A group with financial ties to AT&T is sending automated messages claiming the law would raise cell phone bills. From a report: Big Telecom is once again trying to disrupt a net neutrality bill in California, this time by robocalling seniors to spread misinformation about the bill. "Your Assembly member will be voting on a proposal by San Francisco politicians that could increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month and slow down your data," says a voice on an automated call paid for by legal reform group the Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC). "We can't afford higher cell phone bills. We can't afford slower data. We can't afford Senate Bill 822 (more popularly known as SB822)."

The call urges constituents to contact their state representative and ask them to vote no on the bill, which passed a senate committee last week and will be heard in the Assembly this week. It even provides an option to automatically connect to the recipients' Assembly member. At the top of the call, it cites the non-profit Congress of California Seniors, leading many -- including state senator Scott Wiener, the net neutrality bill's author -- to believe the calls are targeting senior citizens specifically. "The industry has engaged in a massive misinformation campaign around this bill for months," Wiener told me over the phone.

But the claim that cell phone bills will go up is not based on anything in the actual bill, which would simply restore the federal rules that telecom companies operated under from 2015 until the 2017 repeal, which only went into effect a few months ago.

At the recently concluded State of the Map conference in Milan, teams from Microsoft, Apple and Facebook presented their projects, describing how they are working with communities. From a report: The Microsoft Open Maps team has recently released open data on building footprints in the US. Microsoft was among the first to release satellite imagery for use by OpenStreetMap and the images are now integrated into the default editor. It also has a community of mappers directly contributing to OpenStreetMap in Australia. Apple has an internal volunteer programme that has around 5,000 staff contributing to Missing Maps, they've released building data for France and Denmark, and are engaged with data improvement projects around the world. Facebook is exploring how artificial intelligence-assisted tracing can help to improve the quality of OpenStreetMap data in Thailand.

DigitalGlobe has made its satellite imagery available under a licence that will allow it to be used by the OpenStreetMap community to improve their mapping efforts. Telenav launched OpenStreetCam to help collect openly-licensed street imagery and has now released open data and code to explore how machine learning can enable the images to be used to improve OpenStreetMap with stop signs and turn directions.

The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. From a report: The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called "Making Ends Meet." Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group. Some of the participants would receive monthly payments for three years and some would get paid every month for five years. Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached" -- in a January 2016 blog post. Altman explained his belief that universal basic income will eventually be implemented across the nation as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."

A federal judge on Monday issued a preliminary injunction continuing a prohibition on the Trump administration proposal to make available blueprints for so-called ghost guns, untraceable weapons that can be manufactured on a 3-D printer, California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said. From a report: California was one of 20 states led by Washington that won the decision from U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik in Seattle. The injunction extends a ruling last month that barred the Trump administration from taking steps that would allow the firm Defense Distributed to disseminate 3-D gun blueprints. "When the Trump Administration inexplicably gave the green light to distribute on the internet blueprints of 3D-printed, untraceable ghost guns, it needlessly endangered our children, our loved ones and our men and women in law enforcement," Becerra said in a statement. "The Trump Administration's actions were dangerous and incompetent."

An anonymous reader writes: Current versions of Ubuntu and CentOS are disabling a security feature that was added to the GNOME desktop environment last year. The feature's name is Bubblewrap, which is a sandbox environment that the GNOME Project added to secure GNOME's thumbnail parsers in July 2017, with the release of GNOME 3.26. In recent years, security researchers have proven that thumbnail parses can be an attack vector [1, 2, 3].

Ubuntu Security Tech Lead Alex Murray said the Ubuntu team chose to disable Bubblewrap inside Ubuntu because they did not have the time to perform a security audit. Murray blamed the many CPU bugs (Spectre, Meltdown, etc.), which kept the team busy and prevented them to audit the feature.

Capitalism as we know it is over, an anonymous reader writes. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. From a report: The main reason? We're transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet's environmental resources. Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all. Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says [PDF].

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent months, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft and others have aggressively lobbied officials in the Trump administration and elsewhere to start outlining a federal privacy law, according to administration officials and the companies. The law would have a dual purpose, they said: It would overrule the California law and instead put into place a kinder set of rules that would give the companies wide leeway over how personal digital information was handled. "We are committed to being part of the process and a constructive part of the process," said Dean Garfield, president of a leading tech industry lobbying group, the Information Technology Industry Council, which is working on proposals for the federal law. "The best way is to work toward developing our own blueprint." The efforts could set up a big fight with consumer and privacy groups, especially as companies like Facebook face scrutiny for mishandling users' personal data. Many of the internet companies depend on the collection and analysis of such data to help them target the online ads that generate the bulk of their revenue.

Multiple people on live streams and social media reported a mass shooting at a Madden NFL 19 tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, this morning. The Jacksonville County Sheriff's Office confirmed that law enforcement was en route to the scene but had no further information early this afternoon. From a report: In the video, two competitors are playing when someone starts screaming off camera. As the first of nine shots break out, they abandon their stations and others are heard fleeing. Then a man is heard crying out, "What did he shoot me with?" Three more shots are fired and screaming can be heard. This weekend at Jacksonville Landing downtown was the first of four qualifier events for the Madden Classic series sponsored by EA Sports. CNN: "Multiple fatalities at the scene, many transported. #TheLandingMassShooting," according to Jacksonville Sheriff's twitter page, which urged people to "stay far away from the area" as the area is not safe at this time. "One suspect is dead at the scene, unknown at this time if we have a second suspect. Searches are being conducted," according to another tweet from the sheriff's office In a statement issued moments ago, EA Sports Madden NFL said, "This is a horrible situation, and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved."

Top competitor Drini Gjoka, who was at the event and reported the terrifying scene, said, "The tourney just got shot up. Im leavinng and never coming back. I am literally so lucky. The bullet hit my thumb. I will never take anything for granted ever again. Life can be cut short in a second.

Update: LA Times reports that the shooter was a gamer who was competing in the tournament and lost, according to Steven "Steveyj" Javaruski, one of the competitors.