An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: France's parliament has approved a law banning all exploration and production of oil and natural gas by 2040 within the country and its overseas territories. Under that law that passed a final vote on Tuesday, existing drilling permits will not be renewed and no new exploration licenses will be granted. The French government claims the ban is a world first. However, it is largely symbolic since oil and gas produced in France accounts for just 1 percent of domestic consumption. The rest is imported. French President Emmanuel Macron responded to the approval of the law on Twitter, saying in part: "Very proud that France has become the first country in the world today to ban any new oil exploration licenses with immediate effect and all oil extraction by 2040."

An anonymous Slashdot reader is asking whether or not there are any alternatives to Android or iOS smartphones: Like most of us, I've owned a few smartphones over time, ranging from a Nokia E71 to a Samsung Android phone and now, an Apple iPhone. It is close to phone upgrade time, and I've been reviewing the features that I use on my phone. When I think honestly about it, the only features I really need are:

1. Phone calls (loads of conference calls, for which I use a wired headset with a microphone)
2. SMS Messaging (unlimited on my plan)
3. Navigation (very important, and is probably the most-used app on my phone)
4. Occasional internet browsing

All of this could be done by the Nokia E71, when Nokia Maps was a thing. If I want to move away from Apple, Google and the like, do I have any options now? Are there any trustable (and by trustable, I mean avoiding unknown Chinese manufacturers) phones in the market today that could do all four and (ideally) have better battery life than one day?

"An Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 cloud storage bucket containing information from data analytics firm Alteryx has been found publicly exposed, comprising the personal information of 123 million U.S. households," reports ZDNet. "The S3 bucked, located at the subdomain 'alteryxdownload,' was found by California cybersecurity firm UpGuard, with its Cyber Risk Team discovering the leak on October 6, 2017." From the report: The 36 GB data file titled "ConsumerView_10_2013" contained over 123 million rows, each one signifying a different American household. A similar file was seen by UpGuard when the personal details of 198 million American voters, compiled in a dataset by a data firm used by the Republican National Committee, were exposed. To highlight the breadth of the issue, UpGuard said the exposed data reveals over 3.5 billion fields of personally identifying details and data points about virtually every American household, including racial and ethnic information. The spreadsheet uses anonymized identifiers, but the information in the other few billion fields are very detailed, UpGuard said. Home addresses, contact information, mortgage status, financial histories, and very specific analysis of purchasing behavior -- such as domestic travel habits, if someone is a cat enthusiast, and their sporting interests -- is up for grabs in the exposed data. As for how this happened, ZDNet says, "the bucket was configured via permission settings to allow any AWS 'Authenticated Users' to download its stored data. Authenticated users are any user that has an AWS account."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: We The People, the petition section of the White House's website, is shutting down for a promised January relaunch. First launched in 2011 under then-President Obama, We The People pledged to provide a White House response to any petition which garnered 100,000 or more signatures within 30 days. The 200+ petitions that have received an official response have largely been unremarkable, leading to revelations like the White House's official beer recipe or condemnations (in word only) of groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. In short, the site has functioned as a PR tool for fostering good will -- one that the Trump administration has reportedly considered killing since April and now appears to be sluggishly getting around to putting in the ground.

"To improve this site's performance, the platform is currently down for maintenance and will return in late January," the site now reads. "All existing petitions and associated signatures have been preserved and will be available when the site is relaunched. Following the site's relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses." Further reading: The New York Times

The FCC recently announced a new alert program called "Blue Alert" that will notify the public of threats to law enforcement in real time. "With the creation of a dedicated Blue Alert event code in the Emergency Alert System, state and local law enforcement will have the capability to push immediate warnings out to the public via broadcast, cable, and satellite providers, as well as to consumer smartphones through the Wireless Emergency Alert system," reports Android Police. From the report: Much like both the SILVER and AMBER alert programs, and utilizing the same notification system, Blue Alerts aim to warn the general public of threats to public safety and/or imminent danger. However, the police force focused alert system provides timely information to the public when police officers may be in danger. Chairman of the FCC and recent deregulator of the internet, Ajit Pai detailed the new FCC order saying, "Similar to the Amber Alerts that many are familiar with, Blue Alerts will enable authorities to warn the public when there is actionable information related to a law enforcement officer who is missing, seriously injured or killed in the line of duty, or when there is an imminent credible threat to an officer."

The December 14 order from the FCC activates the Blue Alerts service for one calendar year to deliver the notifications over the Emergency Alert System, and for 18 months over the Wireless Emergency Alert system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Newsweek: Security researchers have discovered a new form of powerful malware that secretly mines cryptocurrency on a person's smartphone, which can physically damage the device if it is not detected. Researchers from the Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky investigated the malware, dubbed Loapi, which they found hiding in applications in the Android mobile operating system. The malware works by hijacking a smartphone's processor and using the computing power to mine cryptocurrency -- the process of confirming cryptocurrency transactions by completing complex algorithms that generate new units of the currency. Loapi physically broke a test phone used to study the malware, after two days of the device being infected with it. "Because of the constant load caused by the mining module and generated traffic, the battery bulged and deformed the phone cover," the Kaspersky blog states.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Many Android users may still have a backdoor on their device, according to new revelations made today by the Malwarebytes' mobile security research team. Their discovery is related to the Adups case from last year. Back in mid-November 2016, US cyber-security firm Kryptowire revealed it discovered that firmware code created by a Chinese company called Adups was collecting vasts amount of user information and sending it to servers located in China. According to Kryptowire, the backdoor code was collecting SMS messages, call history, address books, app lists, phone hardware identifiers, but it was also capable of installing new apps or updating existing ones. The backdoor was hidden inside a built-in and unremovable app named com.adups.fota, the component responsible for the phone's firmware-over-the-air update (FOTA) system.

If someone uploads a photo of your face to Facebook, the company usually knows that it's you thanks to facial recognition technology. Now Facebook won't just know it's you -- it'll tell you about the photo, too. From a report: Facebook is expanding its use of facial recognition technology and will now alert people that a friend, or a friend of a friend, uploaded a photo of them, even if they haven't been tagged in the picture. If anyone uploads a profile picture that includes your face, Facebook will alert you of that, too. "We're doing this to prevent people from impersonating others on Facebook," the company wrote on its blog Tuesday.

The algorithms that play increasingly central roles in our lives often emanate from Silicon Valley, but the effort to hold them accountable may have another epicenter: New York City. From a report: Last week, the New York City Council unanimously passed a bill to tackle algorithmic discrimination -- the first measure of its kind in the country. The algorithmic accountability bill, waiting to be signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, establishes a task force that will study how city agencies use algorithms to make decisions that affect New Yorkers' lives, and whether any of the systems appear to discriminate against people based on age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or citizenship status. The task force's report will also explore how to make these decision-making processes understandable to the public. The bill's sponsor, Council Member James Vacca, said he was inspired by ProPublica's investigation into racially biased algorithms used to assess the criminal risk of defendants. "My ambition here is transparency, as well as accountability," Vacca said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A core Republican talking point during the net neutrality battle was that, in 2015, President Obama led a government takeover of the internet, and Obama illegally bullied the independent Federal Communications Commission into adopting the rules. In this version of the story, Ajit Pai's rollback of those rules Thursday is a return to the good old days, before the FCC was forced to adopt rules it never wanted in the first place. But internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General -- acting on orders from Congressional Republicans -- investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC's net neutrality process and found it was nonsense. This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday's vote.

Using a Freedom of Information Act request, Motherboard obtained a summary of the Inspector General's report, which has not been released publicly and is marked "Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive Information." After reviewing more than 600,000 emails, the independent office found that there was no collusion between the White House and the FCC: "We found no evidence of secret deals, promises, or threats from anyone outside the Commission, nor any evidence of any other improper use of power to influence the FCC decision-making process." [...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled. What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn't true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.

schwit1 shares a report from The Merkle: No one will be surprised to hear the Venezuelan government isn't too keen on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can't be regulated or controlled by the government in any official capacity, they could damage the country's brittle economy even further. As a result, the government has imposed new rules for anyone mining cryptocurrency. To be more specific, all miners will now be taxed and required to register with the government. Being taxed is not entirely illogical, but the registration requirement is pretty worrisome, to say the least. The government shouldn't need to know who is doing what in regards to crypto trading and mining. Nevertheless, authorities want to know who is mining, where they are located, and what type of equipment they use. "That'll put food back on the shelves," adds schwit1.