Microsoft suffered a rare cyber-security lapse earlier this month when the company's IT staff accidentally left one of Bing's backend servers exposed online. From a report: The server was discovered by Ata Hakcil, a security researcher at WizCase, who exclusively shared his findings with ZDNet last week. According to Hakcil's investigation, the server is believed to have exposed more than 6.5 TB of log files containing 13 billion records originating from the Bing search engine. The Wizcase researcher was able to verify his findings by locating search queries he performed in the Bing Android app in the server's logs. Hakcil said the server was exposed online from September 10 to September 16, when he notified the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), and the server was secured again with a password. Reached out for comment last week, Microsoft admitted to the mistake.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My internet was down today. Oy! I was just warming up, had written a piece about Occam's News and a bit about the wonderful word naïveté, when boom -- I'm offline. I made two trips into town to try to connect, but eventually gave up,went for an excellent bike ride on the Ashokan Rail Trail, a local wonder. I learned that I should have a few printed books around, or at least one downloaded to my Kindle, and some videos that are downloaded on my iPad. Luckily I had a few episodes of Brockmire and they were lovely. The whole thing is so LOL good. Really you do LOL. Rare thing. I tried watching a bit of Killing Eve season 3, but it's garbage. Bad writing. The first season was so great because it was written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The acting and the sets, they carry through all the seasons, but sheez, no one tells stories like PWB. So instead I planned out my next few projects, something totally worth doing, instead of wrapping up an abbreviated version of the big one I had been attempting. Tomorrow is another day, knock wood, praise Muphy, IANAL, my mother loves me, and all other disclaimers.

Today's song: Free Man in Paris.

President Xi Jinping of China pledged on Tuesday that his country, the world's top producer of greenhouse gases, would adopt much stronger climate targets and achieve what he called "carbon neutrality before 2060." If realized, the pledges would be crucial in the global fight against climate change. From a report: The announcement, made at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, is significant because China is currently the top producer of greenhouse gas emissions. What the country does to curb its emissions, therefore, is crucial to slowing down global warming on the whole. The timing of the announcement was equally notable, coming so close to United States elections in which climate change has become increasingly important to voters. President Trump has pulled the United States out of an international agreement aimed at slowing down climate change. His challenger, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has pledged to rejoin the accord and promised to spend $2 trillion to slash emissions and address the effects of climate change.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Markup has a new service called Blacklight which rates websites based on how much spying they do on their readers. Scripting News does well, but they complain about one thing: the site interacts with "an ad-tech company" -- AWS. They've discovered that I load content from Amazon S3, which is true. That's where I store the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images that make up the site. I'm a paying customer and if they do any spying with the log info, that would be imho unethical. This is a problem with services like Blacklight. They make assumptions that things are nefarious when they're innocent, and if they become popular they constrain the web. This goes against the most powerful thing about the web, it's the platform with no platform vendor.

YouTube said Tuesday that it has updated its technology to enable the tech giant to better enforce its age restriction policies. From a report: The company has been criticized and penalized for its policies and architecture that displayed harmful content to kids and violated children's data privacy. The company is announcing three new changes: It will begin using machine learning to automatically apply age restrictions to content on its platform around the world. It's using technology to identify age-restrictive content so that when viewers discover age-restricted videos embedded on most third-party websites, they will now be required to log in to watch those videos in order to verify their age. It will start to request that some users in Europe verify their age with a valid ID or credit card, in response to new EU regulations, like the Audiovisual Media Services Directive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's surprise announcement of a long-term goal to curb emissions boosts UN climate talks.

Krystalo writes: Edge is finally coming to Linux. At Ignite 2020 today, Microsoft announced that Edge for Linux will be available in the Dev preview channel starting in October. Linux users will be able to download the preview from the Microsoft Edge Insider website or from their native Linux package manager. Microsoft will start with the Ubuntu and Debian distributions, with support for Fedora and openSUSE coming afterwards. "Linux stands out in that, while it has a relatively small desktop population in terms of what you might call typical consumer or end user, developers are often overrepresented in that population, and especially in areas like test automation, or CI/CD workloads for their web apps," Edge program manager Kyle Pflug told VentureBeat. "Edge on Linux is a natural part of our strategy to reduce fragmentation and test overhead for web developers. By providing the same rendering behavior and tools across platforms, developers can build and test sites and web apps in their preferred environment and be confident in the experience their customers will have."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft today announced that it will exclusively license GPT-3, one of the most powerful language understanding models in the world, from AI startup OpenAI. From a report:> In a blog post, Microsoft EVP Kevin Scott said that the new deal will allow Microsoft to leverage OpenAI's technical innovations to develop and deliver AI solutions for customers, as well as create new solutions that harness the power of natural language generation. "We see this as an incredible opportunity to expand our Azure-powered AI platform in a way that democratizes AI technology, enables new products, services and experiences, and increases the positive impact of AI at scale," Scott wrote. "The scope of commercial and creative potential that can be unlocked through the GPT-3 model is profound, with genuinely novel capabilities -- most of which we haven't even imagined yet. Directly aiding human creativity and ingenuity in areas like writing and composition, describing and summarizing large blocks of long-form data (including code), converting natural language to another language -- the possibilities are limited only by the ideas and scenarios that we bring to the table." The implications of the licensing agreement weren't immediately clear, but Microsoft says that OpenAI will continue to offer GPT-3 and other models via its Azure-hosted API, launched in June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of employees now commute from their bed to a desk at home. After the initial euphoria of skipping smog-filled traffic jams and cramped train compartments, a new reality has dawned in which the work day blends into the rest of life, like a never-ending video conference call. Microsoft has a solution for this. From a report: The company's Teams collaboration software is adding the ability to schedule a "virtual commute." It won't start your car or ride the subway for you, but it will remind users about the end of the work day, suggest tasks to help workers wind down and create a little mental space before kids' homework, dinner, laundry and other obligations come crashing in. For example, Teams will prompt users to list tasks as completed or add them to tomorrow's to-do list, while asking workers to rate how their day went and suggesting guided meditation, through an integration with the Headspace app. Pandemic-related burnout and difficulty separating work and personal life has become a surprisingly common concern among Microsoft's corporate customers, according to Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela. "The thing we didn't predict that we've learned is now at the top of customers' mind is really the well-being of their employees," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that big companies deserve scrutiny and that he has no issue with Apple being investigated for antitrust issues stating. But at Apple, he said, "there is no monopoly here." From a report: In an interview, Cook stated that he had "no issue" with Apple's being put under investigation, but fervently stated that he believed that once lawmakers heard Apple's story, they would see that the company did not have a monopoly. "I think that big companies deserve scrutiny. And I think that's not only fair but important for the system that we have in America. And so I have no issue at all in Apple being put underneath the microscope and people looking and probing. My hope is that as people heard our story and as they continue to hear our story that it will become as apparent to them as it is to us that we have no monopoly. There is no monopoly here," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some makers of smart speakers, video doorbells and other hardware hit roadblocks buying key ads in search results on Amazon; gadgets made by e-commerce giant get edge. From a report: Amazon.com is limiting the ability of some competitors to promote their rival smart speakers, video doorbells and other devices on its dominant e-commerce platform, according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. The strategy gives an edge to Amazon's own devices, which the company regards as central to building consumer loyalty. It puts at a disadvantage an array of gadget makers such as Arlo that rely on Amazon's site for a significant share of their sales. The e-commerce giant routinely lets companies buy ads that appear inside search results, including searches for competing products. Indeed, search advertising is a lucrative part of the company's business. But Amazon won't let some of its own large competitors buy sponsored-product ads tied to searches for Amazon's own devices, such as Fire TV, Echo Show and Ring Doorbell, according to some Amazon employees and others familiar with the policy. Roku which makes devices that stream content to TVs, can't even buy such Amazon ads tied to its own products, some of these people said. In some cases, Amazon has barred competitors from selling certain devices on its site entirely. The policies show the conflicts between Amazon's large e-commerce platform for sellers and its role as a product manufacturer in its own right. While traditional retailers buy inventory from manufacturers and resell it to consumers, limiting the number of vendors they can work with, Amazon's platform has more than a million businesses and entrepreneurs selling directly to Amazon's shoppers. Amazon accounts for 38% of online shopping in the U.S. and roughly half of all online shopping searches in the U.S. start on Amazon.com. "News flash: retailers promote their own products and often don't sell products of competitors," said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a written statement. "Walmart refuses to sell [Amazon brands] Kindle, Fire TV, and Echo. Shocker. In the Journal's next story they will uncover gambling in Las Vegas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook has said it will take aggressive and exceptional measures to "restrict the circulation of content" on its platform if November's presidential election descends into chaos or violent civic unrest [the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Nick Clegg, the company's head of global affairs, said it had drawn up plans for how to handle a range of outcomes, including widespread civic unrest or "the political dilemmas" of having in-person votes counted more rapidly than mail-in ballots, which will play a larger role in this election due to the coronavirus pandemic. "There are some break-glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and, worse still, violent set of circumstances," Mr Clegg said, though he stopped short of elaborating further on what measures were on the table. The proposed actions, which would probably go further than any previously taken by a US platform, come as the social media group is under increasing pressure to lay out how it plans to combat election-related misinformation, voter suppression and the incitement of violence on the November 3 election day and during the post-election period.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government is working on updating its technology laws so it can ban the use of modern internet protocols that can hinder its surveillance and censorship capabilities. According to a copy of the proposed law amendments and an explanatory note, the ban targets internet protocols and technologies such as TLS 1.3, DoH, DoT, and ESNI. Moscow officials aren't looking to ban HTTPS and encrypted communications as a whole, as these are essential to modern-day financial transactions, communications, military, and critical infrastructure. Instead, the government wants to ban the use of internet protocols that hide "the name (identifier) of a web page" inside HTTPS traffic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has unveiled its next high-performance NVMe 2280-sized M.2 drive, the 980 Pro. So far, it comes in three capacities shipping this month: 250GB for $89.99, 500GB for $149.99, and 1TB for $229.99. A 2TB model will arrive later this year, but Samsung didn't share a price. From a report: The standout feature of this drive is its compatibility with M.2 slots over the PCIe 4.0 interface. If you have a compatible motherboard, Samsung says the 980 Pro can go on a tear with sequential read / write speeds of up to 7,000MB/s and 5,000MB/s, respectively. It claims that this is two times faster performance than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and nearly 13 times faster than the more affordable but slower SATA SSDs. Of course, to get the best speeds out of this Samsung M.2 drive, you'll need a compatible motherboard with a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. Adoption of the tech is starting to ramp up, including mainstream computing products like AMD's third-generation Ryzen CPUs, its Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT GPUs, and more recently, Nvidia's RTX 3080 graphics card. Sony and Microsoft are also using the technology for their custom SSD technologies in the PS5 and Xbox Series S / X consoles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.