The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. From a report: The White House is pushing for big spending to provide more, better broadband service to underserved areas after the pandemic made Americans more dependent than ever on their internet connections. The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration.

The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection. The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.

Apple would be prohibited from pre-installing its own apps on Apple devices under antitrust reform legislation introduced last week, said Democratic Representative David Cicilline, who is leading a push to pass new regulations for U.S. technology companies. From a report: Cicilline told reporters Wednesday that a proposal prohibiting tech platforms from giving an advantage to their own products over those of competitors would mean Apple can't ship devices with pre-installed apps on its iOS operating platform. "It would be equally easy to download the other five apps as the Apple one so they're not using their market dominance to favor their own products and services," the Rhode Island Democrat said. The proposal is part of a package of bipartisan bills that would impose significant new constraints on how tech companies operate, restricting acquisitions and forcing them to exit some businesses. The House Judiciary Committee will mark up the five bills in a hearing next week, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee's chairman, said.

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."

As ubiquitous as Google Docs has become in the last year alone, a major criticism often overlooked by the countless workplaces that use it is that it isn't end-to-end encrypted, allowing Google -- or any requesting government agency -- access to a company's files. But Google is finally addressing that key complaint with a round of updates that will let customers shield their data by storing their own encryption keys. From a report: Google Workspace, the company's enterprise offering that includes Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, is adding client-side encryption so that a company's data will be indecipherable to Google. Companies using Google Workspace can store their encryption keys with one of four partners for now: Flowcrypt, Futurex, Thales or Virtru, which are compatible with Google's specifications. The move is largely aimed at regulated industries -- like finance, healthcare and defense -- where intellectual property and sensitive data are subject to intense privacy and compliance rules.

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: The "Group of Seven" (or G7) nations are some of the world's largest economies — the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy, and Japan. On Sunday they pledged $2 billion to help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels and pledged an "overwhelmingly decarbonized" electricity sector by 2030. The New York Times calls these "major steps in what leaders hope will be a global transition to wind, solar and other energy that does not produce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions."

Politico's Ryan Heath argues "The language on a 'green revolution' is quite strong — there's plenty of detail missing, but it gives climate campaigners a lot to hit leaders with if they fail to deliver. And it's a big deal for the G-7 to agree to 'to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.'"
Other reports from Politico's writers:

• "Boris Johnson admitted that the world's richest economies had not managed to secure a widely advertised 1 billion vaccine doses to send to developing countries. The final communique says the group will deliver 870 million doses over the next year."

• "The G-7 nations called for a 'timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened' investigation into the origins of Covid-19, including in China. WHO's first crack at an investigation — released in March — called a lab leak 'extremely unlikely,' but China didn't grant access to key documents and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called that investigation 'highly deficient' this morning. The U.S. government remains split between two origin theories."

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Scientific advances from deep brain stimulation to wearable scanners are making manipulation of the human mind increasingly possible, creating a need for laws and protections to regulate use of the new tools, top neurologists said on Thursday.

A set of "neuro-rights" should be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations, said Rafael Yuste, a neuroscience professor at New York's Columbia University and organizer of the Morningside Group of scientists and ethicists proposing such standards. Five rights would guard the brain against abuse from new technologies — rights to identity, free will and mental privacy along with the right of equal access to brain augmentation advances and protection from algorithmic bias, the group says.

"If you can record and change neurons, you can in principle read and write the minds of people," Yuste said during an online panel at the Web Summit, a global tech conference.

"This is not science fiction. We are doing this in lab animals successfully."

The government in Pakistan's largest province, Punjab, has decided to block SIM cards of unvaccinated citizens, reports the Hindustan Times (one of the largest newspapers in India), citing reports from news agency ANI.
Dr. Rashid, the provincial health minister in Pakistan's Punjab, said that there has been a "considerable decrease" in Covid-19 cases in the province due to mass vaccinations. However, a report compiled by the Punjab primary health department shows that the province still failed to achieve its set target for Covid-19 vaccination, reports ARY News, adding that around 300,000 recipients of the first dose of the vaccine never returned for the second dose since the start of Pakistan's mass inoculation drive on February 2.

Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. "We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago," the governor said. "That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Nearly 12 years later, "a $929-million federal grant for the California bullet train project was restored Thursday," reports the Los Angeles Times, "reversing a decision by the Trump administration to terminate the funding." But their story (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1) notes this grant has a very long history: The grant was originally made in 2010 after other states backed out of high-speed rail projects and declined to take the federal support. The California project already had won another $2.5-billion grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Trump action to take back the money was highly controversial, and federal grant experts said such terminations were rare in cases that did not involve fraud but were merely behind schedule.

Ronald Batory, then chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, cited California's multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, among other problems, in taking the action. Along with House Republicans from California, Trump officials were highly critical of the California project, with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao calling it a "bait and switch" on promises made to taxpayers. Chao and Trump had issued an even bigger threat, to claw back the much larger $2.5-billion grant that had already been spent. Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration never made an attempt to get back the funds.

The $929 million is part of a planned $22.8-billion effort aimed at building a 171-mile partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced [part of the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles], as well as completing environmental planning and making some high-speed rail investments in Southern California and the Bay Area.
In a statement, America's Federal Rail Agency said the settlement "reflects the federal government's ongoing partnership in the development of high-speed rail." And they called their restoration of funding "an important step in advancing an economically transformational project in California."

The Times adds that "Some bullet train advocates believe $10 billion or more from the state and federal government could be added to the project, allowing an expansion of the current construction. But even that much money would not close a roughly $80-billion shortfall needed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The Biden administration launched an initiative Thursday aiming to make more government data available to artificial intelligence researchers, part of a broader push to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the crucial new technology. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, a group of 12 members from academia, government, and industry led by officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation, will draft a strategy for potentially giving researchers access to stores of data about Americans, from demographics to health and driving habits. They would also look to make available computing power to analyze the data, with the goal of allowing access to researchers across the country. The task force, which Congress mandated in the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, is part of an effort across the government to ensure the U.S. remains at the vanguard of technological advancements.

Many researchers, particularly in academia, simply don't have access to these computational resources and data, and this is hampering innovation. One example: The Transportation Department has access to a set of data gathered from vehicle sensors about how people drive, said Erwin Gianchandani, senior adviser at the National Science Foundation and co-chairman of the new AI task force. "Because you have very sensitive data about individuals, there are challenges in being able to make that data available to the broader research community," he said. On the other hand, if researchers could get access, they could develop innovations designed to make driving safer. Census data, medical records, and other data sets could also potentially be made available for research by both private companies and academic institutions, officials said. They said the task force will evaluate how to make such data available while protecting Americans' privacy and addressing other ethical concerns.

A total of 15 potential sites are in the running to host the UK's first prototype fusion power plant. The BBC reports: Fusion is seen as a potential source of almost limitless clean energy but is currently only used in experiments. An open call for sites was made last year and nominations closed at the end of March this year. Following checks for compliance with key entry criteria the UK Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) has published a long list of possible locations. The sites, from north to south, with nominating body, are: Dounreay, East Airdrie, Poneil, Ardeer, Chapelcross, Moorside, Bay Fusion, Goole, West Burton, Ratcliffe on Soar, Pembroke, Severn Edge, Aberthaw, Bridgwater Bay, and Bradwell (Essex).

The UKAEA said that acceptance of the sites did not indicate that they were "preferred or desired" or that it believed they were "in all cases, possible." It stressed it was simply that the procedural entry criteria had been met and assessment had now begun. It said a shortlisting process would take place in the autumn with a final site decision likely by the end of next year. UKAEA is hoping to have such a plant operating in the early 2040s, with an initial concept design ready by 2024."

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones has been "permanently suspended" from Twitter, "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation," a Twitter spokesperson tells Slashdot.

Florida's Sun-Sentinel reports: Jones, a former Department of Health data manager fired for alleged insubordination, emerged as a political lightning rod as COVID-19 cases spiked in Florida last year. Supporters see her as a whistleblower speaking truth to power and exposing an effort by the state to paint a rosier picture of the pandemic. Her detractors say she has peddled disinformation for her own financial benefit, unfairly casting doubt on the reliability of Florida's COVID-19 statistics... Jones helped to build the state's online coronavirus dashboard in the early days of the pandemic. In May 2020, she was fired from her post at the Florida Department of Health, where she was manager of Geographic Information Systems. Jones said her bosses pressured her to manipulate statistics to justify reopening the state amid lockdown.
In an article Monday Forbes investigated "the curious case of Rebekah Jones' suspension," citing a researcher who specializes in Twitter fraud: There was clearly a concentrated surge in new follower activity... What is not known is whether Rebekah Jones purchased the followers herself, or whether it was a false-flag campaign meant to discredit her (someone else purchased the followers and directed them at her account to make it appear she broke Twitter's rules).

Nearly 21,000 followers were added in a short amount of time...
Following up with Twitter's spokesperson, Slashdot asked them about Forbes' theory, and whether they had evidence that Jones herself (and not one of her detractors) had perpetrated the surge in follower activity.

Twitter's response? "We have nothing further to add beyond what I shared."

Jones had already attained more than 400,000 followers, reports the Washington Post. But they also note that her suspension is now being celebrated on Twitter by Florida governor DeSantis's press secretary, "who was hired after she wrote an article calling Jones's claims 'a big lie.'" DeSantis's office also pointed to an April Twitter thread from a prominent disinformation researcher alleging that an app has surreptitiously directed thousands of users to follow a number of accounts, including Jones's. Jones responded to the researcher, according to a screenshot, with a tweet saying: "This is insane."

"I've never heard of this app," she wrote.
Jones has since opened a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist".

The number of active phishing sites hit a record number earlier this year in January, according to an industry report published this week by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). The Record reports: A total of 245,771 phishing sites were detected in January. The number represents the unique base URLs of phishing sites found and reported by APWG members. The APWG is an industry coalition made up of more than 2,200 organizations from the cyber-security industry, government, law enforcement, and NGOs sector, which includes some big names such as Microsoft, Facebook, PayPal, ICANN, AT&T, Comcast, Digicert, Cloudflare, Cisco, Salesforce, RSA, Verisign, ESET, McAfee, Avast, Symantec, Trend Micro, PhishLabs, Agari, Cofense, and many others. APWG experts noted that while the number of phishing sites declined in February, the next month, in March, the number of phishing sites jumped above 200,000 again, amounting to the fourth-worst month in APWG's reporting history.

The industry vertical most targeted in phishing attacks in Q1 remained the financial sector, which saw almost a quarter of all phishing attempts. Second was social media, with cybercrime groups attempting to hijack social media accounts to resell online on specialized marketplaces, according to the APWG report (PDF). Furthermore, around 83% of all phishing sites seen in Q1 2020 were also hosted on an HTTP-based connection. This finding reinforces a piece of well-known cybersecurity advice that if a website is loaded via HTTPS, it doesn't mean it's secure, but merely that its traffic can't be easily intercepted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon and a who's who of online-only retailers are trying to kill proposed federal and state legislation that would make the companies disclose contact information for third-party sellers. The bills would force Amazon and others to verify the identities of third-party sellers and provide consumers with ways to contact the stores. The proposed legislation is pitting brick-and-mortar retailers -- including Home Depot, Walgreens, and JC Penney, which support the bills -- against online retailers like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Poshmark, and others, which argue that the legislation would harm small sellers. [...] The online retailers argue that the bills would compromise the privacy of third-party sellers. On some platforms, the majority of merchants run their businesses out of their homes. Etsy, for example, says 97 percent of its sellers do. A survey of Amazon sellers found that 70 percent have work outside of their Amazon businesses, suggesting that they, too, run the business from their homes.

That anonymity, though, provides cover for fraudsters. It's not uncommon to find counterfeit and potentially harmful items on marketplace sites. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office ordered 47 items, including shoes, travel mugs, cosmetics, and phone chargers, from third-party sellers on "popular consumer websites" and determined that 20 of them were counterfeit. Even non-counterfeit items bought from third-party sellers have been implicated in consumer harm. In April 2018, a 19-month-old in Texas was injured after ingesting a battery that fell out of a loose battery compartment in a third-party Apple TV remote. The parents asked Amazon to stop selling the defective product and requested contact information for Hu Xi Jie, who ran the Amazon store "USA Shopping 7693" that sold the remote. Hu Xi Jie never responded, and Amazon was not able to locate the individual. The parents sued Amazon in Texas state court, arguing that the retailer is liable for the defective product. Amazon, on the other hand, says it serves as a middleman and bears no liability. It's that argument, among others, that has brick-and-mortar retailers pushing for changes. Consumer product laws hold businesses like Target and Home Depot liable for injuries if the stores do not take sufficient measures to keep defective products from reaching consumers. Online marketplaces haven't been subject to those rules since they don't control third-party sellers.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday said he is initiating a review of recent high-profile cyber attacks on governments and businesses to find out whether a legislative response is needed. From a report: "Today I am asking Chairman Gary Peters of our Homeland Security Committee and our other relevant committee chairs to begin a government-wide review of these attacks and determine what legislation may be needed to counter the threat of cyber crime and bring the fight to the cyber criminals." Schumer noted that the New York City subway system was the victim of a computer hack in early June. This came on the heels of Colonial Pipeline having to shut down some operations, resulting in disrupted fuel supplies in the U.S. Southeast, as a result of a cyber attack.

According to the BBC, details claiming to reveal how little U.S. billionaires pay in income tax have been leaked to investigative website ProPublica. From the report: ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world's richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. The website alleges Amazon's Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla's Mr Musk's paid nothing in 2018. The FBI and tax authorities are looking into the source of the leak. ProPublica said it was analyzing what it called a "vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data" on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks.

ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax -- an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income -- than most mainstream US workers. The website said: "Using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it." The wealthy, as with many ordinary citizens, are able to reduce their income tax bills via such things as charitable donations and drawing money from investment income rather wage income.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) on Tuesday filed a lawsuit asking the court to declare Google a public utility, which would subject the Silicon Valley giant to government regulation. Yost's complaint, filed in Delaware County Court, alleges Google has used its dominance as a search engine to prioritize its own products over "organic search results" in a way that "intentionally disadvantages competitors." "Google uses its dominance of internet search to steer Ohioans to Google's own products -- that's discriminatory and anti-competitive," Yost said in a statement. "When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access." The complaint alleges that as a result of Google's "self-preferencing Results-page architecture," nearly two-thirds of Google searches in 2020 were completed without users leaving Google-owned platforms, meaning users either never left the search page, or clicked to another Google platform such as YouTube, Google Flights, Google Maps, Google News, Google Shopping or Google Travel. A Google spokesperson said Yost's lawsuit would "make Google Search results worse and make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers." They added: "Ohioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company. This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it in court."

A company that provides a user engagement platform for US politicians has suffered a ransomware attack, leaving many lawmakers unable to email their constituents for days. From a report: The attack, which hit DC-based iConstituent, has affected the offices of nearly 60 House lawmakers across both parties, Punchbowl News reported earlier today, citing House officials, lawmakers, and office aides. Catherine Szpindor, the Chief Administrative Officer of the House, said she was informed of the attack, which appears to have been limited to iConstituent's e-newsletter service and did not impact the company's GovText text messaging system. Szpindor, which is in charge of House cybersecurity, was also quick to distance the US government's network from the attack. "At this time, the CAO is not aware of any impact to House data," Szpindor told Punchbowl News. "The CAO is coordinating with the impacted offices supported by iConstituent and has taken measures to ensure that the attack does not affect the House network and offices' data."

Russia's government was quick to use social media when it tried to steer the course of U.S. elections, American officials say. It isn't quite as eager to see its own opponents at home try the same thing. From a report: Ahead of a parliamentary vote later this year, the Kremlin has been fine-tuning its strategy to pressure platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and TikTok to remove antigovernment content, classifying a growing number of posts as illegal and issuing a flurry of takedown requests. So far it appears to be working. The Western-dominated tech giants have in many instances complied. YouTube temporarily removed links to content laying out the opposition's voting strategy. Russian officials say Twitter is working to comply with requests to remove content that Moscow deems illegal. TikTok, owned by China's ByteDance, also removed or altered a handful of videos that criticized the government and promoted opposition street protests. TikTok, Twitter and Google, the Alphabet subsidiary that owns YouTube, say they decide whether to delete content based on local laws where they operate and on their own internal guidelines. None of the companies commented on specific cases mentioned in this article.