iOS 14 has brought several new privacy features, and there are more to come with App Tracking Transparency -- which will let users opt out of being tracked by apps. From a report: As the launch of this new option approaches, Apple has begun to reject apps using third-party SDKs that collect user data without consent. Developers can implement some SDKs that help them track users by a method called "device fingerprinting," which uses multiple attributes such as the device model, IP address, and other data to identify a person across the internet. Apps often use this data for deep analysis about their audience or to sell advertisements. While tracking the user is not exactly illegal, Apple wants to put an end to apps that do this without explicit consent. As noted by analyst Eric Seufert, the company is now rejecting any apps using the Adjust SDK, which is one of those SDKs that provides device fingerprinting. There would be no problem for these developers if the Adjust SDK complied with Apple's new privacy guidelines, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Seufert detailed to 9to5Mac that the Adjust SDK not only doesn't have an option for users to opt out of being tracked, but has also been suggesting alternatives for developers to continue tracking users once Apple enables App Tracking Transparency. Snap has explored how it can circumvent new privacy rules for iPhones, Financial Times reported Friday.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Even state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) algorithms struggle to recognize the accents of people from certain regions of the world. That's the top-line finding of a new study published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and the Delft University of Technology, which found that an ASR system for the Dutch language recognized speakers of specific age groups, genders, and countries of origin better than others. The coauthors of this latest research set out to investigate how well an ASR system for Dutch recognizes speech from different groups of speakers. In a series of experiments, they observed whether the ASR system could contend with diversity in speech along the dimensions of gender, age, and accent. The researchers began by having an ASR system ingest sample data from CGN, an annotated corpus used to train AI language models to recognize the Dutch language. [...] When the researchers ran the trained ASR system through a test set derived from the CGN, they found that it recognized female speech more reliably than male speech regardless of speaking style. Moreover, the system struggled to recognize speech from older people compared with younger, potentially because the former group wasn't well-articulated. And it had an easier time detecting speech from native speakers versus non-native speakers. Indeed, the worst-recognized native speech -- that of Dutch children -- had a word error rate around 20% better than that of the best non-native age group. In general, the results suggest that teenagers' speech was most accurately interpreted by the system, followed by seniors' (over the age of 65) and children's. This held even for non-native speakers who were highly proficient in Dutch vocabulary and grammar. One solution to remove the bias is to mitigate it at the algorithmic level. "[We recommend] framing the problem, developing the team composition and the implementation process from a point of anticipating, proactively spotting, and developing mitigation strategies for affective prejudice [to address bias in ASR systems]," the researchers wrote in a paper detailing their work. "A direct bias mitigation strategy concerns diversifying and aiming for a balanced representation in the dataset. An indirect bias mitigation strategy deals with diverse team composition: the variety in age, regions, gender, and more provides additional lenses of spotting potential bias in design. Together, they can help ensure a more inclusive developmental environment for ASR."

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Rising temperatures over the past several decades have hurt farming productivity of crops and livestock, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change. The Guardian reports: Productivity has actually slumped by 21% since 1961, compared to if the world hadn't been subjected to human-induced heating. With the global population set to rise to more than 9 billion by 2050, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that food production will have to increase by about 70%, with annual crop production increasing by almost one 1 billion tonnes and meat production soaring by more than 200 million tons a year by this point. The research measured productivity by inputs -- such as labor, fertilizer and equipment -- and the output in food they produce, using a model to determine how climate change has influenced this relationship. While farming has generally become far more efficient in recent decades, it is increasingly menaced by heatwaves that exhaust farm workers and wither certain crops. Extreme weather events and drought can also affect the output of a farm, particularly smaller operations in poorer countries.

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A new NASA mission, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission due for launch this summer, aims to launch a spaceship that will directly punch an asteroid. Motherboard reports: The mission's target is an asteroid system called Didymos, which contains two space rocks that orbit each other. In late 2022, DART will forcefully impact the smaller asteroid in this system, a tiny moon called Dimorphos, so that scientists can assess the feasibility of knocking any space rocks that threaten Earth off course in the future. [...] DART will pioneer a subtler form of planetary defense, in which the trajectory of an asteroid is changed by a very small amount that becomes significant over time. Late next year, the mission will crash into Dimorphos at about seven kilometers per second. Shortly before the collision, the spacecraft will deploy a small satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency that is tasked with watching "the mess we make," [said Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the investigation team lead for DART]. Observations from the Italian satellite, as well as from powerful telescopes on Earth, will reveal just how much Dimorphos was affected by the crash. Rivkin and his colleagues expect the change in orbital speed to be small -- about one millimeter per second -- which would add up to a shortening of the orbital period by about 10 minutes. But even this very slight shift would be enough to redirect the trajectory of a hazardous asteroid that threatened Earth, provided scientists have a lead-time of a decade or two before the projected impact.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesla is known to be working on designing new battery modules that also work as structural elements, but the California automaker is fashioning those structural modules out of traditional cylindrical cells. There's a more elegant approach to the idea, though, and a group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden led by professor Leif Asp has just made a bit of a breakthrough in that regard, making each component of the battery out of materials that work structurally as well as electrically. The structural battery combines a carbon-fiber anode and a lithium-iron phosphate-coated aluminum foil cathode, which are separated by a glass fiber separator in a structural battery electrolyte matrix material. The anode does triple duty, hosting the lithium ions, conducting electrons, and reinforcing everything at the same time. The electrolyte and cathode similarly support structural loads and do their jobs in moving ions. The researchers tested a couple different types of glass fiber -- both resulting in cells with a nominal voltage of 2.8 V -- and achieved better results in terms of battery performance with thinner, plain weave. The cells using this construction had a specific capacity of 8.55 Ah/kg, an energy density of 23.6 Wh/kg (at 0.05 C), a specific power of 9.56 W/kg (at 3 C), and a thickness of 0.27 mm. To put at least one of those numbers in context, the 4680 cells that Tesla is moving to have an energy density of 380 Wh/kg. However, that energy density figure for the cylindrical cells does not include the mass of the structural matrix that surrounds them (when used as structural panels). Speaking of structural loads, the greatest stiffness was also achieved with plain glass fiber weave, at 25.5 GPa. Again, to put that number into context, it's roughly similar to glass fiber-reinforced plastic, whereas carbon fiber-reinforced plastic will be around 10 times greater, depending on whether it's resin transfer molding or woven sheets pre-impregnated with resin (known as pre-preg). Professor Asp's group is now working to see if swapping the cathode's aluminum foil for carbon fiber will increase both stiffness (which it should) and electrical performance. The group is also testing even thinner separators. He hopes to reach 75 Wh/kg and 75 GPa, which would result in a cell that is slightly stiffer than aluminum (GPa: 68) but obviously much lighter.

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hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.

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Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, said it's planning to make its trading debut on April 14. Bloomberg reports: The company's registration statement for the listing has been declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Coinbase said Thursday in a statement confirming a Bloomberg News report. The direct listing on the Nasdaq Stock Market had earlier been pushed back from March, Bloomberg previously reported. As with other direct listings, a reference price to help guide investors and to allow the shares to begin trading will be disclosed the night before the company goes public, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information was private. Coinbase is planning to go public through a direct listing in which it will not raise any new capital, it said in previous filings. It was valued at about $90 billion in its final week of trading on Nasdaq's private market, Bloomberg News reported. The debut will be the first major direct listing to take place on the Nasdaq. All such previous listings were on the New York Stock Exchange, including those by Spotify Technology SA, Slack Technologies Inc., Asana Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc. and Roblox Corp.

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A robot armed with virus-killing ultraviolet light is being tested on Swiss airplanes, yet another idea aiming to restore passenger confidence and spare the travel industry more pandemic pain. Reuters reports: UVeya, a Swiss start-up, is conducting the trials of the robots with Dubai-based airport services company Dnata inside Embraer jets from Helvetic Airways, a charter airline owned by Swiss billionaire Martin Ebner. Aircraft makers still must certify the devices and are studying the impact their UV light may have on interior upholstery, which could fade after many disinfections, UVeya co-founder Jodoc Elmiger said. Still, he's hopeful robot cleaners could reduce people's fear of flying, even as COVID-19 circulates. Elmiger's team has built three prototypes so far, one of which he demonstrated inside a Helvetic jet at the Zurich Airport, where traffic plunged 75% last year. The robot's lights, mounted on a crucifix-shaped frame, cast everything in a soft-blue glow as it slowly moved up the Embraer's aisle. One robot can disinfect a single-aisled plane in 13 minutes, start to finish, though larger planes take longer. Dnata executives hope airplane makers will sign off on the robots -- Elmiger estimates they'll sell for $15,930 or so -- as governments require new measures to ensure air travelers don't get sick.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors have indicted a Kansas man for allegedly logging into a computer system at a public water system and tampering with the process for cleaning and disinfecting customers' drinking water. An indictment filed in US District Court for the District of Kansas said Wyatt A. Travnichek, 22, of Ellsworth County, Kansas, was an employee from January 2018 to January 2019 at the Ellsworth County Rural Water District No. 1. Also known as the Post Rock Water District, the facility serves more than 1,500 retail customers and 10 wholesale customers in eight Kansas counties. Part of Wyatt's responsibilities included remotely logging in to the water district's computer system to monitor the plant after hours. In late March 2019, Wednesday's indictment said, Post Rock experienced a remote intrusion to its computer system that resulted in the shutdown of the facility's processes for ensuring water is safe to drink. "On or about March 27, 2019, in the District of Kansas, the defendant, Wyatt Travnichek, knowingly tampered with a public drinking water system, namely the Ellsworth County Rural Water District No. 1," prosecutors alleged. "To wit: he logged in remotely to Post Rock Rural Water District's computer system and performed activities that shut down processes at the facility which affect the facility's cleaning and disinfecting procedures with the intention of harming the Ellsworth County Rural Water District No. 1." Wednesday's indictment didn't say how Wyatt allegedly gained access to the Post Rock facility. "The indictment charges Wyatt with one count of tampering with a public water system and one count of reckless damage to a protected computer during unauthorized access," adds Ars. "If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines."

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is asking clients to accept higher prices as it ramps up investment to deal with a "structural and fundamental increase" in chip demand. Nikkei Asia reports: C.C. Wei, TSMC's CEO, told clients in a letter seen by Nikkei Asia that the world's biggest contract chipmaker plans to invest $100 billion over the three years through 2023 in advanced semiconductor technologies, according to the letter. TSMC this year announced record high capital expenditure of up to $28 billion for this year alone. "We are seeing a structural and fundamental increase in underlying demand driven by key long-term growth megatrends including 5G and high-performance computing," Wei said in the letter. The Covid-19 pandemic has also transformed the global economy, changing how people work, learn and live, the CEO added. Wei told clients that TSMC will also "suspend wafer price reductions starting December 31" this year, for four quarters. "We believe that this modest action is the least disruptive option to supply chains so that TSMC can deliver our mission of providing leading semiconductor technologies and manufacturing capability to you in a sustainable manner," Wei said. "The increased capacity will improve supply certainty and help protect complex global supply chains that rely on semiconductors," he said. "We ask for your patience as we expedite the building of new fabs and capacity."

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Amtrak released a proposed map Wednesday of an expanded U.S. rail system that could be built with funding from President Biden's infrastructure plan. Axios reports: The expanded rail system -- funded with the $80 billion Biden's infrastructure plan allocates to rail specifically -- would "create jobs, improve the quality of life, reduce carbon emissions and generate economic growth," Amtrak said in a statement. The envisioned train network would create up to 30+ new routes in 15 more states, connecting 160 more communities and serving 20 million more passengers, according to Amtrak. The company also says the expanded map would lower carbon emissions, claiming that traveling on Amtrak is "up to 83% more energy efficient than driving and up to 73% more energy efficient than flying."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that the Federal Communications Commission could relax rules limiting the number of newspapers, radio stations and television stations that a single entity may own in a given market. The decision is likely to prompt further consolidation among broadcast outlets, some of which say they need more freedom to address competition from internet and cable companies. Critics fear that media consolidation will limit the perspectives available to viewers. The rules at issue in the case, initially adopted between 1964 and 1975, had been meant "to promote competition, localism and viewpoint diversity by ensuring that a small number of entities do not dominate a particular media market," Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the court. But the rules, he added, were a relic of a different era -- "an early-cable and pre-internet age when media sources were more limited." "By the 1990s, however, the market for news and entertainment had changed dramatically," Justice Kavanaugh wrote. "Technological advances led to a massive increase in alternative media options, such as cable television and the internet. Those technological advances challenged the traditional dominance of daily print newspapers, local radio stations and local television stations." The case, Federal Communications Commission v. Prometheus Radio Project, No. 19-1231, concerned three rules. One barred a single entity from owning a radio or television station and a daily print newspaper in the same market, the second limited the number of radio and television stations an entity can own in a single market, and the third restricted the number of local television stations an entity could own in the same market. In 2017, the commission concluded that the three rules no longer served their original purposes of promoting competition and the like. The vote was 3 to 2 along party lines, with the commission's Republican members in the majority.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook, an Alabama native with a lifelong interest in civil rights, joins condemnations of Georgia's new voting law. From a report: "The right to vote is fundamental in a democracy. American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right." "Apple believes that, thanks in part to the power of technology, it ought to be easier than ever for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote," Cook continues. "We support efforts to ensure that our democracy's future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past." The floodgates are open, as Axios' Courtenay Brown wrote on Wednesday. Almost a week after a bill that curbs voting access in Georgia became law -- and nearly one month after it passed the state's House -- a slew of corporations have come out against voter suppression.

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The advisory committee for a Harvard University geoengineering research project is recommending that the team suspend plans for its first balloon flight in Sweden this summer. From a report: The purpose of that initial flight was to evaluate the propelled balloon's equipment and software in the stratosphere. In subsequent launches, the researchers hope to release small amounts of particles to better understand the risks and potential of solar geoengineering, the controversial concept of spraying sulfates, calcium carbonate or other compounds above the Earth to scatter sunlight and ease global warming. These would mark the first geoengineering-related experiments conducted in the stratosphere. But the committee has determined that the researchers should hold off on even the preliminary equipment tests until they've held discussions with members of the public in Sweden. David Keith, a Harvard climate scientist and member of the research team, said they will abide by the recommendations. The decision is likely to push the launch into 2022, further delaying a project initially slated to begin as early as 2018. It also opens up the possibility that the initial flights will occur elsewhere, as the researchers had selected the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden in part because the Swedish Space Corporation could accommodate a launch this year. Moreover, that company said in its own statement that it decided not to conduct the flights as well, following recent conversations with geoengineering experts, the advisory board and other stakeholders. Harvard set up the advisory committee in 2019 to review the proposed experiments and ensure the researchers take appropriate steps to limit risks, seek outside input, and operate in a transparent manner. In a statement, the committee said it has begun the process of working with public engagement specialists in Sweden and looking for organizations to host conversations.

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Google today announced a series of policy updates for apps distributed through the Play Store. The most impactful sees Google limit most developers from seeing which Android apps are installed on your device. From a report: As part of its ongoing work to restrict the use of high risk/sensitive permissions, Google is limiting what apps can use the QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission that "gives visibility into the inventory of installed apps on a given device." This applies to apps that target API 30+ on devices running Android 11 and newer. Enforcement was originally meant to occur earlier, but delayed in light of COVID-19.

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Data was withheld from World Health Organization investigators who travelled to China to research the origins of the coronavirus epidemic, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this week. From a report: The United States, the European Union and other Western countries immediately called for China to give "full access" to independent experts to all data about the original outbreak in late 2019. In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely" as a cause. One of the team's investigators has already said China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic began. "In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data," Tedros said. "I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."

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Amazon.com has explored opening discount retail stores selling a mix of home goods and electronics, a potentially significant expansion of the company's growing portfolio of brick-and-mortar locations. From a report: The outlets would carry unsold inventory sitting in Amazon's warehouses at steep discounts, according to two people familiar with the plans. The company has considered opening permanent stores, as well as pop-up locations in malls or parking lots, said the people. The plans were preliminary and under discussion last year, but the pandemic and new Fresh grocery chain forced many employees to focus on day-to-day operations. "It's a way to be able to clean out warehouses, and get through inventory without having to destroy it," said one of the people, who was briefed on the plans but not authorized to discuss them. "It is keeping with the value proposition of Amazon, keeping price at the forefront and allowing customers to get access to products at low cost."

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The Supreme Court has unanimously decided that Facebook text message alerts don't violate laws against unwanted auto-dialed calls. The court ruled that a lower court defined illegal "robocalls" too broadly and that the term should only apply to systems that generate lists of numbers and call them indiscriminately, not a system that simply stores numbers and automatically calls them. From a report: The lawsuit involves text messages that notify Facebook users of an attempted login. Its plaintiff, Noah Duguid, sued after receiving unwanted, erroneous notifications despite not having a Facebook account. Duguid argued that Facebook was violating the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). An appeals court agreed, but the Supreme Court interpreted the law's definitions differently. Closely parsing the TCPA's grammar, the court concluded that an illegal auto-dialing system "must use a random or sequential number generator," and this definition "excludes equipment like Facebook's login notification system, which does not use such technology."

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lee1 writes: The UHI human interaction research group has been intensively studying a pervasive problem facing users of the web: the problem of tabs. How to organize them, preserve them, keep track of them. We have carefully considered the pros and cons of various approaches offered by different browsers, and by extensions: tab trees, second rows of tabs, vertical tabs, 3D tabs, musical tabs, you name it. None of them were good enough.

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wiredog shares a ZDNet report: I have literally been covering SCO's legal attempts to prove that IBM illegally copied Unix's source code into Linux for over 17 years. I've written well over 500 stories on this lawsuit and its variants. I really thought it was dead, done, and buried. I was wrong. Xinuos, which bought SCO's Unix products and intellectual property (IP) in 2011, like a bad zombie movie, is now suing IBM and Red Hat [for] "illegally Copying Xinuos' software code for its server operating systems." For those of you who haven't been around for this epic IP lawsuit, you can get the full story with "27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one" from Groklaw. If you'd rather not spend a couple of weeks going over the cases, here's my shortened version. Back in 2001, SCO, a Unix company, joined forces with Caldera, a Linux company, to form what should have been a major Red Hat rival. Instead, two years later, SCO sued IBM in an all-out legal attack against Linux. The fact that most of you don't know either company's name gives you an idea of how well that lawsuit went. SCO's Linux lawsuit made no sense and no one at the time gave it much of a chance of succeeding. Over time it was revealed that Microsoft had been using SCO as a sock puppet against Linux. Unfortunately for Microsoft and SCO, it soon became abundantly clear that SCO didn't have a real case against Linux and its allies. SCO lost battle after battle. The fatal blow came in 2007 when SCO was proven to have never owned the copyrights to Unix. So, by 2011, the only thing of value left in SCO, its Unix operating systems, was sold to UnXis. This acquisition, which puzzled most, actually made some sense. SCO's Unix products, OpenServer and Unixware, still had a small, but real market. At the time, UnXis now under the name, Xinuos, stated it had no interest in SCO's worthless lawsuits. In 2016, CEO Sean Synder said, "We are not SCO. We are investors who bought the products. We did not buy the ability to pursue litigation against IBM, and we have absolutely no interest in that." So, what changed? The company appears to have fallen on hard times. As Synder stated: "systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market." Officially, in his statement, Snyder now says, "While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property, it is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself."

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