Microsoft and AT&T on Wednesday said they reached a deal under which the telecommunications company will tap Microsoft's Azure cloud service for its computing needs and use Microsoft 365, which includes Office productivity software, for much of its 268,000-strong workforce. From a report: Under the deal, Microsoft and AT&T will also work together on so-called edge computing, which will see Microsoft technology deployed alongside AT&T's coming 5G network for applications that need extremely small delays in passing data back and forth, such as air traffic control systems for drones. The multi-year deal is worth more than $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agreement is a major win for Microsoft, which will become AT&T's "preferred" cloud vendor and is fighting to gain market share from Amazon Web Services, the biggest provider of public cloud services. Cloud service customers run their software applications in data centers managed by the cloud provider. AT&T will remain responsible for its own core networking operations for cell phones and other devices. But John Donovan, chief executive of AT&T Communications, told Reuters the deal is a fundamental shift for the telecommunications provider to become "public cloud first," meaning that it will predominately rely on data centers built by others to power the rest of its business.

What's Google working on after shuttering Google+ ?

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge: Google's in-house incubator, Area 120, is working on a new social networking app called Shoelace which is aimed at organizing local events and activities. You use it by listing your interests in the app, allowing it to recommend a series of "hand-picked" local activities which it calls "Loops." You can also organize your own events, and there's a map interface to view and RSVP to other people's Loops.

Shoelace's soft-launch comes just months after Google shut down Google+, its most prominent attempt at building a social media platform. However, rather than trying to create a new all-encompassing social network to rival the likes of Facebook, Shoelace seems to have much more modest ambitions that take aim at Facebook's ubiquitous Events functionality...

[I]t's also only available in New York City at the moment; the team says it's hoping to expand to more cities across the US soon.

Apple has opened a design and development accelerator in Shanghai -- its first for China -- to help local developers create better apps as the iPhone maker looks to scale its services business in one of its key overseas markets. From a report: At the accelerator, Apple has begun to hold regular lectures, seminars and networking sessions for developers, the company said this week. It is similar to an accelerator it opened in Bangalore about two years ago. In India, where Apple has about half a million app developers, the accelerator program has proven crucially useful, more than three dozen developers who have enrolled for the program have told TechCrunch over the years. Participation in the accelerator is free of cost. Apple said more than 2.5 million developers from greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, actively build apps for its platform. These developers have earned more than $29 billion through App Store sales. More than 15% of Apple's revenue comes from greater China, according to official figures.

D-Link has agreed to a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission in regards to a 2017 lawsuit in which the US government agency accused the Taiwanese hardware maker of misrepresenting the security of its devices and ignoring vulnerability reports. From a report: As part of the settlement, D-Link has promised to implement a new software security program for its routers and Internet-connected cameras. The company has also agreed to subject itself to ten years of biennial security audits from a third-party, independent auditor. The FTC gets to choose the auditor, while D-Link got to decide the certifications the auditor must obtain before allowing it to review its security program.

Google's bet on balloons to deliver cell service soon faces a crucial test amid doubts about the viability of the technology by some potential customers. From a report: The company behind the effort, Loon says its balloons will reach Kenya in the coming weeks for its first commercial trial. The test with Telkom Kenya, the nation's No. 3 carrier, will let mountain villagers buy 4G service at market-rate prices for an undefined period. Kenya's aviation authority said its final approval would be signed this month. Hatched in 2011, Loon aims to bring connectivity to remote parts of the world by floating solar-powered networking gear over areas where cell towers would be too expensive to build.

Its tennis-court-sized helium balloons have demonstrated utility. Over the last three years, Loon successfully let wireless carriers in Peru and Puerto Rico use balloons for free to supplant cell phone towers downed by natural disasters. Kenyan officials are enthusiastic as they try to bring more citizens online. But executives at five other wireless carriers courted by Loon across four continents told Reuters that Loon is not a fit currently, and may never be. Those companies, including Telkom Indonesia, Vodafone New Zealand and French giant Orange, say Loon must demonstrate its technology is reliable, safe and profitable for carriers.

Nokia's CTO Marcus Weldon "told the BBC that the UK should be wary of using the Chinese hardware" -- though Nokia rushed to assure the BBC that Weldon's remarks do "not reflect the official position of Nokia."

Forbes reports: On the security front, Weldon referred to analysis suggesting Huawei equipment was far more likely to have vulnerabilities than technology from Nokia or Ericsson. "We read those reports and we think okay, we're doing a much better job than they are," Weldon said, describing Huawei's failings as serious and claiming Nokia's alternatives to be a safer bet. "Some of it seems to be just sloppiness, honestly, that they haven't patched things, they haven't upgraded. But some of it is real obfuscation, where they make it look like they have the secure version when they don't...."

The comments from Nokia's CTO came in light of research from Finite State, which published a scathing report claiming that "Huawei devices quantitatively pose a high risk to their users. In virtually all categories we examined, Huawei devices were found to be less secure than those from other vendors making similar devices." And this included the potential backdoors that lie at the heart of the U.S. government's security case against the Chinese company. "Out of all the firmware images analyzed, 55% had at least one potential backdoor," Finite State found. "These backdoor access vulnerabilities allow an attacker with knowledge of the firmware and/or with a corresponding cryptographic key to log into the device."
Nokia's later statement insisted that their company "is focused on the integrity of its own products and services and does not have its own assessment of any potential vulnerabilities associated with its competitors."

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. From a report: The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO defense ministers met this week. The name of this new Dutch-German military internet is the Tactical Edge Networking, or TEN, for short. This is the first time when two nations merge parts of their military network, and the project is viewed as a test for unifying other NATO members' military networks in the future. The grand master plan is to have NATO members share military networks, so new and improved joint standards can be developed and deployed across all NATO states. TEN will be headquartered in Koblenz, Germany, and there will also be a design and prototype center at the Bernard Barracks in Amersfoort, the Netherlands.

Several Huawei employees have collaborated on research projects with Chinese armed forces personnel, indicating closer ties to the country's military than previously acknowledged by the smartphone and networking powerhouse, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: Over the past decade, Huawei workers have teamed with members of various organs of the People's Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors spanning artificial intelligence to radio communications. They include a joint effort with the investigative branch of the Central Military Commission -- the armed forces' supreme body -- to extract and classify emotions in online video comments, and an initiative with the elite National University of Defense Technology to explore ways of collecting and analyzing satellite images and geographical coordinates. Those projects are just a few of the publicly disclosed studies that shed light on how staff at China's largest technology company teamed with the 'People's Liberation Army on research into an array of potential military and security applications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: A college education is still considered a pathway to higher lifetime earnings and gainful employment for Americans. Nevertheless, two-thirds of employees report having regrets when it comes to their advanced degrees, according to a PayScale survey of 248,000 respondents this past spring that was released Tuesday. Student loan debt, which has ballooned to nearly $1.6 trillion nationwide in 2019, was the No. 1 regret among workers with college degrees. About 27% of survey respondents listed student loans as their top misgiving, PayScale said. College debt was followed by chosen area of study (12%) as a top regret for employees, though this varied greatly by major. Other regrets include poor networking, school choice, too many degrees, time spent completing education and academic underachievement. "Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their degrees," the report adds. "About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets."

Those with the most regrets include humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation. "About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education," report says. "About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same." Somewhere in the middle were 66% of business graduates, 67% of health sciences graduates and 68% of math graduates who said they regretted their education.

Cloudflare issued a blog post explaining how Verizon sent a large chunk of the internet offline this morning after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania. The outages affected Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others. The Register reports: For nearly three hours, network traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest online names was instead accidentally rerouted through a steel giant based in Pittsburgh. More than 20,000 prefixes -- roughly two per cent of the internet -- were wrongly announced by regional U.S. ISP DQE Communications: this announcement informed the sprawling internet's backbone equipment to thread netizens' traffic through one of DQE's clients, steel giant Allegheny Technologies, a rerouting that was then, mindbogglingly, accepted and passed on to the world by Verizon, a trusted major authority on the internet's highways and byways. And so, systems around the planet automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going to Allegheny, which black holed the traffic.

Internet engineers suspect that a piece of automated networking software -- a BGP optimizer called Noction -- used by DQE was to blame for the problem. But even though these kinds of misconfigurations happen every day, there is significant frustration and even disbelief that a U.S. telco as large as Verizon would pass on this amount of incorrect routing information. The sudden, wrong, change should have been caught by filters and never accepted. [...] One key industry group called Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) has four main recommendations: two technical and two cultural for fixing the problem. The two technical approaches are filtering and anti-spoofing, which basically check announcements from other network operators to see if they are legitimate and remove any that aren't; and the cultural fixes are coordination and global validation -- which encourage operators to talk more to one another and work together to flag and remove any suspicious looking BGP changes. Verizon is not a member of MANRS.

The Trump administration is examining whether to require that next-generation 5G cellular equipment used in the U.S. be designed and manufactured outside China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The move could reshape global manufacturing and further fan tensions between the countries. From the report: A White House executive order last month to restrict some foreign-made networking gear and services due to cybersecurity concerns started a 150-day review of the U.S. telecommunications supply chain. As part of that review, U.S. officials are asking telecom-equipment manufacturers whether they can make and develop U.S.-bound hardware, which includes cellular-tower electronics as well as routers and switches, and software outside of China, the people said. The conversations are in early and informal stages, they said. The executive order calls for a list of proposed rules and regulations by the 150-day deadline, in October; so, any proposals may take months or years to adopt.

The proposals could force the biggest companies that sell equipment to U.S. wireless carriers, Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson, to move major operations out of China to service the U.S., which is the biggest market in the $250 billion-a-year global industry for telecom equipment and related services and infrastructure. There is no major U.S. manufacturer of cellular equipment. U.S. officials have long worried that Beijing could order Chinese engineers to insert security holes into technology made in China. They worry those security holes could be exploited for spying, or to remotely control or disable devices.

Raspberry Pi today introduced a new version of its popular line of single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever, with the company promising "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems." The specifications are: A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3x performance); 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM; full-throughput Gigabit; Ethernet; dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking; Bluetooth 5.0; two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports; dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K; VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x; 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video; and complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products. It starts at $35.

Raphael Satter, writing for AP: Katie Jones sure seemed plugged into Washington's political scene. The 30-something redhead boasted a job at a top think tank and a who's-who network of pundits and experts, from the centrist Brookings Institution to the right-wing Heritage Foundation. She was connected to a deputy assistant secretary of state, a senior aide to a senator and the economist Paul Winfree, who is being considered for a seat on the Federal Reserve. But Katie Jones doesn't exist, The Associated Press has determined.

Instead, the persona was part of a vast army of phantom profiles lurking on the professional networking site LinkedIn. And several experts contacted by the AP said Jones' profile picture appeared to have been created by a computer program. Experts who reviewed the Jones profile's LinkedIn activity say it's typical of espionage efforts on the professional networking site, whose role as a global Rolodex has made it a powerful magnet for spies.

In a new essay Friday, technology pundit Robert Cringely remembers the day he got his first home fax machine in 1986, arguing that broadcast television is like a fax machine -- in that "they are both obsolete."

Then he offers a quick history of television, cable TV, and the rise of Netflix, concluding "I'll be surprised if broadcast TV in the U.S. survives another decade" -- also predicting the end of cable TV packages: 5G wireless networking, as I've written here before, has pretty much nothing to do with mobile phones. It has to do with replacing every other kind of data network with 5G wireless. No more land lines, no more cable systems, no more wires. Going all-wireless almost completely eliminates customer-facing labor. No more guy with a tool belt to keep you waiting for service. No more truck rolls. There will be 5G and there will be content, that's all.

Content can mean a phone call or a movie, a game, or anything else that involves electrons in motion. And given that we'll all have voracious and completely different demands for high-resolution content, 5G will suck-up all available bandwidth and then some. Legacy broadcast license holders like broadcast TV and radio stations will sell their airspace to 5G carriers and retire to Florida. They'll get offers they can't refuse....

Cable TV packages will fall apart with every network fighting for itself in an a la carte programming world.
"There's nothing sacrosanct about a broadcast network paradigm that we've been riding for a century," he concludes. "This too shall pass."

Researchers at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan have discovered that Twitter-based classes actually hurts academic performance, according to the Washington Post: The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that's a question for neuroscientists, they said. Rather, Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it, the economists said in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan...

The investigation drew on a sample of roughly 1,500 students attending 70 Italian high schools during the 2016-17 academic year. Half of the students used Twitter to analyse The Late Mattia Pascal, the 1904 novel by Italian Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello, which satirises issues of self-knowledge and self-destruction. They posted quotes and their own reflections, commenting on tweets written by their classmates. Teachers weighed in to stimulate the online discussion. The other half relied on traditional classroom teaching methods. Performance was assessed based on a test measuring understanding, comprehension and memorisation of the book. Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by about 25 to 40 per cent of a standard deviation from the average result, as the paper explains. Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, described these as "pretty big effects".

Notably, the decline was sharpest among higher-achieving students, including women, those born in Italy and those who had scored higher on a baseline test. This finding, the paper notes, bolsters the conclusion that blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance, rather than simply failing to augment learning... [Lead author Gian] Barbetta suggested that declining performance among students who had used the social networking site to study the novel was a result of two factors. The first was a mistaken belief on the part of students that they had absorbed the book by circulating tweets about its contents. The second was that time spent on social media simply replaced time spent actually poring over the book.

The study contributes to growing skepticism that human activities - and learning, specifically - can be transferred to cyberspace without a cost.
A spokesman for Twitter "declined to comment on the study."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Violent crime in the U.S. is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn't know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime. Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring's Neighbors -- all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby -- are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the U.S., according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

Nextdoor was the ninth most-downloaded lifestyle app in the U.S. on iPhones at the end of April, according to App Annie, a mobile data and analytics provider; that's up from No. 27 a year ago in the social networking category. (Nextdoor changed its app category from social to lifestyle on April 30; on April 29 it was ranked 14th in social, according to App Annie.) Amazon Ring's Neighbors is the 36th most-downloaded social app. When it launched last year, it was 115th. Citizen, which considers itself a news app, was the seventh most-downloaded news app on iOS at the end of April, up from ninth last year and 29th in 2017. These apps have become popular because of -- and have aggravated -- the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center. In fact, crime has fallen steeply in the last 25 years according to both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University, says these apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color. As Steven Renderos, senior campaigns director at the Center for Media Justice, put it, "These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood -- it is merely a reflection of people's own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities."

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as "suspicious" on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

An internet milestone known as "768k Day" is getting closer and some network administrators are shaking in their boots fearing downtime caused by outdated network equipment. From a report: The fear is justified, and many companies have taken precautions to update old routers, but some cascading failures are still predicted. The term 768k Day comes from the original mother of all internet outages known as 512k Day. [...] Many legacy routers received emergency firmware patches that allowed network admins to set a higher threshold for the size of the memory allocated to handle the global BGP routing table. Most network administrators followed documentation provided at the time and set the new upper limit at 768,000 -- aka 768k.

CIDR Report, a website that keeps track of the global BGP routing table, puts the size of this file at 773,480 entries; however, their version of the table isn't official and contains some duplicates. A Twitter bot named BGP4-Table, which has also been tracking the size of the global BGP routing table in anticipation of 768K Day, puts the actual size of the file at 767,392, just a hair away from overflowing. ZDNet spoke today with Aaron A. Glenn, a networking engineer with AAGICo Berlin, and Jim Troutman, Director at the Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange (NNENIX). Both estimate 768K Day happening within the next month. But unlike many network admins, they don't expect the event to cause internet-wide outages like in 2014. However, both Glenn and Troutman expect some companies and smaller, local ISPs to be affected. "I would be mildly surprised if there was any interruption or outage at any real scale," Glenn told ZDNet.

Trailrunner7 shares a report: The discovery of a new, sophisticated team of hackers spying on dozens of government targets is never good news. But one team of cyberspies has pulled off that scale of espionage with a rare and troubling trick, exploiting a weak link in the internet's cybersecurity that experts have warned about for years: DNS hijacking, a technique that meddles with the fundamental address book of the internet. Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations.

In the process, they went so far as to compromise multiple country-code top-level domains -- the suffixes like .co.uk, or .ru, that end a foreign web address -- putting all the traffic of every domain in multiple countries at risk. The hackers' victims include telecoms, internet service providers, and domain registrars responsible for implementing the domain name system. But the majority of the victims and the ultimate targets, Cisco believes, were a collection of mostly governmental organizations including ministries of foreign affairs, intelligence agencies, military targets, and energy-related groups, all based in the Middle East and North Africa. By corrupting the internet's directory system, hackers were able to silently use "man-in-the-middle" attacks to intercept all internet data from email to web traffic sent to those victim organizations.

[...] Cisco Talos said it couldn't determine the nationality of the Sea Turtle hackers, and declined to name the specific targets of their spying operations. But it did provide a list of the countries where victims were located: Albania, Armenia, Cypress, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Cisco's Craig Williams confirmed that Armenia's .am top-level domain was one 'of the "handful" that were compromised, but wouldn't say which of the other countries' top-level domains were similarly hijacked.

"Snapchat pioneered Stories, the popular feature where users create and share ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours," reports Business Insider. "And now, it's taking them everywhere." Users are now able to share their Stories on third-party partner apps like Tinder -- and Snap is also sharing its Bitmoji's with Venmo and Fitbit.

TechCrunch reports: For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Evan Spiegel claiming "Our values are hard to copy". That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat's 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap's vision of an ephemeral, visual future.

But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot. It rearranges the adage of "if you can't beat them, join them" into "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war. Snapchat's plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies. Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original?

A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it's going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it's smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The article concludes that Snap "needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking."