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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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A bipartisan trio of senators introduced a bill that would rein in app stores of companies they said exert too much market control, including Apple and Alphabet's Google. Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar teamed up with Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn to sponsor the bill, which would bar big app stores from requiring app providers to use their payment system. It would also prohibit them from punishing apps that offer different prices or conditions through another app store or payment system. "I found this predatory abuse of Apple and Google so deeply offensive on so many levels," Blumenthal said in an interview Wednesday. "Their power has reached a point where they are impacting the whole economy in stifling and strangling innovation." Blumenthal said he expected companion legislation in the House of Representatives "very soon."

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Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted. It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.

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WhatsApp users will finally be able to move their entire chat history between mobile operating systems -- something that's been one of users' biggest requests to date. From a report: The company today introduced a feature that will soon become available to users of both iOS and Android devices, allowing them to move their WhatsApp voice notes, photos, and conversations securely between devices when they switch between mobile operating systems. The feature WhatsApp introduced today works with Samsung devices and Samsung's own transfer tool, known as Smart Switch. Today, Smart Switch helps users transfer contacts, photos, music, messages, notes, calendars, and more to Samsung Galaxy devices. Now, it will transfer WhatsApp chat history, too. WhatsApp showed off the new tool at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, and announced Samsung's newest Galaxy foldable devices would get the feature first in the weeks to come. The feature will later roll out to Android more broadly. WhatsApp didn't say when iOS users would gain access.

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On Wednesday, language learning app Duolingo reached a valuation of $6.5 billion after its shares surged nearly 40% in the company's Nasdaq debut. Reuters reports: Duolingo's stock opened at $141.4 per share, blowing past the initial public offering price (IPO) of $102 per share, which crossed the top end of its target range. The stock later pared some gains to trade at $130.92 in the afternoon. The company's flotation comes at a time of increased investor interest in the edtech space, after pandemic restrictions sent students and teachers from the classroom to the web. "Being a public company will allow us to operate at a higher level, and get going from the minor leagues to the major leagues," said Luis von Ahn, co-founder and chief executive officer of Duolingo. Following the IPO, the company will focus on improving its flagship app and getting more active users to switch to paying subscribers, von Ahn said. Duolingo offers courses in 40 languages to about 40 million monthly active users. The company also plans to expand more in Asia, its fastest growing region. Currently, Duolingo's largest market is the United States, home to 20% of its users and bringing in 45% of the company's revenue, von Ahn said.

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Delta Air Lines was sued for more than $1 billion by one of its own pilots, who claims he developed a text-messaging app for flight crews that the airline stole and used as the basis for its own app. Bloomberg reports: Captain Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade-secrets theft in Georgia state court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop his QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way to address crew communication snafus after disrupted flights. Delta turned him down but went on to launch its own identical tool, he claims. Delta "stole like a thief in the night" and defrauded its own loyal employee, Keenan Nix, a lawyer for Alexander, said Wednesday in an interview. He said Alexander, an 11-year veteran at the airline, was flying a Delta 757 "as we speak." A five-hour power outage that resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations in August 2016 cost Delta more than $150 million. The pilot said in the suit he emailed Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian at the time saying "he had a 'solution.'" Bastian allegedly responded promptly and referred Alexander to the company's new chief information officer. Bastian and the CIO, Rahul Samant, are both named in the suit, along with four other Delta executives. Alexander claims he had several positive meetings with the airline in 2015 and 2016 in which executives made clear they were interested in acquiring his app. But Delta eventually cut off discussions and then launched its own crew app in April 2018, called Flight Family Communications. "'FFC' is a carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of Craig's proprietary QrewLive communications platform," Alexander said in his suit. The pilot noted in his suit that Bastian and Samant have both bragged to investors that the app has smoothed operations. In describing the damages he's seeking, Alexander said the value of the technology, "based solely upon operational cost savings to Delta, conservatively exceeds $1 billion." Alexander is also seeking punitive damages against Delta. "To add insult to theft and injury, Captain Craig Alexander must use his stolen QrewLive text messaging platform every day while he works for Delta," the suit claims. "Each time he looks at the FFC app, he is painfully reminded that Delta stole his proprietary trade secrets, used them to Delta's enormous financial benefit." "While we take the allegations specified in Mr. Alexander's complaint seriously, they are not an accurate or fair description of Delta's development of its internal crew messaging platform," said Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson.

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The trend toward self-driving and electric vehicles will add hundreds of millions of lines of code to cars. Can the auto industry cope? From a report: Ten years ago, only premium cars contained 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of a car, executing 100 million lines of code or more. Today, high-end cars like the BMW 7-series with advanced technology like advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) may contain 150 ECUs or more, while pick-up trucks like Ford's F-150 top 150 million lines of code. Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking, are becoming standard. Vard Antinyan, a software quality expert at Volvo Cars who has written extensively about software and system complexity, explains that as of 2020, "Volvo has a superset of about 120 ECUs from which it selects to create a system architecture present within every Volvo vehicle. Altogether, they comprise a total of 100 million lines of source code." This source code, Antinyan says, "contains 10 million conditional statements as well as 3 million functions, which are invoked some 30 million places in the source code." How much and what types of software resides in each ECU varies greatly, depending on, among other things, the computing capability of the ECU, the functions the ECU controls, the internal and external information and communications required to be processed and whether they are event or time triggered, along with mandated safety and other regulatory requirements. Over the past decade, more ECU software has been dedicated to ensuring operational quality, reliability, safety and security. "The amount of software written to detect misbehavior to ensure quality and safety is increasing," says Nico Hartmann, Vice President of ZF's Software Solutions & Global Software Center at ZF Friedrichshafen AG, one of the world's largest suppliers of automotive components. Where perhaps a third of an ECU's software was dedicated to ensuring quality operations ten years ago, it is now often more than half or more, especially in safety critical systems, Hartmann states. Which ECUs and associated software end up going into a Volvo like its luxury SUV XC90 model, which has approximately 110 ECUs, depends on several factors. Volvo, like all auto manufacturers, has variants of each model offered for sale aimed at different market segments.

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Long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob writes: The old RAD/content authoring system, ToolBook, appears to be entering the final phase of its EOL process. Sumtotal/Skillsoft (the current owner, under which meaningful development effectively ceased) 'may' refuse software activations after the end of 2021, and does not provide a format-compatible replacement. Similarly, they are halting their support services, and will not allow contracts to be renewed. This may have significant ramifications for the education/training sector, and I have reason to believe that the body of the work dependent on this software is significantly larger than one might expect out of a wayward VisualBasic competitor from the 90s. The software, which was offered for sale until relatively recently (I'm unsure of the date of cutoff), has not received an update since 2014, nor a major version update since 2011. As such, I'd like to increase the visibility of this particular EOL, in the hopes that interested parties will take notice and have an opportunity to begin the process of moving their courseware out of this format... If one has never encountered this software before, it is "interesting", to say the least, as is the history of Asymetrix (one of Paul Allen's ventures) and later Sumtotal Systems, through 90s and early 2000s. If one does not care to look into it, it can be thought of as some sort of bizarro-world amalgam of features from Visual Basic and HyperCard.

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Following Apple's acquisition of popular weather app Dark Sky in March 2020, Dark Sky's iOS app and website will be available until the end of 2022, co-founder Adam Grossman said in a Monday update to Dark Sky's blog. The Verge reports: The update about the 2022 shutdown hit the same day that Apple announced new weather features coming to iOS 15 as part of its WWDC keynote presentation. The stock Weather app is getting a new design, full-screen weather maps, next-hour precipitation notifications, and even new animated backgrounds. Dark Sky shut down the Android and Wear OS versions of its apps on August 1st, 2020. But the iOS app is still available for $3.99 on the App Store, if you're interested in buying it ahead of next year's shutdown. The Dark Sky API will also continue to work for existing customers until the end of 2022. Previously, the API was set to stop working at the end of this year; now, it will work for a little while longer.

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WhatsApp will soon let you use the popular instant messaging app simultaneously on multiple devices, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said. The instant messaging app, used by more than 2 billion users, also plans to add more options to its disappearing messages feature, top executives said. TechCrunch reports: Zuckerberg confirmed to news outlet WaBetaInfo that multi-device support will be arriving on the instant messaging service "soon." WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said users will be able to connect up to four devices to one account. The messaging firm is also working to introduce a dedicated WhatsApp app for the iPad, he said. The instant messaging service, which last year introduced the ability to set a seven-day timer on messages (disappearing mode), is now planning to expand this feature to let users share pictures and videos that can only be viewed once. WhatsApp users will also get an option to enforce disappearing mode across the app for all new chats. Zuckerberg and Cathcart told the news outlet -- and it's indeed the two of them talking -- that these features will be available to users in public beta "in the next month or two."

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"The web browser is a crucial part of modern life, and yet it hasn't really been revised since the '90s," writes Protocol. "That may be about to change." The browser tab is an underrated thing. Most people think of them only when there are too many, when their computer once again buckles under Chrome's weight. Even the developers who build the tabs — the engineers and designers working on Chrome, Firefox, Brave and the rest — haven't done much to them. The internet has evolved in massive, earth-shaking ways over the last two decades, but tabs haven't really changed since they became a browser feature in the mid '90s. Josh Miller, however, has big plans for browser tabs. Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience? It would be nothing like the simple, passive windows to the web that browsers are now. Which is exactly the goal. The Browser Company (which everyone on the team just calls Browser) is one of a number of startups that are rethinking every part of the browser stack. Mighty has built a version of Chrome that runs on powerful server hardware and streams the browser itself over the web. Brave is building support for decentralized protocols like IPFS, and experimenting with using cryptocurrencies as a new business model for publishers. Synth is building a new bookmarks system that acts more like a web-wide inbox. Sidekick offers a vertical app launcher and makes tabs easier to organize. "A change is coming," said Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. "The question is just the time frame, and what's actually required to make it happen." They have lots of different ideas, but they share a belief that the browser can, and should, be more than it is. "We don't need a new web browser," Miller said. "We need a new successor to the web browser." While he was at the White House, Chief Digital Officer (and Miller's boss) Jason Goldman said something Miller couldn't forget. "Platforms have all the leverage," is how Miller remembers it. "And if you care about the future of the internet, or the way we use our computers, or want to improve any of the things that are broken about technology ... you can't really just build an application. Platforms, whether it's iOS or Windows or Android or Mac OS, that's where all the control is."

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New submitter imcdona writes: VideoLan has released VLC Media Player 3.0.14 to fix an issue affecting Window users and causing the widely-used software's auto-updater not to launch the new version's installer automatically. "VLC users on Windows might encounter issues when trying to auto update VLC from version 3.0.12 and 3.0.13," VideoLan explained."We are publishing version 3.0.14 to address this problem for future updates." This issue is caused by a bug introduced in the automatic updater code of VLC 3.0.12 and fixed with the release of VLC 3.0.14. Because of this bug, VLC updates are downloaded to the users' computers, verified for integrity, but will not be installed as the auto-updater fails to launch the VLC 3.0.14 installer.

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GasBuddy, an app that helps users find and save money on gas, topped the Apple App Store on Wednesday, as some consumers across the East Coast continue to struggle to find fuel after a cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline. CNBC reports: The company's pipeline has served as a vital link between the Gulf Coast refiners and the Eastern Seaboard, but the company had to take its entire system offline Friday after it fell victim to a ransomware attack. Much of the system is still offline. Now, consumers are flocking to grab gas before tanks run out. Sixty-five percent of stations in North Carolina are out of fuel, according to data from GasBuddy. In South Carolina and Georgia, 43% of stations are without fuel, and 44% of stations are dry in Virginia, according to AAA. Gas prices have also surged because of the supply issues and fear of shortages. On average, Americans are paying $3.008 for a gallon of gas, up from $2.985 on Tuesday and $2.927 one week ago, AAA said earlier this week. This has all led consumers to seek gas stations that have supply and potentially cheaper prices. That's where GasBuddy comes in.

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Britain's Court of Appeals has cleared a group of 42 sub-postmasters and postmistresses for theft, fraud and false accounting. They were convicted, with some imprisoned, after the Post Office installed faulty software in the branches where these office operators worked. The BBC reports: Following the convictions - including theft, fraud and false accounting -- some former postmasters went to prison, were shunned by their communities and struggled to secure work. Some lost their homes, and even failed to get insurance owing to their convictions. Some have since died. They always said the fault was in the computer system, which had been used to manage post office finances since 1999. The Horizon system, developed by the Japanese company Fujitsu, was first rolled out in 1999 to some post offices to be used for a variety of tasks including accounting and stocktaking. But from an early stage it appeared to have significant bugs which could cause the system to misreport, sometimes involving substantial sums of money. Horizon-based evidence was used by the Post Office to successfully prosecute 736 people. But campaigners fought a long and series of legal battles for compensation in the civil courts, which have been followed by referrals by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. A Post Office spokesman said: "We sincerely apologize to the postmasters affected by our historical failures. Throughout this appeals process we have supported the quashing of the overwhelming majority of these convictions and the judgment will be an important milestone in addressing the past." Long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. reacts: As a software geek, the part I find most troubling is that blind faith that those in authority placed in the software without proper accounting. Accounting systems and Software are deterministic, well they should be. IF the system/software worked correctly, this missing money must have shown up somewhere. Software defects are always traceable. It might be expensive and time consuming but persistence will win in the end. Somebody somewhere is responsible for this and defacto framing of these people is criminal in principle, if not in law.

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Charging is a common concern with electric vehicles. But some owners of the brand-new Mustang Mach-E have run into a peculiar problem: their electric SUVs won't start even when the main battery pack is full. From a report: That's because, The Verge has learned, there's a problem with some early Mustang Mach-E SUVs that involves how the much smaller 12-volt battery gets charged. It's the latest in a growing line of small issues that have come to light during the rollout of Ford's first long-range electric car. As is the case in other electric cars, the Mustang Mach-E keeps its 12-volt lead-acid battery topped up by essentially sipping power from the much larger lithium-ion battery pack. Based on owners' accounts across multiple forum threads, including one who spoke to The Verge, the problem is this stops happening whenever the Mustang Mach-E is plugged in to charge up the larger battery pack. That is especially an issue for owners in areas with cold weather, as Ford encourages them to leave their Mustang Mach-Es plugged in so the SUVs can use power from the grid to warm up before driving. The 12-volt battery powers many of the Mustang Mach-E's systems (since the larger battery pack is high-voltage), and so when it dies, the electric SUV cannot be started. When this happens, owners have reported the FordPass app says the vehicle is in "deep sleep" mode. Some forum members have started referring to it as the "electric brick" problem.

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A British company is suing Microsoft for $370m in damages [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] in the English High Court, alleging that the US company is trying to crush a multibillion-dollar market in second-hand versions of its software. From a report: ValueLicensing buys pre-owned Microsoft software licences from companies that upgrade their IT or become insolvent, and then resells them across the UK and Europe. It claims on its website that its customers can save up to 70 per cent by buying used software, and points to one NHS Trust that allegedly saved $1.37 m by using Microsoft Office 2019, rather than the latest version of the office tools suite. Jonathan Horley, ValueLicensing's founder, accused Microsoft of harming competition in the used software market by persuading companies to relinquish their perpetual licences, often in exchange for discounts on Microsoft's cloud-based software, such as Office 365. "Microsoft has an incentive to move to its new cloud-based model and remove the old licences from the market so customers have no choice but to move to its subscription model," said Mr Horley, in an interview with the Financial Times.

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Hitachi said on Wednesday it will buy U.S. software company GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion, including repayment of debt, as the Japanese industrial conglomerate pivots from electronics hardware to digital services. From a report: The deal is the biggest Japanese outbound acquisition of a U.S. hi-tech company on record, according to Refinitiv data. The acquisition is part of Hitachi's ongoing business portfolio overhaul, which includes the $7 billion acquisition of ABB's power grid business last year and a series of divestitures of its domestic hardware subsidiaries. Hitachi's stock tumbled 7% on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, its sharpest daily fall in more than a year, on the news.

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Slack rolled out a new feature Wednesday designed to build out its email replacement service called Slack Connect, but had to backtrack almost immediately after backlash over its potential for abuse. From a report: The new Slack Connect DM (direct messaging) functionality allowed paid subscribers to invite any other Slack user to a private conversation, accompanying their invite with a customizable message. The problem that many pointed out on social media was that those messages could be used to direct harassment at strangers online, without an easy option to block them because the invites come from a generic Slack address. The company reversed course by disabling the custom invite option and said it's heeding the feedback it has received and is committed to fixing the issue.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: Probably the best known brand of cutter comes from Cricut, and that company has dropped a bombshell in the form of an update to the web-based design software that leaves their now very annoyed users with a monthly upload limit of 20 new designs unless they sign up for a Cricut Access Plan that costs $9.99 on monthly payments. Worse still, a screenshot is circulating online purporting to be from a communication with a Cricut employee attempting to clarify matters, in which it is suggested that machines sold as second-hand will be bricked by the company. We'd like to think that given the reaction from their online community the subscription plan will backfire, but unlike the world of 3D printing their market is not necessarily an online-savvy one. A crafter who buys a Cricut from a bricks-and-mortar warehouse store and uses it with Cricut cartridges may not balk at being required to pay rent to use hardware that's already paid for in the same way a member of our community with a 3D printer would. After all, Cricut have always tried to make their software a walled garden. However if the stories about second-hand models being bricked turn out to bear fruit that might be a different matter.

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