Yahoo and AOL, formerly known as Verizon Media, have officially been acquired by their new owners and renamed as simply "Yahoo." The Verge reports: Verizon announced it was selling the properties to Apollo Global Management in May in a deal said to be worth $5 billion, around half of the nearly $9 billion the telecom giant originally paid for them, and a fraction of the hundreds of billions the two companies were worth at their peaks.

Yahoo will now be run by CEO Guru Gowrappan, and will operate as a standalone company under Apollo Funds. Apollo is a private equity firm that owns assets like crafts retailer Michaels, Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. "The close of the deal heralds an exciting time of renewed opportunity for us as a standalone entity," Gowrappan said. "We anticipate that the coming months and years will bring fresh growth and innovation for Yahoo as a business and a brand, and we look forward to creating that future with our new partners."

An anonymous reader shares a report: An anonymous reader Days before Christmas in 2015, Juniper Networks alerted users that it had been breached. In a brief statement, the company said it had discovered "unauthorized code" in one of its network security products, allowing hackers to decipher encrypted communications and gain high-level access to customers' computer systems. Further details were scant, but Juniper made clear the implications were serious: It urged users to download a software update "with the highest priority." More than five years later, the breach of Juniper's network remains an enduring mystery in computer security, an attack on America's software supply chain that potentially exposed highly sensitive customers including telecommunications companies and U.S. military agencies to years of spying before the company issued a patch.

Those intruders haven't yet been publicly identified, and if there were any victims other than Juniper, they haven't surfaced to date. But one crucial detail about the incident has long been known -- uncovered by independent researchers days after Juniper's alert in 2015 -- and continues to raise questions about the methods U.S. intelligence agencies use to monitor foreign adversaries. The Juniper product that was targeted, a popular firewall device called NetScreen, included an algorithm written by the National Security Agency. Security researchers have suggested that the algorithm contained an intentional flaw -- otherwise known as a backdoor -- that American spies could have used to eavesdrop on the communications of Juniper's overseas customers. NSA declined to address allegations about the algorithm.

Juniper's breach remains important -- and the subject of continued questions from Congress -- because it highlights the perils of governments inserting backdoors in technology products. "As government agencies and misguided politicians continue to push for backdoors into our personal devices, policymakers and the American people need a full understanding of how backdoors will be exploited by our adversaries," Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a statement to Bloomberg. He demanded answers in the last year from Juniper and from the NSA about the incident, in letters signed by 10 or more members of Congress.

A new article at ZDNet argues that "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL."

"Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Once upon a time, roughly thirty years ago, there was a computer network called America Online... There was already an Internet, but most people didn't know how to use it or even that it existed. AOL, and a couple of competitors, Compuserve and Prodigy, offered people online things they could do, such as chat with other people... The services had only one drawback, which was that they were limited. People couldn't do just whatever they wanted, they could only pick from a small menu of functions, such as chat, that the services provided... As it grew and grew, the World Wide Web became an amazing place in contrast to AOL... People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered...

People got excited about Facebook because it was a place where they could find real people they knew, just like MySpace, but also because it had some features like AOL, like the game Farmville. Business people were even more excited because Facebook started to generate a lot of advertising revenue. Advertisers liked Facebook because it not only knew who was talking to whom, it also knew a little bit about the hobbies and interests of people. Advertisers liked that because they could use the information to "target" their ads like never before. Smart people said that Facebook had what are known as "network effects." It became more powerful the more people joined it...

There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... One of the bad things was that people no longer had control. They had given so much information about themselves to Facebook and its competitors that it was like those companies owned people when they were in Cyberspace. The services didn't seem to do a great job of handling people's information, either.
What's interesting about this article is it even tells you how the story ends: Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.

People got excited again, like the first time they found the Web and gave up on AOL.

But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.

"While workers who want to stay at home forever have been especially vocal about their demands, a silent majority of Americans do want to get back to the office, at least for a few days a week..." reports the New York Times. The article, shared by long-time Slashdot reader gollum123, cites the opinions of workers in a variety of industries. In a national survey of more than 950 workers, conducted in mid-August by Morning Consult on behalf of The New York Times, 31 percent said they would prefer to work from home full time. By comparison, 45 percent said they wanted to be in a workplace or an office full time. The remaining 24 percent said they wanted to split time between work and home... The data intelligence company's findings echoed recent internal surveys by employers like Google and Twitter, as well as outside surveys by firms like Eden Workplace. Among those craving the routines of office life and cubicle chatter: social butterflies, managers, new hires eager to meet colleagues, and people with noisy or crowded homes...

Certainly, some people have thrived in their new remote work lives. They saved time and money, and sometimes increased productivity. The degree to which employees have embraced permanent remote or hybrid work models has been "stunning" to company executives, said Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied remote work for decades. But for others, Professor Neeley said, it has removed needed barriers between work and home life, increased a sense of isolation and led to burnout. "Some people just dislike the screen — their physicality and their proximity to others is a big part of what work looks like," she said.
In the Times' article, here's how one 23-year-old recent college graduate starting at Google described their own dilemma.

"If we don't get a really solid foundation at this company in our first six months, our first year, what foot does that leave us on for the rest of our time at the company?"

South Korea is ending a law it announced in 2011 that blocked young gamers from accessing game websites after midnight. "South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, as well as the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, say that they're ending the law to respect children's rights and encourage at-home education," reports Engadget. "The country aims to abolish the law by the end of the year when it revises its Youth Protection Act." From the report: The news doesn't mean underage gamers are entirely off the hook, though. Instead, excessive gaming will be managed by the country's "choice permit" system, which lets parents and guardians arrange approved play times. Still, that sounds more permissive than China's gaming curfew, which bans players under 18 from playing between 10PM and 8AM. Additionally, they're limited to 90 minutes of game time during weekdays, and three hours on weekends and holidays.

As Kotaku reports, the shutdown law was originally meant to curb PC gaming, but it also affected consoles. Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live ended up restricting their accounts to adults. That's why Minecraft is now an R-rated game in the country. "In the changing media environment, the ability of children to decide for themselves and protect themselves has become important more than anything," Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said, according to The Korea Times. "We will work with related ministries to systematically support media and game-use education at schools, homes, and in society so that young people can develop these abilities, and continue to make efforts to create a sound gaming environment and various leisure activities for children."

"Are You Ready for Sentient Disney Robots?" asks a headline at the New York Times. (Alternate URL here for a text-only version.)

"A new trend that is coming into our animatronics is a level of intelligence," a senior Imagineering executive tells the Times, showing off Disney's sophisticated new three-foot animatronic of the Guardians of the Galaxy character Groot. "This guy represents our future. It's part of how we stay relevant."

The animatronic Groot walked across the room to introduce himself to the Times' reporter. When I remained silent, his demeanor changed. His shoulders slumped, and he seemed to look at me with puppy dog eyes. "Don't be sad," I blurted out. He grinned and broke into a little dance before balancing on one foot with outstretched arms.
It's just part of a larger initiative to upgrade the park's tech in a variety of different ways: There are animatronics at Disney World that have been doing the same herky-jerky thing on loop since Richard Nixon was president. In the meantime, the world's children have become technophiles, raised on apps (three million in the Google store), the Roblox online gaming universe and augmented reality Snapchat filters... In early June, Disney's animatronic technology took a sonic leap forward. The Disneyland Resort's newest ride, WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, features a "stuntronic" robot (outfitted in Spidey spandex) that performs elaborate aerial tricks, just like a stunt person. A catapult hurls the untethered machine 65 feet into the air, where it completes various feats (somersaults in one pass, an "epic flail" in another) while autonomously adjusting its trajectory to land in a hidden net... The Spider-Man robot — 95 pounds of microprocessors, 3-D printed plastic, gyroscopes, accelerometers, aluminum and other materials — took more than three years to develop. Disney declined to discuss the cost of the stuntronics endeavor, but the company easily invested millions of dollars...

One of Disney's senior roboticists, Scott LaValley, came from Boston Dynamics, where he contributed to an early version of Atlas, a running and jumping machine that inspires "how did they do that" amazement — followed by dystopian dread. Disney said it had no plans to replace human performers... Rather, Disney's newest robotics initiative is about extreme Marvel and "Star Wars" characters — huge ones like the Incredible Hulk, tiny ones like Baby Yoda and swinging ones like Spider-Man — that are challenging to bring to life in a realistic way, especially outdoors.... The development of Groot — code-named Project Kiwi — is the latest example. He is a prototype for a small-scale, free-roaming robotic actor that can take on the role of any similarly sized Disney character....

Cameras and sensors will give these robots the ability to make on-the-fly choices about what to do and say. Custom software allows animators and engineers to design behaviors (happy, sad, sneaky) and convey emotion.

"COVID-19 origin theorists could be right about a Chinese government cover-up," reports The Week, "but they might have their sights set in the wrong direction, an American virologist suggested to Bloomberg." When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.

The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets.

A link between them would be "very intriguing," Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virology research associate at the University of Utah, told Bloomberg...

[I]t seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."
The paper contains "meticulously collected data and photographic evidence supporting scientists' initial hypothesis — that the outbreak stemmed from infected wild animals..." according to Bloomberg's article. (Alternate URL here.) According to the report, which was published in June in the online journal Scientific Reports, minks, civets, raccoon dogs, and other mammals known to harbor coronaviruses were sold in plain sight for years in shops across the city, including the now infamous Huanan wet market, to which many of the earliest Covid cases were traced... [Researcher Xiao Xiao's] animal logs included masked palm civets and raccoon dogs — both involved in the 2003 SARS outbreak — and other species susceptible to coronavirus infections, such as bamboo rats, minks, and hog badgers. Of the 38 species Xiao documented, 31 were protected.

Anyone caught violating China's wild animal conservation law faces fines and up to 15 years of imprisonment. But enforcement was lax, as evidenced by the fact that many of the Wuhan shops displayed their wares openly, "caged, stacked and in poor condition," Xiao observed in the report.

Xiao estimated that 47,381 wild animals were sold in Wuhan over the survey period.
Collaborating with four more scientists (including three from the University of Oxford), Xiao had submitted their manuscript to a journal for publication in February of 2020 — only to have it rejected. "Had the study been made public right away, the search for the origins of the virus might have taken a very different course..." Bloomberg writes: Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals....

As other nations began blaming the Chinese Communist Party for the pandemic, the government grew defensive. It may have been embarrassed that its citizens were still eating wild animals bought in wet markets — a well-known path for zoonotic disease transmission that China tried unsuccessfully to outlaw almost 20 years ago...

Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, denied "wildlife wet markets" existed in the country...

Slashdot reader phalse phace tipped us off to a breaking story. Reuters reports: A California judge on Friday ruled that a 2020 ballot measure that exempted ride-share and food delivery drivers from a state labor law is unconstitutional as it infringed on the legislature's power to set standards at the workplace...which makes the entire ballot measure "unenforceable", Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch wrote in the ruling.

Gig economy companies including Uber, Lyft, Doordash and Instacart were pushing to keep drivers' independent contractor status, albeit with additional benefits.

According to Bloomberg, the U.K. is considering blocking a takeover of Arm by Nvidia due to potential risks to national security. SoftBank announced plans to sell Arm to U.S. chip company Nvidia last September for more than $40 billion. It's been under investigation and protested ever since. Bloomberg reports: In April, U.K. Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden asked the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to prepare a report on whether the deal could be deemed anti-competitive, along with a summary of any national security concerns raised by third parties. The assessment, delivered in late July, contains worrying implications for national security and the U.K. is currently inclined to reject the takeover, a person familiar with government discussions said. The U.K. is likely to conduct a deeper review into the merger due to national security issues, a separate person said.

No final decision has been taken, and the U.K. could still approve the deal alongside certain conditions, the people added. Dowden is set to decide on whether the merger needs further examination by the U.K.'s competition authorities. "We continue to work through the regulatory process with the U.K. government," said an Nvidia spokesperson in a statement. "We look forward to their questions and expect to resolve any issues they may have."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service and its inspection agency seeking records about a covert program to secretly comb through online posts of social media users before street protests, raising concerns about chilling the privacy and expressive activity of internet users. From the press release: Under an initiative called Internet Covert Operations Program, analysts at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the Postal Service's law enforcement arm, sorted through massive amounts of data created by social media users to surveil what they were saying and sharing, according to media reports. Internet users' posts on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and Telegraph were likely swept up in the surveillance program. USPIS has not disclosed details about the program or any records responding to EFF's FOIA request asking for information about the creation and operation of the surveillance initiative. In addition to those records, EFF is also seeking records on the program's policies and analysis of the information collected, and communications with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), about the use of social media content gathered under the program.

Media reports revealed that a government bulletin dated March 16 was distributed across DHS's state-run security threat centers, alerting law enforcement agencies that USPIS analysts monitored "significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021." Protests around the country were planned for that day, and locations and times were being shared on Parler, Telegram, Twitter, and Facebook, the bulletin said. "We're filing this FOIA lawsuit to shine a light on why and how the Postal Service is monitoring online speech. This lawsuit aims to protect the right to protest," said Houston Davidson, EFF public interest legal fellow. "The government has never explained the legal justifications for this surveillance. We're asking a court to order the USPIS to disclose details about this speech-monitoring program, which threatens constitutional guarantees of free expression and privacy."

"Loneliness among adolescents around the globe has skyrocketed since a decade ago," reports the Washington Post, "and it may be tied to smartphone use, a new study finds." In 36 out of 37 countries, feelings of loneliness among teenagers rose sharply between 2012 and 2018, with higher increases among girls, according to a report released Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers used data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a survey of over 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students. The survey included a six-item measure of loneliness at school in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018. Before 2012, the trends had stayed relatively flat. But between 2012 and 2018, nearly twice as many teens displayed high elevated levels of "school loneliness," an established predictor of depression and mental health issues. (The study did not cover the period of the coronavirus pandemic, which also may have affected teen well-being.)

"It's surprising that the trend would be so similar across so many different countries," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study's lead author. "On the other hand, if this trend is caused by smartphones or electronic communication, a worldwide increase is exactly what you'd expect to see." In an earlier study, Twenge had identified 2012 as the year when smartphone ownership passed 50 percent in the United States...

In the worldwide study, school loneliness was not correlated with factors such as income inequality, gross domestic product and family size, but it did correlate with increases in smartphone and Internet use. By 2012, most of the countries in the study had reached a point where at least half of teens had access to smartphones, and that is when teen loneliness levels began to rise, Twenge said. "When it got to that saturation point where social media was virtually mandatory and practically everybody had a phone, it changed things," she said. As smartphone adoption spread in the 2010s, adolescents spent less time interacting in person and more time using digital media, the paper said, adding, "Given that digital media does not produce as much emotional closeness as in-person interaction, the result may be more loneliness in recent years...."

School administrators and teachers have noted the changes. Lunchrooms and hallways, formerly raucous places, have in recent years fallen silent as teens have turned to their devices. Some are taking action on the local or national level. In 2018, France stopped allowing smartphones at school for students in elementary and middle school.

When the 150,000-member "megachurch" Hillsong opened a branch in Atlanta, its pastor Sam Collier says Facebook suggested using it to explore how churches can "go further farther on Facebook..." reports the New York Times: He is partnering with Facebook, he said, "to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better."

"Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself. "Reach the parishioner better."
Facebook's involvement with churches has been intense: For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong's grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was "partnering with Facebook" and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.

Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement...

"Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook..."

[Facebook] has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups...

The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life... The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones... There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates "enormous" concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh...

"Corporations are not worried about moral codes," she said. "I don't think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out." Last month Facebook held a summit "which resembled a religious service," the Times reports, at which Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection."

But the article also notes the 6-million member Church of God in Christ "received early access to several of Facebook's monetization features," testing paid subscriptions for exclusive church content, as well as real-time donations during services. But "Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams."

A Facebook engineer abused employee access to user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought, a new book said. Business Insider reports: Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees over exploiting user data for personal means, said an advance copy of "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" that Insider obtained. The engineer, who is unnamed, tapped into the data to "confront" a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing, the book said. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel.

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company's systems, he had access to "years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on," the book said. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book said, the engineer was also able to see her location in real time. Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to "cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers," the book said.

"There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users' private information," wrote Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the book's authors. They added that most of the employees who abused their employee privileges to access user data only looked up information, although a few didn't stop there. Most of the engineers who took advantage of access to user data were "men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in," the book said. Facebook told Insider it fired employees found to have accessed user data for nonbusiness purposes.

Business Insider reports: A huge underground cryptocurrency mining operation has been busted by Ukraine police for allegedly stealing electricity from the grid. Police said they'd seized 5,000 computers and 3,800 games consoles that were being used in the illegal mine, the largest discovered in the country.

The mine, in the city of Vinnytsia, near Kyiv, stole as much as $259,300 in electricity each month, the Security Service of Ukraine said. To conceal the theft, the operators of the mine used electricity meters that did not reflect their actual energy consumption, officials said.

"Such illegal activity could lead to power surges and left people without electricity," the security service said.

North America's largest crypto mine is six miles outside Rockdale, Texas, "a four-square-mile town that hosts a Walmart, one other grocery store, a handful of Mexican restaurants and a couple of pizza places," reports the Washington Post.

The miners took over an old Alcoa aluminum facility, creating a "fenced-off crypto compound" with more than 100,000 servers, stacked 20 feet high. "When the expansion is completed by the end of 2022, that number will have more than doubled," the Post reports, citing the company's CEO Chad Harris.

Texas has some of Ameria's cheapest energy prices. But what's really interesting is what happened last month when 94-degree temperatures strained the state's energy grid: Thanks to the way Texas power companies deal with large electricity customers like Whinstone, Harris's bitcoin mine...didn't suffer. Instead, the state's electricity operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), began to pay Whinstone — for having agreed to quit buying power amid heightened demand. That sort of arrangement has helped make the state one of the go-to locations for expanding crypto entrepreneurs the world over, despite its continued agonizing over power shortages. Indeed, Whinstone's new owners are undertaking a major expansion of its facility outside Rockdale, with the intention of doubling its capacity. When fully developed, the crypto mine here is expected to require 750 megawatts of power — enough to power more than 150,000 Texas homes during peak demand.

And it's not just Whinstone. More crypto farms want to move into the area as China, believed to be the nation with the most crypto miners, moves to restrict local bitcoin mining and trading by, among other limitations, ordering power companies not to sell them power. Shenzhen-based BIT Mining said in May that it plans to invest more than $25 million in a Texas data center, while Beijing-based server firm Bitmain is already modernizing the old aluminum plant across the street from Whinstone's Rockdale-area facility.

Rockdale's mayor, a bitcoin miner himself with a rack of computers in his home, says he's met with at least one other firm interested in locating here. Whinstone, which leases shelving on its campus to other crypto miners' servers, has been contacted by "several," the company's CEO said. It's not just happening near Rockdale. Peter Thiel-backed crypto mining firm Layer1 Technologies last year opened a plant near Pyote in West Texas (population 138 in the 2020 census). In February, Canada's Argo Blockchain announced plans to buy 320 acres of land in the same West Texas area within a year... "One good thing about crypto mining is it's adding flexibility to the system," said Peter Cramton, a former board member of ERCOT, the nonprofit that's charged with managing the state's wholesale energy market. "But the problem is it's consuming real resources, doing a function that has no value...."

Bitcoin mines of Whinstone's size may be capable of creating roughly 500 bitcoin per month, the company says. At today's bitcoin value of approximately $34,000, that's $17 million, helping to explain why Riot Blockchain, a publicly traded company, paid $80 million in May to acquire Whinstone.

CoinDesk reports that "A project is in the works to make the Tor Client more adaptable and easier for third parties to use, with some help from Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG)." ZOMG announced on Tuesday that it is awarding the privacy-focused Tor Project a $670,000 grant to continue to develop Arti, a Rust coding language implementation of the Tor Client... Arti should make it simpler for third parties to embed and customize the Tor Client than the current implementation in the C coding language... "Arti is a project to make an improved version of Tor that will be more reliable, more secure, and easier for other software to use," said Nick Mathewson, chief network architect and co-founder of the Tor Project. "We hope that within the next several years, Arti will become the preferred implementation of the Tor protocols...."

"Onion routing has just had its 25th anniversary in May, and although Tor is a great set of privacy tools, the C program 'tor' itself (note the lowercase t) is beginning to show its age," Mathewson said. "We've found over the recent years that the complexity of the existing C code, and the fragility of the C language, make it unnecessarily difficult to improve the code while maintaining our security and privacy guarantees....

"Roughly half of Tor's security issues since 2016 would have been impossible in Rust, and many of the other issues would have been much less likely, based on our informal audit," he said...

The funding will go toward developer salaries as they develop Arti. Mathewson said the goal with this round of funding is to advance Arti to the point where it is ready for general use, testing and embedding.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

President Joe Biden will direct the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to draft new rules aimed at stopping manufacturers from limiting consumers' ability to repair products at independent shops or on their own, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the plan. From the report: While the agency will ultimately decide the size and scope of the order, the presidential right-to-repair directive is expected to mention mobile phone manufacturers and Department of Defense contractors as possible areas for regulation. Tech companies including Apple and Microsoft have imposed limits on who can repair broken consumer electronics like game consoles and mobile phones, which consumer advocates say increases repair costs. The order is also expected to benefit farmers, who face expensive repair costs from tractor manufacturers who use proprietary repair tools, software, and diagnostics to prevent third-parties from working on the equipment, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the action ahead of its official announcement.

The Yahoo brand, once an Internet name as iconic as Google, might be worth little to Gen Z-ers more familiar with TikTok and Instagram. But it still has value in Japan, where the once-illustrious marquee just sold for $1.6 billion. From a report: Z Holdings, a unit of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp, agreed to buy the rights to the Yahoo name in Japan for 178.5 billion yen to replace an existing licensing agreement. The deal follows the sale of Verizon's media division, the bulk of which is the original U.S. version of the Yahoo web portal, to private equity firm Apollo Global for $5 billion. Yahoo! was one of Son's early big investments, who built a $100 million stake in one of the original web startups in the mid-90s. He subsequently formed the joint venture Yahoo! Japan, which over the years morphed into tech and e-commerce platform Z Holdings as Yahoo sold off its core assets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you receive emails flagged as spam or see a warning that a message might be a phishing attempt, it's a sign that your email provider is scanning your emails. The company may do that just to protect you from danger, but in some situations it can delve into your communications for other purposes, as well. Google announced that it would stop scanning Gmail users' email messages for ad targeting in 2017 -- but that doesn't mean it stopped scanning them altogether. Verizon didn't respond to requests for comments about Yahoo and AOL's current practices, but in 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that both email providers were scanning emails for advertising. And Microsoft scans its Outlook users' emails for malicious content. Here's what major email providers say about why they currently scan users' messages.

Email providers can scan for spam and malicious links and attachments, often looking for patterns. [...] You may see lots of ads in your email inbox, but that doesn't necessarily mean your email provider is using the content of your messages to target you with marketing messages. For instance, like Google, Microsoft says that it refrains from using your email content for ad targeting. But it does target ads to consumers in Outlook, along with MSN, and other websites and apps. The data to do that come from partnering with third-party providers, plus your browsing activity and search history on Bing and Microsoft Edge, as well as information you've given the company, such as your gender, country, and date of birth.

[...] If you're using an email account provided by your employer, an administrator with qualifying credentials can typically access all your incoming and outgoing emails on that account, as well as any documents you create using your work account or that you receive in your work account. This allows companies to review emails as part of internal investigations and access their materials after an employee leaves the company. [...] Law enforcement can request access to emails, though warrants, court orders, or subpoenas may be required. Email providers may reject requests that don't satisfy applicable laws, and may narrow requests that ask for too much information. They may also object to producing information altogether.