An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Most broadband providers in the UK "have been forced to cut the headline speeds they advertise when selling deals" because of new UK rules requiring accurate speed claims, according to a consumer advocacy group. "Eleven major suppliers have had to cut the advertised speed of some of their deals, with the cheapest deals dropping by 41 percent," the group wrote last week. The analysis was conducted by Which?, a brand name used by the Consumers' Association, a UK-based charity that does product research and advocacy on behalf of consumers. "BT, EE, John Lewis Broadband, Plusnet, Sky, Zen Internet, Post Office, SSE, TalkTalk, and Utility Warehouse previously advertised their standard (ADSL) broadband deals as 'up to 17Mbps,'" the group noted in its announcement on Saturday. "The new advertised speed is now more than a third lower at 10Mbps or 11Mbps." "TalkTalk has completely dropped advertising speed claims from most of its deals," the consumer group also said. "Vodafone has also changed the name of some of its deals: Fibre 38 and Fibre 76 are now Superfast 1 and Superfast 2." Previously, ISPs were able to advertise broadband speeds of "up to" a certain amount, even if only one in 10 customers could ever get those speeds, Which? wrote. "But the new advertising rules mean that at least half of customers must now be able to get an advertised average speed, even during peak times (8-10pm)," the group said.

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Jason Koebler writes: Verizon is rolling out a new Virtual Private Network service called Safe Wi-Fi it developed in conjunction with McAfee. According to Verizon, the $4 per month service "protects your privacy and blocks ad tracking, creating a secure Wi-Fi connection anywhere in the world." But the company didn't even write a privacy policy for the product: Verizon's terms of service directs all of its VPN users to the general McAfee privacy policy governing all of its products. That policy, in turn, states that McAfee and Verizon have the right to collect an ocean of data on the end user, including carrier data, Bluetooth device IDs, mobile device ID, mobile advertising identifiers, MAC address, IMEI data, and more. The policy explicitly says that browsing history can be used to help target ads at you.

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Programmes and pages removed from online platforms for hate speech and violation of policies, tech companies say.

Iranian president says Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal proves that the US is 'untrustworthy'.

It sounds like a joke, but the idea actually makes sense: More bugs, not less, could theoretically make a system safer. From a report: Carefully scatter non-exploitable decoy bugs in software, and attackers will waste time and resources on trying to exploit them. The hope is that attackers will get bored, overwhelmed, or run out of time and patience before finding an actual vulnerability. Computer science researchers at NYU suggested this strategy in a study published August 2, and call these fake-vulnerabilities "chaff bugs." Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, assistant professor at NYU Tandon and one of the researcher on this study, told me in an email that they've been working on techniques to automatically put bugs into programs for the past few years as a way to test and evaluate different bug-finding systems. Once they had a way to fill a program with bugs, they started to wonder what else they could do with it. "I also have a lot of friends who write exploits for a living, so I know how much work there is in between finding a bug and coming up with a reliable exploit -- and it occurred to me that this was something we might be able to take advantage of," he said. "People who can write exploits are rare, and their time is expensive, so if you can figure out how to waste it you can potentially have a great deterrent effect." Brendan has previously suggested that adding bugs to experimental software code could help with ultimately winding up with programs that have fewer vulnerabilities.

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Poll: Suppose all the social media sites ban a commentator whose ideas you detest. He no longer can communicate with most of the people who want to hear what he says.

Researchers warn that even limited climate warming could trigger conditions not seen in a million years.

Government forces and rival rebels in South Sudan have signed another power-sharing deal.

EU regulators plan to study whether there is a need for action in the push for a common mobile phone charger following a lack of progress by phone makers towards this goal, EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said. From a report: The European Commission has been pushing for a common charger for nearly a decade as it cited the more than 51,000 tons of electronic waste yearly from old chargers as well as the inconvenience to consumers. iPhone and Android users have long complained about using different chargers for their phones.

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Facebook wants your financial data. The social media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. From the report: Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup and U.S. Bancorp USB to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter. Facebook has talked about a feature that would show its users their checking-account balances, the people said. It has also pitched fraud alerts, some of the people said. Data privacy is a sticking point in the banks' conversations with Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks are taking place as Facebook faces several investigations over its ties to political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which accessed data on as many 87 million Facebook users without their consent. Update: Shares of Facebook surged nearly 3% following the report. A paywall free, alternative source of this story. Update 2 (18:10 GMT): Talking to TechCrunch, Facebook has, in part, denied WSJ's report. TechCrunch: Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells TechCrunch it's not asking for credit card transaction data from banks and it's not interested in building a dedicated banking feature where you could interact with your accounts. It also says its work with banks isn't to gather data to power ad targeting, or even personalize content such as what Marketplace products you see based on what you buy elsewhere.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo is making it easier for their customers running Linux to update their firmware now on ThinkPad, ThinkStation, and ThinkCenter hardware. Lenovo has joined the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and following collaboration with the upstream developers is beginning to roll-out support for offering their device firmware on this platform so it can be easily updated by users with the fwupd stack. Kudos to all involved especially with Lenovo ThinkPads being very popular among Linux users.

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Breastfeeding within an hour after birth is critical for saving newborn lives.

Labourers die in southern Foggia province after the van they were travelling in smashed into a lorry.

Google on Monday announced that the 'P' in Android P stands for Android Pie, succeeding Android Oreo. It also pushed the source code of the latest version to the Android Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The latest version of Google's mobile operating system, Android 9.0 Pie, is also starting to roll out today as an over-the-air update to Pixel phones, the company said. From a report: If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all). During the beta testing phase, Android P was made available on the Sony Xperia XZ2, Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, Nokia 7 Plus, Oppo R15 Pro, Vivo X21, OnePlus 6, and Essential PH-1. [...] Google wants you to know that Android Pie includes a "heaping helping of artificial intelligence baked in to make your phone smarter, simpler, and more tailored to you." Android Pie offers of a slew of new features including built-in support for display cutouts (read: notches), a tweaked Quick Settings panel, a notification drawer with rounded corners, messages in notifications when replying inline, smart replies in notifications, a consistent UI for fingerprint authentication, privacy enhancements to limit what apps can do in the background, Adaptive Battery and Adaptive Brightness features (courtesy of Google DeepMind), App Actions for predicting what the user will do next, App Slices for surfacing an app's user interface inside the Google app's search results and inside Google Assistant, a BiometricPrompt API for a system-managed dialog to prompt the user for any supported type of biometric authentication, and multi-camera APIs that let you access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras.

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dave.blog now redirects to scripting.com. I was never going to start a new blog there. I don't know what I was thinking. One person, one blog seems to be the default.