An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned. The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there's no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company. Little is known about Kache.ai. The word "Kache" in Chinese means truck, which could signal a connection to China. Although TechCrunch was not able to independently verify if Kache.ai has any outside partners or backers yet. [T]he Kache.ai website said the company was working on "the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology for the commercial trucking industry." It appears the company is hiring at every level, from mapping and database experts to people with robotics and simulation skills. The website also noted that the company is looking for software engineers with experience in convolutional neural networks as well as computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Art Show now fades out and back in on picture switches.

Dier scores decisive penalty kick in ill-tampered last-16 match against Colombia to seal England's progress.

At least 134 Palestinians have been wounded as Great March of Return protests continue in besieged Gaza Strip.

An anonymous reader shares a report: South Korea has lowered its maximum working hours from 68 hours a week to 52 hours. The legislation, which went into effect Sunday, received overwhelming support in the National Assembly in an effort to limit the time employees spend on the job. South Korea has the third highest number of hours worked of 37 countries tracked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with the average person in South Korea working about 2,024 hours in 2017, or approximately 38.9 hours a week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US President Donald Trump accuses allies in the military alliance of failing to adequately pay for their protection.

Michael Zhang, reporting for PetaPixel: A Virginia federal court has made a decision that photographers won't be happy to hear: the court ruled that finding a photo on the Internet and then using it without permission on a commercial website can be considered fair use. The copyright battle started when photographer Russell Brammer found one of his long-exposure photos of a Washington, D.C. neighborhood cropped and used by the website for the Northern Virginia Film Festival on a page of "things to do" in the D.C. area. Brammer then sent a cease and desist letter to Violent Hues Productions, the company behind the festival, and it responded by immediately taking the photo down. Brammer then sued the company for copyright infringement, and it responded by claiming fair use. In his ruling, the judge said, "Violent Hues' use of the photograph was transformative in function and purpose. While Brammer's purpose in capturing and publishing the photograph was promotional and expressive, Violent Hues' purpose in using the photograph was informational: to provide festival attendees with information regarding the local area. Furthermore, this use was noncommercial, because the photo was not used to advertise a product or generate revenue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judicial workers are angered by reform law that will force out about 40 percent of Supreme Court judges.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the last year, gadget and software makers have developed ways for users to better manage their relationship with technology. They make it easier to ignore notifications or quiet all but the most important stuff. But even the latest mobile OS updates don't address the entire problem. In this always-on era, we are assumed to be near our phones all the time, and there is no good way to signal to the world when we are not. There is no way to proclaim, "I'm not available, I won't see your notification, and I won't care until next Sunday." The solution isn't complicated. In fact, it has been around since the '90s. It is called an "away" message, and we need it now more than ever. Most people's first experience with an away message came on AOL Instant Messenger. Those were the days before mobile, when you could only be online while sitting at the computer -- probably a wheezing beige colossus running Windows 95. Rather than log off every time you had to run to the store, AIM allowed you to change a small icon next to your name from green, which signified you were online and available, to red, which meant you were temporarily indisposed. [...] Away messages helped users understand why their buddies weren't responding. More important, away messages offered permission to actually go away. If someone needed you urgently, they would try another route, but mostly they would leave you alone. You weren't ignoring them on purpose; you were just gone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tel Aviv passed a law allowing the money to be taken from taxes and tariffs that the Israeli government collects on Palestinian leadership's behalf.

UN human rights office says that Ola al-Qaradawi is held in solitary confinement in one of the worst prisons in Egypt.

India has asked Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger to take steps to prevent the circulation of false texts and provocative content that have led to a series of lynchings and mob beatings across the country in the past few months. From a report: With more than 200 million users in India, WhatsApp's biggest market in the world, false news and videos circulating on the messaging app have become a new headache for social media giant Facebook, already grappling with a privacy scandal. So far this year, false messages about child abductors on WhatsApp have helped to trigger mass beatings of more than a dozen people in India -- at least three of whom have died. In addition, five people were beaten to death by a mob on Sunday in a fresh incident of lynching in India's western state of Maharashtra on suspicions that they were child abductors. "Deep disapproval of such developments has been conveyed to the senior management of WhatsApp and they have been advised that necessary remedial measures should be taken," India's IT ministry said in a strongly-worded statement on Tuesday. From a report published on The Washington Post earlier this week: As India's government weighs what to do, local authorities have been left to tackle fake news as best they can, issuing warnings and employing low-tech methods such as hiring street performers and "rumor busters" to visit villages to spread public awareness. One such "rumor buster" was killed by a mob Thursday in the eastern state of Tripura.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kasmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: It's the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won't go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. [...] Some computer science academics at Northeastern University had heard enough people talking about this technological myth that they decided to do a rigorous study to tackle it. For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to find out whether any of them were secretly using the phone's mic to capture audio. The apps included those belonging to Facebook, as well as over 8,000 apps that send information to Facebook. Sorry, conspiracy theorists: They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but they didn't find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone's screen and sending that information out to third parties.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have found that moons in distant solar systems may be the most

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been arrested in Kuala Lumpur, as part of the probe into the 1MDB state investment fund.