Council... adds, though, that for now the most important thing congressional IT staffers can do is account for which devices were stolen and begin a mass effort to reset passwords, add multifactor authentication to any accounts that don't already have it, wipe and reimage hard drives when practical, and comb monitoring logs for signs of access or exfiltration.

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