Google faces a data-protection complaint from Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems amid concerns it unlawfully monitors users and passes on the "tracking ID" to advertisers. From a report: Schrems's campaign group Noyb on Wednesday filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority, accusing Google of tracking users of Android phones through a unique ID that "allows Google and countless third-parties to" monitor users. The European Union's strict data protection rules, in force since May 2018, require people's consent before being tracked, the group said in a statement. Data regulators have the powers to levy fines of as much as 4% of a company's global annual sales for serious violations. "Google does not collect valid 'opt-in' consent before generating the tracking ID, but seems to generate these IDs without user consent," according to the statement.

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President Donald Trump extended his effort to curb Huawei Technologies's access to the U.S. market and American suppliers. From a report: The president on Wednesday renewed for a year a national emergency order that restricts Huawei and a second Chinese telecommunications company, ZTE, from selling their equipment in the U.S. The move continues a battle with China over dominance of 5G technology networks. In the original order, which didn't name any countries or companies, Trump declared a national emergency relating to threats against information and communications technology and services. The Commerce Department then put Huawei on its "Entity List," meaning U.S. companies need a special license to sell products to the Chinese company. Further reading: Huawei Struggles to Get Along Without Google.

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Uber is launching a new set of safety features in its app, including a tool that checks if drivers are wearing face masks before starting trips. From a report: The move is an attempt by the firm to restore momentum in its core ride-hailing business as countries look to gradually start lifting their coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Starting Monday, drivers and riders will be required to wear face masks and coverings in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. But unlike riders, drivers will now be required to verify that they're wearing face masks by taking a selfie before accepting a booking. Riders will also be required to sit in the back seat. The San Francisco-based company, which has been heavily affected by shelter-in-place measures worldwide, will also invest $50 million to distribute supplies such as masks, hand sanitizer and disinfectant to drivers and couriers. Uber is partnering with Clorox in the U.S. and Unilever in Europe to provide the supplies. "Keeping everyone safe means that everyone must take proper precautions, not only to protect yourselves, but to protect your driver and protect the next person who may be getting into the car after," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told reporters Wednesday over a Zoom call.

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The Senate on Wednesday blocked a bipartisan effort to shield Americans' internet browsing and search histories from warrantless surveillance. From a report: Lawmakers voted 59-37 on an amendment by Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to a House-approved bill that would reauthorize domestic surveillance authorities. It was the first in a series of at least three amendment votes that senators agreed to in March. The intelligence tools expired on March 15 after senators left town without renewing key sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, amid objections from privacy hawks who said the compromise bill didn't go far enough to safeguard Americans' personal data and communications. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted in a floor speech that Americans are relying on the internet more than ever due to the Covid-19 pandemic. "Don't those Americans deserve some measure of privacy?" he asked, arguing that without the amendment "it is open season on anybody's most personal information."

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Google Chrome is rolling out a new feature to help you better manage all your open tabs. The company announced today the launch of "tab groups" for the beta version of its web browser, which will allow you to organize, label, and even color-code your tabs for easy access. The feature will make its way to the stable release of Chrome starting next week. From a report: To use the new feature, you can right-click on a tab and choose "Add tab to group." You can then select an existing group to move the tab to or create a new one, which you'll also name and label. The company had been testing this solution for several months before today's public release, as some had already spotted. Based on this early research, Google says it found that many people tended to organize their tabs by topic -- like a project they're working on or a set of shopping and review sites, for example. Others, however, would organize tabs by urgency -- labeling them things like "ASAP," "this week," or "later." Google also suggests tab groups can be used to help keep you focused on task progress, by grouping them into areas like "in progress," "need to follow up," and "completed."

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Alienware has announced the second generation of its flagship Area-51m gaming laptop, the Area-51m R2. It's largely similar on the outside to the original Area-51m, but the specs are almost completely overhauled on the inside, with 10th Gen Intel processors, new Nvidia GPUs, faster RAM, and better display options. From a report: All of those upgrades will be limited to the new R2 model, though. Despite Alienware's goals for future-proofed upgradable parts, the Area-51m has failed to live up to its potential. One of the biggest draws of the Area-51m was the option for user-replaceable parts. Most modern laptops have nearly all of their internal components sealed in place in an effort to cut down on size. But the Area-51m took a different approach. It was big, easy to disassemble, and made it simple to replace nearly every internal component, from RAM to the CPU to the GPU to even the thermal cooling components. The idea was to make something more portable than any other desktop but more customizable than any laptop. Alienware's parent company, Dell, even built its own system for replaceable GPUs in laptops, called DGFF (Dell Graphics Form Factor) to make it easier to upgrade in the future.

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Amazon plans to extend hazard pay for warehouse workers through the end of May, but it will return to normal pay rates in June, the company's top operations executive told Recode in an interview on Tuesday. From a report: The decision comes as Amazon faces intense scrutiny from progressive politicians, activist groups, and its own workforce over its treatment of its front-line employees who have kept working during the coronavirus pandemic. In mid-March, as the pandemic shut down businesses across the world that are deemed nonessential, Amazon started paying its warehouse and delivery employees in the US an additional $2 per hour as well as double overtime pay. It offered similar temporary pay increases for front-line staff in Canada, the UK, and some European countries.

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Epic Online Services is now available, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base. From a report: The new suite, which went live on Wednesday, enables a unified gameplay experience across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and Xbox. It gives developers and their communities ready access to features like cross-play, cross-progression, unified matchmaking, lobbies, and more. Support for Android and iOS platforms will be added soon. "At Epic, we believe in open, integrated platforms and in the future of gaming being a highly social and connected experience," said Chris Dyl, general manager of online services at Epic Games, in a news release. "Through Epic Online Services, we strive to help build a user-friendly ecosystem for both developers and players, where creators can benefit regardless of how they choose to build and publish their games, and where players can play games with their friends and enjoy the same quality experience regardless of the hardware they own."

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Braintrust query: It appears that C-SPAN has stopped livestreaming the Cuomo daily briefing. Looking for a site where we can reliably find the recording on a daily basis. Any help much appreciated.

Epic Games' Unreal is already one of the most widely used game engines on the planet, utilized by game developers, advertisers and filmmakers alike. And it's ready to take the next step. From a report: Epic Games announced its new Unreal Engine 5 today and we finally have an idea of what graphics will look like on next generation hardware. The first gameplay footage from Microsoft's Xbox Series X was underwhelming, but the first run of games on new hardware typically is. The nine minutes of footage from Epic, which is running a tech demo on PlayStation 5 hardware, offered our first real glimpse of what may be the future of video game visuals. The clip features a video game protagonist exploring a cave system then skysurfing through a mountain pass as ruins crumble around her. Epic designed it to showcase two new features of Unreal Engine 5 -- nanite and lumen. Epic Games says that nanite allows game designers to render an incredible amount of polygons on screen, leading to photo-realistic environments. Lumen is a new lighting engine that renders light and fills space similarly to Nvidia's RTX tech. In the demo, the two new technologies add up to a beautiful scene with complicated textures, animation, and lighting. Epic Games is selling these new technologies, and Unreal Engine 5 in general, as tools developers can use to save time in the development process. According to Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 comes with a suite of tools that allow developers to rely less on hand crafting environments and animations. The demo is gorgeous, but it doesn't show off the developer's version of the software and it's hard to know what the software will look like for its target audience -- people making video games.

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Hackers working for the Chinese government are trying to steal valuable research on coronavirus vaccines and treatments from U.S. health care, pharmaceutical and research organizations, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned Wednesday. From a report: "China's efforts to target these sectors pose a significant threat to our nation's response to COVID-19," the Federal Bureau of Investigation and DHS's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement. The agencies said "the potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective and efficient treatment options."

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Huawei denied on Monday having any official involvement in an insecure patch submitted to the Linux kernel project over the weekend; patch that introduced a "trivially exploitable" vulnerability. From a report: The buggy patch was submitted to the official Linux kernel project via its mailing list on Sunday. Named HKSP (Huawei Kernel Self Protection), the patch allegedly introduced a series of security-hardening options to the Linux kernel. Big tech companies that heavily use Linux in their data centers and online services, often submit patches to the Linux kernel. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have been known to have contributed code. On Sunday, the HKSP submission sparked interest in the Linux community as could signal Huawei's wish to possibly contribute to the official kernel. Due to this, the patch came under immediate scrutiny, including from the developers of Grsecurity, a project that provides its own set of security-hardening patches for the Linux kernel. In a blog post published on the same day, the Grsecurity team said that it discovered that the HKSP patch was introducing a "trivially exploitable" vulnerability in the kernel code -- if the patch was to be approved.

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Luminary Media, the money-losing podcasting startup, has raised more than $30 million in a new round and is seeking more funding as it tries to ride out the global pandemic, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. From the report: The funds were raised at a level below last year's $200 million valuation, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the process is private. The company, which is also cutting costs after struggling to attract subscribers, plans to use the money to fund operations and future programming. This current round of investment would bring Luminary's total fundraising to more than $160 million, comparable to the value of the entire company. Luminary, backed by investors such as Sinai Ventures, NEA and former HBO executive Richard Plepler, previously raised at least $130 million to build what it said would be the Netflix of podcasts -- a subscription service packed with top-notch, exclusive shows from journalists, TV hosts and celebrities. Its slate of original shows includes Guy Raz's "Wisdom From the Top" and "The Trevor Noah Podcast." But the app has struggled to find an audience since its debut in April 2019. Only about 80,000 people who tried the app have remained paying subscribers, said the people.

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Listen to Mitt Romney, he speaks the truth.

From time to time people ask how I do the email distribution of Scripting News. I looked at the various services that do this, but they all had lock-in in the center of their business model. I already have a way to write my blog. So that meant that they had to publish from my site's RSS feed, and none of them do that. Since I'm a developer, I wrote my own mail-sending software. I have made bits of the software open source, but it's not something that an end-user could use. I can't productize everything I write, and typically when I do, very few people use it, so I just made it for myself, and at least I know the user is happy, and will give me good feedback and bug reports.