An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Ticketmaster has admitted that it has suffered a security breach, which the BBC understands has affected up to 40,000 UK customers. Malicious software on third-party customer support product Inbenta Technologies caused the hack, the firm said on Twitter. "Some personal or payment information may have been accessed by an unknown third party," it added. All affected customers have been contacted.

In the email to those customers, Ticketmaster said it had set up a website to answer any questions and advised them to reset their passwords. It also offered them a free 12-month identity monitoring service. It said the breach was likely to have only affected UK customers who purchased or attempted to purchase tickets between February and 23 June 2018. But, as a precaution, it said it had also informed international customers who had purchased or attempted to purchase tickets between September 2017 and 23 June 2018.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet: Google couldn't exist without Linux and open-source software. While you may not think of Google as a Linux company in the same way as you do Canonical, Red Hat, or SUSE, it wouldn't be the search and advertising giant it is today without Linux. So, it makes sense that Google is moving up from its Silver membership in The Linux Foundation, to the Platinum level. With this jump in status, Google gets a seat on the Foundation's board of directors. This position will be filled by Sarah Novotny, the head of open source strategy for Google Cloud Platform. Earlier this week, Chinese tech giant Tencent joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.

Apple and Samsung reached a settlement in their U.S. patent battle, putting an end to a seven-year fight over smartphone designs. From a report: The string of lawsuits started in 2011 when Apple sued Samsung for allegedly copying the design of the iPhone in the creation of its own line of smartphones. Terms of the accord weren't immediately disclosed. The settlement follows a damages retrial in which Apple won a $539 million jury award in May.

In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.

On Feb. 6, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched its largest rocket into the blue Florida sky. Onboard was "Starman," a dummy strapped into the billionaire's cherry red Tesla roadster. Minutes later, fans cheered as Musk topped himself by nailing a simultaneous landing of the Falcon Heavy's boosters. It was arguably a turning point for the commercial space age. Airlines were somewhat less thrilled. From a report: On that day, 563 flights were delayed and 62 extra miles added to flights in the southeast region of the U.S., according to Federal Aviation Administration data released Tuesday by the Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA.

America's airspace is a finite resource, and the growth of commercial launches has U.S. airlines worried. Whenever Musk or one of his rivals sends up a spacecraft, the carriers which operate closer to the ground must avoid large swaths of territory and incur sizable expenses. Most of the commercial activity to date has been focused on Cape Canaveral, the Air Force post on Florida's Atlantic coast, where Musk's Space Exploration Technologies and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin base their stellar operations. It is one of 22 active U.S. launch sites, and a number of other locales -- including Brownsville, Texas; Watkins, Colorado; and Camden County, Georgia -- are pursuing new spaceport ventures to capitalize on commercial space activity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook's Instagram is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, if it were a stand-alone company, marking a 100-fold return for the app purchased in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. The photo-sharing platform, which reached 1 billion monthly active users earlier this month, will likely help nudge Instagram revenue past $10 billion over the next 12 months, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jitendra Waral wrote in a report Monday. Instagram is attracting new users faster than Facebook's main site and is on track to exceed 2 billion users within the next five years, Waral said. While the social network already has surpassed that milestone, Instagram's audience is younger than its parent, making it more attractive to advertisers. And unlike Facebook, Instagram is still growing in the U.S.

A prominent Japanese blogger has been stabbed to death minutes after giving a seminar on how to resolve personal disputes on the internet. The Guardian reports: Media reports said Kenichiro Okamoto, better known by his blogger name Hagex, died on Sunday evening after reportedly being attacked by a man he had argued with online. The suspect, Hidemitsu Matsumoto, allegedly followed Okamoto into the toilets after he had ended his talk at a venue in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Okamoto was stabbed several times before staggering out of the toilets after his assailant, who fled on a bicycle, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. Okamoto, who sustained stab wounds to the chest and neck, was taken to hospital where he was confirmed dead. His attacker reportedly handed himself in almost three hours after the attack.

A new study by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute determined that it's quite likely humans are alone in the observable universe. Fortune reports: The study looked at the Fermi paradox -- the apparent discrepancy between the seeming likelihood of alien life, given the billions of stars similar to our sun, and the scant evidence that such life actually exists. The paradox was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked his colleagues at Los Alamos, N.M.. "Where Is Everyone?"

The study authors then examined various hypotheses and equations used to resolve the Fermi paradox. The results weren't pretty: "Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe. Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cited the study's conclusions as an "added impetus" for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization capable of extending life beyond Earth. He tweeted: "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The city of Orlando, Fla., says it has ended a pilot program in which its police force used Amazon's real-time facial recognition -- a system called "Rekognition" that had triggered complaints from rights and privacy groups when its use was revealed earlier this year. Orlando's deal to open part of its camera systems to Amazon was reported by NPR's Martin Kaste in May, after the ACLU noticed that an Amazon Rekognition executive mentioned the city as a customer.

On Monday, the ACLU of Florida wrote a letter to Mayor Buddy Dyer and the Orlando City Council, demanding that the city "immediately" shut down "any face surveillance deployment or use by city agencies and departments." On the same day, Orlando city and police officials issued a joint statement saying that the test of how its officers might use the Rekognition technology ended last week. The city added, "Staff continues to discuss and evaluate whether to recommend continuation of the pilot at a further date," adding that "the contract with Amazon remains expired." Orlando police say the test was limited to only a fraction of the city's cameras, and that the system was tested by tracking its own officers. The Rekognition deal with Orlando caused a stir after Ranju Das, the head of the Rekognition unit, said in early May: "City of Orlando is a launch partner of ours. It's a smart city; they have cameras all over the city. The authorized cameras are then streaming the data [...] we are a subscriber to the stream, we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces that they have."

The German website Heise reports that Nvidia's new non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) last for five years and are more far reaching than product-specific information. HardOCP explains what NDAs are and shares an excerpt from Heise's report: First and foremost, I should tell you that NDAs in the tech world are nothing new, but those non-disclosure agreements usually are product-specific and date-specific. Say we agree to get a review sample of video card X. Many times we will get an NDA that is specific to releasing any information shared by card X's representative and a date when we can share that information with you, often referred to as the "embargo date."

[Here's the excerpt from Heise about Nvidia's new NDA]: "The NDA should apply to all information provided by Nvidia, so it did not refer to a specific product or information. There was also no concrete expiration date. It was also full of conditions that ran counter to journalistic principles. Our legal department clapped their hands over their heads as they read the document. In other words, journalists are allowed to write only what fits Nvidia in the junk. In doing so, Nvidia downgrades the independent press into a marketing tool." There are several forums discussing Nvidia's new NDA. HardOCP has shared a copy of the NDA for you to read and make up your own mind.

Uber has been granted a short-term license to operate in London following a court hearing. BBC reports: Transport for London (TfL) refused to renew the license when it expired last September, saying the U.S. taxi app was not a "fit and proper" operator. Uber has now been awarded a license but it has been put on probation for 15 months. The company had been seeking a five-year license when it was refused last year. Following a two-day hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court, Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said Uber was now considered "fit and proper." She ordered the company to pay TfL's legal costs of [approximately $562,000].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: California state senators advanced a last-minute internet privacy bill Tuesday ahead of a deadline while acknowledging it would need changes if it becomes law. The bill would let consumers ask companies what personal data they collect and opt out of having their data sold, among other privacy provisions. Lawmakers voted to pass the measure, AB375, out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill is aimed at keeping a related initiative off the November ballot. Lawmakers negotiated it with San Francisco housing developer Alastair Mactaggart, who spent millions of dollars to place the initiative on the ballot. He said he would pull the measure from the ballot if the bill is signed into law by the Thursday deadline to withdraw initiatives. The bill now moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee, a spokeswoman for co-author Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, said. The full Assembly and Senate each plan to vote on the bill Thursday. Gov. Jerry Brown's office has not said whether he will sign it.

An Access Now report finds that Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network. "The latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks," reports The Verge. From the report: According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks, the latest restrictions could not be circumvented by using a censorship-resistant DNS server like those provided by Google and CloudFlare. For many Venezuelans, Tor seems to have been the only way left to access the restricted content. "This is the latest escalation in Venezuela's internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods," said Andres Azpurua of Venezuela Inteligente, in a statement provided through Access. "This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet."

Back in January, Facebook banned cryptocurrency ads because too many companies in this space were "not currently operating in good faith." Now the social media company is reversing its ban effective immediately. "The company says it will allow ads and related content from 'pre-approved advertisers,' but will still not allow ads promoting binary options and initial coin offerings," reports TechCrunch. From the report: This time around, it's making advertisers go through an application process to determine their eligibility. Facebook will ask advertisers to include on their applications details like what licenses they've obtained, whether they're a publicly traded company, and other relevant background information regarding their business. How thoroughly this information is fact-checked by Facebook staff remains unclear.

The company reminded users in the same announcement that they should continue to flag ad content that violates its guidelines. In other words, expect some bad ads to get through. Facebook explains its new requirements will keep some crypto advertisers from being able to hawk their businesses on the social network, but adds that its policy in this area continues to be a work in progress. Facebook's Product Management Director, Rob Leathern, made the announcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Mumbai has the become the largest Indian city to ban single-use plastics, with residents caught using plastic bags, cups or bottles to face penalties of up to 25,000 rupees (~$365) and three months in jail from Monday. Council inspectors in navy blue jackets have been posted across the city to catch businesses or residents still using plastic bags. Penalties have already kicked in for businesses and several, reportedly including a McDonald's and Starbucks, have already been fined. Penalties range from 5,000 rupees (~$73) for first-time offenders to 25,000 rupees (~$365) and the threat of three months' jail for those caught repeatedly using single-use plastics.