A day after the Brexit, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage admitted he had misled the public on a key issue. He admitted that UK's alleged 350M Euro weekly contribution to the EU would not be directed to the National Health Service, and that this commitment was never made official. Journalists worldwide tweeted photos of the campaign ads -- posted in conspicuous places like the sides of buses -- debunking the lie. This incident illustrates the need for more political fact-checking as a public service, to enable the voters to make more informed and rational decisions about matters affecting their daily lives. Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process. When gathering information, a journalist should verify its accuracy. The work is then vetted by an editor, a person with more professional experience who may correct or further amend some of the information. A long-form article on The Guardian today underscores the challenges publications worldwide are facing today -- most of them don't have the luxury to afford a fact-checker (let alone a team of fact-checkers), and the advent of social media and forums and our reliance (plenty of people get their news on social media now) have made it increasingly difficult to vet the accuracy of anything that is being published. From The Guardian article:When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not.Global Voices' adds:But the need for fact-checking hasn't gone away. As new technologies have spawned new forms of media which lend themselves to the spread of various kinds of disinformation, this need has in fact grown. Much of the information that's spread online, even by news outlets, is not checked, as outlets simply copy-past -- or in some instances, plagiarize -- "click-worthy" content generated by others. Politicians, especially populists prone to manipulative tactics, have embraced this new media environment by making alliances with tabloid tycoons or by becoming media owners themselves. The other issue is that many people do not care about the source of the information, and it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not. This, coupled with how social networking websites game the news feed to show you what you are likely to find interesting as opposed to giving you news from trustworthy sources, has made things even worse. As you may remember, Facebook recently noted that it is making changes to algorithms to show you updates from friends instead of news articles from publications you like. The Guardian adds:Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want -- which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. [...] In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same -- whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.

Samantha Rhodes, writing for CNET: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took another step in his pet project to bring internet access to every corner of the planet. Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a platform that will give barebones connectivity to far-flung rural communities, called OpenCellular. The social-networking company will provide the skeleton for what you would need to bring cellular access, complete with open-source software that lets potential partners update and tweak the service to meet a community's needs. OpenCellular marks Facebook's latest attempt to push its goal of worldwide access, which aims to connect the last four billion people without internet access and the 10 percent of the population without cellular service. It's a priority for Facebook and Zuckerberg, even if not everyone agrees with their methods. Rather than go at it alone, this new program will rely on partners to run with the blueprints that it has drawn up.

Casey Newton, reporting for The Verge: At a time when its social networking rivals are racing to promote more real-time sharing, Snapchat is turning its attention to the past. The company today introduced Memories, a way of saving and sharing old snaps in a private archive inside the main app. It's a living, social camera roll in which photos and videos can be organized, edited, and shared long after they are taken. The introduction of Memories represents a significant shift for the famously ephemeral Snapchat -- and reflects the app's growing status as the default camera for millions of users.Reporter Alex Kantrowitz says this update "will make Snapchat feel a little less raw and in-the-moment, and a little more polished and, err, stale. That's a big deal." In a post on BuzzFeed News, he says this update will make Snapchat more addictive. He explains why: Posts from Snapchat are regularly repurposed. On any given day, you're likely to encounter saved snaps on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. People post snaps to other networks because they don't want to constrain themselves to one network. But they also post them elsewhere because saving a snap to a camera roll can feel like tossing it into the abyss. Posting a snap to Instagram, however, can give it a sense of permanence and organization. By creating Memories, Snapchat is building its own home for these old snaps. Whether it's the company's intention or not, Memories will create an avenue within Snapchat for people to do what they're doing with snaps outside, namely: save, organize, edit, republish. The likely result: more time inside Snapchat, less in other apps.

Reader Orome1 writes: Security researcher Amitay Dan warns that tplinklogin.net, a domain through which TP-LINK router owners can configure their devices, is no longer owned by the company, and that this fact could be misused by malware peddlers. TP-LINK has confirmed that they no longer own the domain in question, and will not be trying to buy it from the unknown seller for now. Instead, they intend to change the domain in the manuals to a newer one that's already in use.ComputerWorld has more details.

"Network operators like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and ATT, in cahoots with [real estate] developers and landlords, routinely use a breathtaking array of kickbacks, lawyerly games of Twister, blunt threats, and downright illegal activities to lock up buildings in exclusive arrangements," reports Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford. itwbennett writes: Eight years ago, the FCC issued an order banning exclusive agreements between landlords and ISPs, but a loophole is being exploited, leaving many tenants in apartment buildings with only one choice of broadband service provider. The loophole works like this: Instead of having an exclusive agreement with one provider, the landlords refuse to let any other companies than their chosen providers access their properties...
"This astounding, enormous, decentralized payola scheme affects millions of American lives," Crawford writes, revealing Comcast's revenue-sharing proposals for property owners and urging cities (and national lawmakers) to require broadband neutrality in residential buildings. Other loopholes are also being exploited, Crawford writes, and "it's why commercial tenants in NYC pay through the nose for awful Internet access service in the fanciest of commercial buildings... We've got to take landlords out of the equation -- all they're doing is looking for payments and deals...and the giant telecom providers in our country are more than happy to pay up."

Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica:In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last. Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router -- for less money -- and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher. Despite all that, people still buy the WRT54GL in large enough numbers that Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design.

Stan Schroeder, writing for Mashable:An anonymous hacker managed to obtain an enormous number of user credentials in June 2013 from fallen social networking giant MySpace -- some 427 million passwords, belonging to approx. 360 million users. In May 2016, a person started selling that database of passwords on the dark web. Now, the entire database is available online for free. Thomas White, security researcher also known by the moniker "Cthulhu," put the database up for download as a torrent file on his website, here. "The following contains the alleged data breach from Myspace dating back a few years. As always, I do not provide any guarantees with the file and I leave it down to you to use responsibly and for a productive purpose," he wrote. The file is 14.2 GB in size; downloading it might take some time. It is password-protected, but White made the password available on Twitter and his site.

An anonymous reader writes: The Netherlands has become the first country in the world to implement a nationwide long-range (LoRa) network for the Internet of Things, says Dutch telecoms group KPN on Thursday. "As from today the KPN LoRa network is available throughout The Netherlands," KPN said in a statement. Phys.Org reports: "The rollout of a low data rate (LoRa) mobile communications network is critical to connect objects as many may not be able to link up with home or work Wi-Fi networks to gain Internet access. The LoRa network is complementary to KPN's networks for the 2G, 3G and 4G phones. KPN has already reached deals to connect some 1.5 million objects, a number which should steadily grow now that the LoRa network is available across the country. Tests are being carried out at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam -- one of Europe's busiest air hubs -- for baggage handling. Meanwhile in the Utrecht rail station an experiment is under way to allow LoRa to monitor rail switches."

An anonymous reader shares an article by CRN:Partners say Cisco's end game with its patent lawsuits against Arista Networks is simply to slow the fast-growing networking company and stunt any innovation efforts from competitors. "Cisco's goal is to try to slow down Arista and competitors any way they can," said Chris Becerra, president and CEO of Terrapin Systems, a Morgan Hill, Calif.-based Arista partner. "If they don't have the technology to beat them out there, they're going to try to slow them down any way possible." Last week, the San Jose, Calif.-based network giant won three of five patent infringement suits against Santa Clara, Calif.-based Arista dealing with its networking switches. The International Trade Commission recommended a ban on Arista product imports containing the infringing technology. Additionally, the ITC also ruled earlier this year that Arista infringed on several other Cisco patents pertaining to its private VLANS, system database and externally managing router configuration with a centralized database -- recommending a similar ban on Arista imports.For those unfamiliar, Cisco had filed its trade complaint in December 2014, in which it sought a ban on Arista's switches. Arista, which designs and sells multilayer network switches to deliver software-defined networking solutions, was formed by former Cisco employees.

Security reporter Brian Krebs writes:GoToMyPC, a service that helps people access and control their computers remotely over the Internet, is forcing all users to change their passwords, citing a spike in attacks that target people who re-use passwords across multiple sites. Owned by Santa Clara, Calif. based networking giant Citrix, GoToMyPC is a popular software-as-a-service product that lets users access and control their PC or Mac from anywhere in the world. On June 19, the company posted a status update and began notifying users that a system-wide password update was underway.

An anonymous reader writes: As internet users continue to consume more videos than ever before, Facebook has decided to further add to the trend and officially launch video comments. Users are watching so many videos that the Cisco Visual Networking Index forecasts internet video traffic will represent 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020. Facebook said via a blog post that the new feature was developed at Facebook's 50th Hackathon. The team that built the feature included: Bob Baldwin who lead the initiative with Hermes Pique and Sameer Madan working on iOS, Muhammed Ibrahim worked on the web, and Billy Ng worked on Android. Baldwin's past projects consisted of features that let Facebook users include photos or stickers in the comments. The new video comments feature may help Facebook catch up to Snapchat in terms of daily videos viewed on the social media platform.

An anonymous reader writes: Back in March 2015, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a security document that included a series of provisions related to the use of wireless devices. In order to comply with these security guidelines, some manufacturers of home routers and other networking equipment decided to lock down the software powering these devices. This caused an outcry from the open source community who demanded that the FCC and manufacturers would not restrict the free use of the operating system and associated software running on their devices. Now Imagination Technologies is presenting a proof of concept demonstration that addresses the next-generation security requirements mandated by the FCC and other similar agencies. The demo makes use of a feature of MIPS Warrior CPUs called multi-domain, secure hardware virtualization. This technology allows developers to create system-wide, hardware-enforced trusted environments that are much secure compared to current solutions. The platform used for the demonstration runs three virtual machines (VMs) on a MIPS P-class CPU integrated in a router-type evaluation kit; this approach securely separates the OpenWrt operating system from the Wi-Fi driver, allowing them to co-exist in isolation and thus comply with the FCC guidelines.Ars Technica has more details.

An anonymous reader writes: Qualcomm wants to supply the next generation of autonomous and connected cars with networking to connect everything inside and outside of the cars. That means 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GNSS, DSRC, V2X, OABR, CAN, etc. ... [Networkworld reports: "Qualcomm today announced its Connected Car Reference Platform intended for the car industry to use to build prototypes of the next-generation connected car. Every category from economy to luxury car will be much smarter than the connected luxury car of today, creating a big opportunity for Qualcomm to supply semiconductors to automakers and suppliers. Qualcomm described the following features of the Connected Car Reference Platform in its release:

Scalability: Using a common framework that scales from a basic telematics control unit (TCU) up to a highly integrated wireless gateway, connecting multiple electronic control units (ECUs) within the car and supporting critical functions, such as over-the-air software upgrades and data collection and analytics.
Future-proofing: Allowing the vehicleâ(TM)s connectivity hardware and software to be upgraded through its life cycle, providing automakers with a migration path from Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) to hybrid/cellular V2X and from 4G LTE to 5G.
Wireless coexistence: Managing concurrent operation of multiple wireless technologies using the same spectrum frequencies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy.
OEM and third-party applications support: Providing a secure framework for the development and execution of custom applications."]

We've frequently linked to DistroWatch for their coverage of Linux package and release announcements. Now an anonymous reader writes: The DistroWatch website introduced IPv6 support on Friday and the new protocol has been getting a lot of attention. "Over 8% of our traffic this weekend came from IPv6 addresses," commented DistroWatch contributor Jesse Smith. "It was a pleasant surprise, we were not expecting that many people would be using IPv6 yet."

When asked why DistroWatch enabled IPv6 access to their server at this time, Smith answered: "Partly it was an experiment to see how much interest there was in IPv6. Partly it was because it is a little embarrassing (in 2016) to have a technology focused website that is not making use of IPv6."

Vanity Fair has run some excerpts from an upcoming book by a former employee that gives insight on how things work at the social network. The chapter, among other things, details Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's actions when Google launched its own social networking service Google Plus. The extract finds Zuckerberg's behaviour so intense that it calls it "bordered on the psychopathic." It reads: [...] hit Facebook like a bomb. Google Plus was the great enemy's sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared "Lockdown," the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook's earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.â [...] Rounding off another beaded string of platitudes, he changed gears and erupted with a burst of rhetoric referencing one of the ancient classics he had studied at Harvard and before. "You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. 'Carthage must be destroyed.' For some reason I think of that now."

An anonymous reader writes: A large number of websites have been infected with SEO spam thanks to a new zero-day in the WP Mobile Detector plugin that was installed on over 10,000 websites. The zero-day was used in real-world attacks since May 26, but only surfaced to light on May 29 when researchers notified the plugin's developer. Seeing that the developer was slow to react, security researchers informed Automattic, who had the plugin delisted from WordPress.org's Plugin Directory on May 31. In the meantime, security firm Sucuri says it detected numerous attacks with this zero-day, which was caused by a lack of input filtering in an image upload field that allowed attackers to upload PHP backdoors on the victim's servers with incredible ease and without any tricky workarounds. The backdoor's password is "dinamit," the Russian word for dynamite.

An anonymous reader writes: The Internet and Web will be downgraded to "internet" and "web" tomorrow with the new edition of the AP Stylebook. Therefore, today marks their last day as proper nouns. The AP Stylebook is a manual that many journalists follow, offering a comprehensive guide to the usage of words, style, spelling and punctuation. "The argument for lowercasing Internet is that is has become wholly generic, like electricity and the telephone. It never was trademarked and is not based on any proper noun," writes Tom Kent, AP Standards Editor. "The best reason for capitalizing it in the past may have been that the term was new. At one point, we understand, 'Phonograph' was capitalized." The two names will join the likes of website (formerly Web site) and email (formerly e-mail).

"Get ready for some big changes in the 'silicon' of Silicon Valley," writes tech CEO Narbeh Derhacobian who argues that the need to build tens of billions of connected sensor devices will change the way computers get built. "Just like smartphone owners like to pick and choose which apps they want, IoT manufacturers may want to shop for components individually without being locked into a single fab." An anonymous reader summarizes his article on TechCrunch: Thousands of different hardware devices, each selling around one million units, "would suggest the need for a much greater diversity of chip configurations than we've seen to date." Currently smartphones are engineered using a "System on a Chip" design where all the components are "locked into a single manufacturing process," but Derhacobian predicts chip manufacturers will continue a trend of moving towards a "System in a Package" approach -- "packing components closely together, without the complete, end-to-end integration... In a smart, connected world, sensor requirements could vary greatly from factory to factory, not to mention between industries as varied as agriculture, urban planning and automotive."

"In some ways, the great trends of the PC and smartphone eras were toward standardization of devices. Apple's great vision was understanding that people prefer a beautiful, integrated package, and don't need many choices in hardware. But in software it's generally the opposite. People have different needs, and want to select the apps and programs that work best for them."

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Guardian: Facebook has apologized for banning a photo of a plus-sized model and telling the feminist group that posted the image that it depicts "body parts in an undesirable manner". Cherchez la Femme, an Australian group that hosts popular culture talkshows with "an unapologetically feminist angle", said Facebook rejected an advert featuring Tess Holliday, a plus-sized model wearing a bikini, telling the group it violated the company's "ad guidelines". After the group appealed against the rejection, Facebook's ad team initially defended the decision, writing that the photo failed to comply with the social networking site's "health and fitness policy". "Ads may not depict a state of health or body weight as being perfect or extremely undesirable," Facebook wrote. "Ads like these are not allowed since they make viewers feel bad about themselves. Instead, we recommend using an image of a relevant activity, such as running or riding a bike." In a statement on Monday, Facebook apologized for its original stance and said it had determined that the photo does comply with its guidelines.Facebook said that its team scans millions of ad images every week, and sometimes understandably misses out on a few.

An anonymous reader writes: A report from CTIA released Monday found that consumers have nearly doubled their consumption of mobile data last year. It found that last month, consumers chugged down 804 billion megabytes of data, which adds up to a total of 9.65 billion gigabytes. The numbers are especially significant when compared to previous years. "From December 2013 to December 2014, U.S. data consumption grew by about 26 percent. But over the following year, it grew by 137 percent," writes Washington Post. YouTube and Netflix account for over half of North American internet traffic at peak hours, according to the networking equipment firm Sandvine. That figure spikes to 70 percent when streaming audio is part of the mix. The wireless industry as a result raked in nearly $200 billion last year alone, which is a 70 percent jump compared to a decade ago. The numbers are likely to rise as more and more devices become connected to the internet. With news of films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar coming to Netflix this September, we're likely to see mobile data use increase even more this year.