An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to ban dealings with ByteDance, owner of video-sharing sensation TikTok, appears to codify what his administration has already been warning. A second edict targeting messaging app WeChat and its parent, Tencent, seems weirdly overdue. The executive orders issued by the White House go beyond stopping average Americans from becoming unwitting spies for the Communist Party through their postings and data. The implications could hurt not only the Chinese targets, but the U.S. companies they work with, including Apple and Alphabet's Google.

Though TikTok and WeChat have been getting all the recent attention, the orders state that American companies cannot work with ByteDance or Tencent (though an unnamed U.S. official later stated that Tencent transactions were still OK). That clarification notwithstanding, the wording of the orders does imply that regardless of intention such bans could extend further, to include Americans advertising on dozens of products offered by either Chinese company, or to selling them cloud-storage services, or perhaps the most nuclear option: distributing their apps, even within China. [...] Even though Chinese smartphone brands dominate their domestic market, iOS and Android remain the dominant platforms and Apple and Google cover almost the entire global ecosystem with their respective app stores. If they can't do business with ByteDance, for example, even after a TikTok spin off, then the Beijing company might be unable to distribute its own apps, even within China.

Firefox has fixed a bug that was being exploited in the wild by tech support scammers to create artificial mouse cursors and prevent users from easily leaving malicious sites. From a report: The bug was discovered being abused online by UK cyber-security firm Sophos and reported to Mozilla earlier this year. A bugfix was provided and has been live in Firefox since version 79.0, released last week. he bug is a classic "evil cursor" attack and works because modern browsers allow site owners to modify how the mouse cursor looks while users are navigating their websites. This type of customization might look useless, but it's often used for browser-based games, browser augmented reality, or browser virtual reality experiences. However, custom cursors have been a major problem for the regular web. In evil cursor attacks, malicious websites tamper with cursor settings in order to modify where the actual cursor is visible on screen, and where the actual click area is.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The U.S. government charges too much for access to an electronic database of federal court records, the Federal Circuit ruled in a decision curbing a revenue stream the court system uses to help fund other programs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court's decision that the government was not authorized under federal law to spend $192 million in Public Access to Court Records system fees on court technology projects. The lower court "got it just right" when it limited the government's use of PACER revenues to the costs of operating the system, the court said in a precedential opinion Thursday.

"We agree with plaintiffs and amici that the First Amendment stakes here are high," the court said. But it said it doesn't foresee the lower court's interpretation "as resulting in a level of user fees that will significantly impede public access to courts." The ruling is a win for public access to court information, as PACER fees will go down if the ruling withstands a possible government appeal. But access still won't be free, despite calls for the government to stop charging for it. The Federal Circuit said it was up to Congress to decide whether to require free access. Challengers said PACER fees were too high, while the government said the middle ground reached by the lower court made the fees too low. Fees for downloading a copy of a filing run 10 cents per page, up to $3 per document. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts collected more than $145 million in fees in 2014 alone, according to the complaint in the case. Under a 2020 change to the fee waiver rules, about 75% of users pay nothing each quarter.

A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter and documents it reviewed. From the report: Anomaly Six, a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications, in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is embedded directly in some of the apps. An SDK allows the company to obtain the phone's location if consumers have allowed the app containing the software to access the phone's GPS coordinates. App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue. But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps; most privacy policies don't disclose that information.

Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global-location-data products to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients. The company told The Wall Street Journal it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to nongovernmental, private-sector clients. Numerous agencies of the U.S. government have concluded that mobile data acquired by federal agencies from advertising is lawful. Several law-enforcement agencies are using such data for criminal-law enforcement, the Journal has reported, while numerous U.S. military and intelligence agencies also acquire this kind of data.

A lot happens on YouTube, and the Google video site has for ages emailed subscribers that opted into alerts about new uploads and livestreams. YouTube is getting rid of these emails next week as very few people opened alerts about new videos from their inbox. From a report: The rationale is "less than 0.1% of these emails are opened," the company said. Messages about your "account, mandatory service announcements, etc." remain, with Google hoping that the broader change today will help "you more easily spot and pay attention to the important emails." It reflects companies increasingly wanting to reduce information overload.

A reader shares a report: The last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its area in just two days at the end of July, researchers said on Thursday. The Milne Ice Shelf is at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, in the sparsely populated northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. "Above normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break up," the Canadian Ice Service said on Twitter when it announced the loss on Sunday. "Entire cities are that size. These are big pieces of ice," said Luke Copland, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa who was part of the research team studying the Milne Ice Shelf. The shelf's area shrank by about 80 square kilometers. By comparison, the island of Manhattan in New York covers roughly 60 square kilometers.

"This was the largest remaining intact ice shelf, and it's disintegrated, basically," Copland said. The Arctic has been warming at twice the global rate for the last 30 years, due to a process known as Arctic amplification. But this year, temperatures in the polar region have been intense. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years. Record heat and wildfires have scorched Siberian Russia. Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year in particular has been 5 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average, Copland said. That has threatened smaller ice caps, which can melt quickly because they do not have the bulk that larger glaciers have to stay cold. As a glacier disappears, more bedrock is exposed, which then heats up and accelerates the melting process.

Security researcher Troy Hunt: Let me just cut straight to it: I'm going to open source the Have I Been Pwned code base. The decision has been a while coming and it took a failed M&A process to get here, but the code will be turned over to the public for the betterment of the project and frankly, for the betterment of everyone who uses it. Let me explain why and how.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Facebook is extending its work from home policy until July of next year, becoming the latest tech giant to commit to letting staff work remotely in response to the coronavirus pandemic. "Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021," said Nneka Norville, a Facebook spokesperson, on Thursday. Norville also said Facebook is giving employees $1,000 for "home office needs."

Zuckerberg pitched the idea to Facebook staff as both a matter of satisfying employee desires and also as an effort to create "more broad-based economic prosperity." "When you limit hiring to people who live in a small number of big cities, or who are willing to move there, that cuts out a lot of people who live in different communities, have different backgrounds, have different perspectives," Zuckerberg said on a livestream posted to his Facebook page in May. Google also recently extended its work from home policy until July 2021. And some companies, including Twitter, said their staff may work remotely indefinitely.

Researchers from the Institute for Space Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed a technique in which lasers can measure the position of space debris during daylight conditions. Details of this unprecedented achievement were published in Nature Communications. Gizmodo reports: Prior to this, lasers could only detect space junk during twilight, as ground stations enter into darkness and objects near the horizon remain illuminated by the Sun's rays. This small window of opportunity severely minimizes the amount of time available to search for and characterize these orbiting objects, which can threaten crucial satellites.

"We are used to the idea that you can only see stars at night, and this has similarly been true for observing debris with telescopes, except with a much smaller time window to observe low-orbit objects," explained Tim Flohrer, Head of ESA's Space Debris Office, in an ESA press release. "Using this new technique, it will become possible to track previously 'invisible' objects that had been lurking in the blue skies, which means we can work all day with laser ranging to support collision avoidance." The new technique differs from conventional methods in that it can track objects during daylight hours, which it does using a combination of telescopes, light deflectors, and filters that track light at specific wavelengths. So even when the sky is bright and blue, scientists can increase a target's contrast, making previously invisible objects visible. Keys to this method include additional telescopes and the ability to visualize space debris against the blue sky background in real-time. In daylight tests, the distances to 40 different objects were measured with the new technique, which had never been done before.