An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft Teams went down this morning for nearly three hours after Microsoft forgot to renew a critical security certificate. Users of Microsoft's Slack competitor were met with error messages attempting to sign into the service on Monday morning, with the app noting it had failed to establish an HTTPS connection to Microsoft's servers. Microsoft confirmed the Teams service was down just after 9AM ET today, and then later revealed the source of the issue. "We've determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing users to have issues using the service," explains Microsoft's outage notification. Microsoft then started rolling the fix out at 11:20AM ET, and by 12PM ET the service was restored for most affected users.

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There is now a special page in the Firefox browser where users can see what telemetry data Mozilla is collecting from their browser. From a report: Accessible by typing about:telemetry in the browser's URL address bar, this new section is a recent addition to Firefox. The page shows deeply technical information about browser settings, installed add-ons, OS/hardware information, browser session details, and running processes. The information is what you'd expect a software vendor to collect about users in order to fix bugs and keep a statistical track of its userbase. A Firefox engineer told ZDNet the page was primarily created for selfish reasons, in order to help engineers debug Firefox test installs. However, it was allowed to ship to the stable branch also as a PR move, to put users' minds at ease about what type of data the browser maker collects from its users.

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YouTube on Monday reinforced its guidelines on tackling fake or misleading election-related content on its platform as the United States gears up for the presidential election later this year. From a report: YouTube will remove any content that has been "technically doctored" or manipulated or misleads the user about the voting process or makes false claims about a candidate, it said in a blog.

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Corporations love to pretend that 'anonymization' of the data they collect protects consumers. Studies keep showing that's not really true. From a report: Last fall, AdBlock Plus creator Wladimir Palant revealed that Avast was using its popular antivirus software to collect and sell user data. While the effort was eventually shuttered, Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek first downplayed the scandal, assuring the public the collected data had been "anonymized" -- or stripped of any obvious identifiers like names or phone numbers. "We absolutely do not allow any advertisers or any third party...to get any access through Avast or any data that would allow the third party to target that specific individual," Vlcek said. But analysis from students at Harvard University shows that anonymization isn't the magic bullet companies like to pretend it is. Dasha Metropolitansky and Kian Attari, two students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, recently built a tool that combs through vast troves of consumer datasets exposed from breaches for a class paper they've yet to publish. "The program takes in a list of personally identifiable information, such as a list of emails or usernames, and searches across the leaks for all the credential data it can find for each person," Attari said in a press release. They told Motherboard their tool analyzed thousands of datasets from data scandals ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the hacks and breaches that have plagued services from MyHeritage to porn websites. Despite many of these datasets containing "anonymized" data, the students say that identifying actual users wasn't all that difficult. "An individual leak is like a puzzle piece," Harvard researcher Dasha Metropolitansky told Motherboard. "On its own, it isn't particularly powerful, but when multiple leaks are brought together, they form a surprisingly clear picture of our identities. People may move on from these leaks, but hackers have long memories."

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My timeline of text-related work. Adding stuff as I remember.

Only three of the world's Top 100 international airports pass basic security checks, according to a report published last week by cyber-security firm ImmuniWeb. From a report: The three are the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, the Helsinki Vantaa Airport in Finland, and the Dublin International Airport in Ireland. According to ImmuniWeb, these three "may serve a laudable example not just to the aviation industry but to all other industries as well." The three are the only airports that passed a long list of security tests that involved checks of their public websites, official mobile applications, and searches for leaks of sensitive airport or passenger data in places like cloud services, public code repositories, or the dark web.

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A German artist illustrated [video] how it is possible to create a virtual traffic jam in Google Maps by walking around the streets of Berlin with 99 cell phones. Qbertino shares a report: Google Maps utilizes GPS and location data from mobile devices to determine if there is traffic congestion on a particular street. The app will then redirect users to less trafficked streets to avoid traffic. Using a hand cart filled with 99 active cell phones connected to Google Maps, artist Simon Weckert showed how he could create fake traffic jams in Google Maps simply by walking around the streets of Berlin. As he would be walking, rather than driving, Google Maps would perceive it to be a traffic jam due to a large number of devices reporting the same slow speed. Google's response to the matter, via blog 9to5Google: Speaking with 9to5Google, a spokesperson from Google has responded to this situation to clarify a few things. In normal usage, Google does use a large number of devices running Maps in a single place as proof of a traffic jam, something this rare and very specific case took advantage of. In the statement below, though, the company does hint that it might use cases like this to further improve how Maps handles traffic data. "Whether via car or cart or camel, we love seeing creative uses of Google Maps as it helps us make maps work better over time."

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The brand keeping BlackBerry phones alive across most of the globe, TCL Communications, plans to stop selling BlackBerry phones later this year. From a report: In a tweet this morning, TCL announced that it "will no longer be selling" BlackBerry-branded phones as of August 31st, 2020, because it will no longer have the rights to design and manufacture them. Existing devices will continue to be supported. BlackBerry decided in 2016 to stop making its own phones, after years of failures, and to license its brand out instead. The biggest licensing deal was with TCL, which since December 2016 has had the near-global rights to design and sell BlackBerry-branded phones. It's done a decent job of it, pairing classically BlackBerry-style designs with the functions of modern Android phones. None of the devices have been blockbuster hits, though, and recent devices have received poor reviews.

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AmiMoJo writes: Zhaoxin, a fabless chip maker based in Shanghai, has produced a homegrown x86 CPU line that's apparently ready for the DIY scene. The Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-6000 series of processors were originally shown off in 2018, but since then we had heard little about them. Now it seems that the KX-U6780A will come to market this quarter, as listed on Chinese retail site Taobao with a March release date. For the uninitiated, Zhaoxin is a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai Municipal Government. Zhaoxin's current CPU designs have origins in Centaur Technology, a company acquired by VIA in 1999. The VIA Nano Isaiah core design, built by Centaur, would serve as the architecture for Zhaoxin's first CPUs. The Isaiah design was Centaur's first superscalar CPU capable of out-of-order execution. This is what seemed to pave the way for Zhaoxin's in-house designed LuJiaZui cores, as they too are built around a superscalar, out of order architecture. LuJiaZui seems to be an iterative migration from the Wudaokou architecture, but also supports modern instruction set extensions such as AVX and SSE4.2, which is an important evolution for China and its domestic CPU goals. The KaiXian KX-U6880A appears to be the series flagship, with the slightly lower clocked KX-U6780A slotting in just beneath it. All KX-6000 series chips are based on the LuJiaZui architecture, boasting eight cores and eight threads.

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Google has gradually been adding print services to its Photos platform in recent years, and now it's testing a particularly novel one: a $7.99 a month subscription service that'll send subscribers physical prints of 10 algorithmically-selected photos each month. From a report: The trial is both U.S.-only and invitation-only, and eligible Google Photos' users will be invited to try the service via a message at the top of the screen when they log into the service on a laptop or desktop. Users will be able to ask that preference be given to one of three image categories when Google Photos makes it selections. The first will favor people and pets, the second will focus on landscapes, cityscapes and the outdoors, while the third will be a mix of everything. Users can update their preference each month if they're getting too many pics of their pooch... assuming such a thing is even possible.

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I used to call for presidential candidates to try to work with Repubs, but that's changed since Friday's vote re evidence for impeachment. They are complicit, as corrupt as the president. There is no working with any Republican in Congress at this time.

A question about how LO2 captures keystrokes.

Over on Facebook Terry Heaton posted a screed in support of Jennifer Lopez in last night's SuperBowl halftime show. To me it was a big meh. I find those kinds of shows unimpressive, the music not interesting. I came to watch football, not dance. I'm not kidding. Even Prince, the Stones, Bruce, etc didn't get me off. I was in the kitchen during the wardrobe malfunction. But -- Terry's post is noteworthy because he ends it with this line: "America is facing the destruction of our democracy, and we're worried about this?" We should make a button out of that. Tatoo it on our forehead so we see it in the mirror. We need to be good to each other, find ways to combine our power, not minimize it. Let's go Mets! and thanks for listening.

Kenya's high court last week temporarily suspended the country's new national biometric identity program until the government enacts laws to protect the security of the data and prevent discrimination against minorities. From a report: The government had said the IDs would be required for all Kenyan citizens and foreign residents to access a broad range of rights and services, including health care, education, public housing, voting, marriage licenses and registering mobile phones. But the court's three-judge panel announced in proceedings on Thursday that it is suspending the digital ID program until the government has in place "an appropriate and comprehensive regulatory framework" that would protect the personal data it collects and safeguard minorities from discrimination. The panel's 500-page judgment is expected to be released this week. The decision is a setback for the government, which had already collected data from nearly 40 million Kenyans during a mass registration in April and May last year. The government will now have to pass new legislation -- under public scrutiny -- to build in protections and implement the biometric program. It is unclear how long that might take.

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The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time. From a report: There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they've agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3 Celsius. It's an outcome that would be disastrous -- flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat -- but there's been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario. The scientists involved couldn't agree on why -- or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began "talking to each other like, 'What'd you get?', 'What'd you get?'" said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model. "The question is whether they've overshot," said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Researchers are starting to put together answers, a task that will take months at best, and there's not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

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