The United Arab Emirates will shift to a working week of four and half days with a Saturday-Sunday weekend from the start of next year to better align its economy with global markets, but private companies will be free to choose their own working week. From a report: The oil-producing Gulf state, the region's commercial, trade and tourism hub, currently has a Friday-Saturday weekend. From Jan. 1, however, the weekend will start on Friday afternoon, including for schools, a government circular said. "Each company, depending on the sector they operate in and what suits and serves their business best, can choose the weekend they decide for their employees," Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation Abdulrahman al-Awar told Reuters. Over the past year, the UAE has taken measures to make its economy more attractive to foreign investment and talent at a time of growing economic rivalry with Saudi Arabia.

Twitter announced it has acquired Quill, a business-focused messaging service meant to compete against the likes of Slack. According to TechCrunch, "Quill is not making the cut in the acquisition: it will be winding down as an app" as Twitter works to incorporate many of its features into its own service. From the report: Quill notes in a brief announcement on its site that users will be "able to export your team message history until 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11th 2021, when we will be turning off our servers and deleting all data." It will issue refunds for all active teams. But the team and its IP are joining the flock: Specifically, Quill's people will be joining Twitter's Experience organization to work on messaging tools, specifically Twitter direct messages. Pettersson will be taking a role as product manager, reporting into the Conversations team under Oji Udezue, Twitter tells me.

DMs have long been a source of interest for Twitter observers, and some have wondered when and if Twitter would ever seek to develop them into a more standalone product (something that they've toyed with apparently) and possible business line. That would make some sense, given the huge boom we've seen in messaging apps in recent years, and the moves so many other open-ended social media platforms have made to boost their own direct messaging businesses. Now, with Twitter making more moves to diversify its business, maybe this could be an opportunity to rethink DMs too.

Intel announced that it will take public its self-driving technology company Mobileye, the Israeli company it acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017. The Verge reports: The chipmaker said that by listing Mobileye's shares on the stock market, it hopes to unlock more value for Intel's shareholders. Intel will remain the majority shareholder in Mobileye. In a statement, Intel heralded its acquisition of the company as a noteworthy success, noting that Mobileye's revenue in 2021 was 40 percent higher than the previous year. An IPO "provides the best opportunity to build on Mobileye's track record for innovation and unlock value for shareholders," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said.

Founded in Jerusalem in 1999 by Amnon Shashua and Ziv Aviram, the company develops systems and chips to help vehicles navigate autonomously and provide warnings for collisions. Tesla originally used Mobileye chips for its Autopilot system but severed ties with the company after a fatal accident where Tesla claims Mobileye's technology was unable to distinguish between a laterally crossing truck and the sky behind it. Its EyeQ4 chip is currently used in the NIO ES6 and ES8, Nissan's ProPilot 2.0, VW's Travel Assistant in the Passat and Golf, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, as well as the F-150 truck.

Mobileye is currently working on four different products that offer varying levels of automation, including an advanced driver assist system (ADAS) that it currently supplies to 25 companies and a "premium" ADAS that will launch with Zeekr, an electric vehicle brand owned by China's Geely. Neither ADAS system will include lidar, the sensor that uses lasers to determine the real-time location of objects on the road. Mobileye's other two products will use lidar and are more advanced in their automation technology. [...] Mobileye also aspires to operate its own robotaxis [...].

Karl Bode, reporting for TechDirt: Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers," Verizon said at the time.

Six years later and Verizon found itself at the heart of a massive privacy scandal after it began covertly injecting unique user-tracking headers into wireless data packets. The technology allowed Verizon to track users all over the internet, and the company neither bothered to inform users it would happen, or gave users any way to opt out. It took security researchers two years before security researchers even realized what Verizon was doing. Verizon ultimately received a $1.35 million fine from the FCC (a tiny portion of what Verizon made off the program), but still uses the same tech (albeit with functioning opt-out) today.

A few years later and it's not clear Verizon has actually learned all that much. The company last week began expanding its data collection and monetization once again, this time via a new "Verizon Custom Experience" the company says will help it "personalize our communications with you, give you more relevant product and service recommendations, and develop plans, services and offers that are more appealing to you." In reality that means Verizon is expanding the collection of data on the websites you visit, the people you communicate with, and the apps you use.

Airliners, private planes and helicopters may have to limit landings in low-visibility conditions and follow other restrictions under a government directive to ensure safe operations once a new band of 5G mobile-phone service starts in January. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday issued two orders laying out potential flight restrictions that could cause severe restrictions at major airports during bad weather.

"The FAA is working closely with the Federal Communications Commission and wireless companies, and has made progress toward safely implementing the 5G expansion," the FAA said in a statement. "We are confident with ongoing collaboration we will reach this shared goal." The agency said in a press release that it believes "the expansion of 5G and aviation will safely co-exist" and stopped short of specific restrictions. But the two airworthiness directives lay the groundwork for what could be severe limitations across the nation's aviation system if the regulator believes the signals -- from a part of the spectrum called the "C-Band" that the mobile carriers have procured to expand their service -- threaten safety.

Problems with some of the Amazon Web Services cloud servers are causing slow loading or failures for significant chunks of the internet. From a report: The company's widespread network of data centers powers many of the things you interact with online, so as we've seen in previous AWS outage incidents, any problem can have massive ripple effects. People started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET. There are reports of outages for Disney Plus streaming, as well as games like PUBG, League of Legends, and Valorant. We've also noticed some problems accessing Amazon.com, as well as other Amazon products like the Alexa AI assistant, Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music, or Ring security cameras. The DownDetector list of services with spikes in their outage reports runs off nearly any recognizable name: Tinder, Roku, Coinbase, both Cash App and Venmo, and the list goes on.

Newspapers all over the country have been quietly filing antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook for the past year, alleging the two firms monopolized the digital ad market for revenue that would otherwise go to local news. From a report: What started as a small-town effort to take a stand against Big Tech has turned into a national movement, with over 200 newspapers involved across dozens of states. "The intellectual framework for this developed over the last 3-4 years," said Doug Reynolds, managing partner of HD Media, a holding company that owns several West Virginia newspapers, including the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Reynolds, along with a group of lawyers, filed the first newspaper lawsuit of this kind in January in West Virginia. As a part of the first lawsuit, Reynolds worked with a coalition of lawyers that has agreed to represent newspapers all over the country looking to file similar lawsuits. The lawyers include experts in antitrust litigation and lawyers with a personal interest in newspapers from Farrell and Fuller, Fitzsimmons Law Firm, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Herman Jones LLP.

Alphabet's Google is suing two Russian nationals it claims are part of a criminal enterprise that has silently infiltrated more than a million computers and devices around the world, creating "a modern technological and borderless incarnation of organized crime." From a report: In a complaint being unsealed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Google names two defendants, Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, as well as 15 unnamed individuals. Google claims the defendants have created a âoebotnetâ known as Glupteba, to use for illicit purposes, including the theft and unauthorized use of Google users' login and account information. A botnet is a network of internet-connected devices that have been infected with malware. When summoned together, they can do the bidding of a hacker, often with the devices' owners not realizing their machines have been hijacked. A swarm of devices can jam traffic at websites, run malware to steal login credentials, sell fraudulent credit cards online and grant unauthorized access to other cyber criminals. The Glupteba botnet stands out from others because of its "technical sophistication," using blockchain technology to protect itself from disruption, Google said in the complaint. At any moment, the power of the Glupteba botnet could be used in a powerful ransomware attack or distributed denial of service attack, Google said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The complexities of the real world are starting to bleed into the Metaverse -- the virtual arena where identity functions as both a reflection on and determinant of social capital. Differences in prices for digital avatars based on race, gender and skin color are emerging among a popular collection of NFTs known as CryptoPunks, belying the utopian and egalitarian ideals touted by the closely connected world of crypto, decentralized finance, blockchain and non-fungible tokens. According to both participants in and observers of the space, these price discrepancies are partly explained by the lack of diversity among the investors who favor these status assets. It's a demographic that skews mostly male and White. Female CryptoPunks, and those with darker skin colorings, tend to sell for less than avatars with male traits or fair skin. CryptoPunk investors say the price disparity is not a function of individual prejudice or racism, but of the fact that the people currently willing and able to pay top dollar for digital goods aren't bidding on avatars that don't look like them. "If you look at the blockchain space, it largely tends to be white, it largely tends to be male," said Tony Herrera, an immigrant activist in California who owns 60 CryptoPunks. "One Punk could be dark and one could be light, and the lighter one is going to be the more desirable."

In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg published Monday, a group of academics called for Meta to be more transparent about its research into how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp affect the mental health of children and adolescents. The Verge reports: The letter calls for the company to allow independent reviews of its internal work, contribute data to external research projects, and set up an independent scientific oversight group. "You and your organizations have an ethical and moral obligation to align your internal research on children and adolescents with established standards for evidence in mental health science," the letter, signed by researchers from universities around the world, reads.

The open letter comes after leaks from Facebook revealed some data from the company's internal research, which found that Instagram was linked with anxiety and body image issues for some teenage girls. The research released, though, is limited and relied on subjective information collected through interviews. While this strategy can produce useful insights, it can't prove that social media caused any of the mental health outcomes. The information available so far appears to show that the studies Facebook researchers conducted don't meet the standards academic researchers use to conduct trials, the new open letter said. The information available also isn't complete, the authors noted -- Meta hasn't made its research methods or data public, so it can't be scrutinized by independent experts. The authors called for the company to allow independent review of past and future research, which would include releasing research materials and data.

The letter also asked Meta to contribute its data to ongoing independent research efforts on the mental health of adolescents. It's a longstanding frustration that big tech companies don't release data, which makes it challenging for external researchers to scrutinize and understand their products. "It will be impossible to identify and promote mental health in the 21st century if we cannot study how young people are interacting online," the authors said. [...] The open letter also called on Meta to establish an independent scientific trust to evaluate any risks to mental health from the use of platforms like Facebook and Instagram and to help implement "truly evidence-based solutions for online risks on a world-wide scale." The trust could be similar to the existing Facebook Oversight Board, which helps the company with content moderation decisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Eurostar is testing a new biometric facial recognition technology on passengers traveling from London's St Pancras International station to continental Europe. The passengers will be given the opportunity to complete their pre-departure ticket and passport checks via the new biometric system, called the "SmartCheck" lane. Those who take this option will be allowed to board the train without going through the typically tedious ID verification procedures. The system will involve two facial scans, one at the ticket gate to verify the ticket check and one at the UK Exit Checkpoint, to confirm that the passport information is valid.

The goal, according to Eurostar, is to eliminate queues and expedite the boarding process, not only improving customer satisfaction but also minimizing the chances for viral transmission. The system will be trialed with a limited number of invited passengers and won't involve the UK's or Schengen entry controls. Eurostar announced its intention to introduce a facial recognition system to replace physical tickets and passport checks last year, and facial recognition company iProov helped them build it. iProov is a proponent of what they call "passive authentication", which is facial recognition without the user having to do anything. The user consents to the platform by visiting an online portal to register with their information and takes an image of their face with the smartphone or webcam. When they reach a physical checkpoint, they simply look at the camera, and the system authenticates them effortlessly.

Verizon might be collecting information about your browsing history, location, apps, and your contacts, all in the name of helping the company "understand your interests," first spotted by Input. The Verge reports: The program, which Verizon appears to automatically opt customers into, is called Verizon Custom Experience and its controls lay buried in the privacy settings on the My Verizon app. The program introduces two different options that appear in the app, Custom Experience and Custom Experience Plus, each of which varies in terms of invasiveness. Verizon provides additional information about both settings within the app, as well as on a FAQ page on its website. It appears that the Custom Experience option is a stripped-down version of Custom Experience Plus, and as Verizon states directly in the app, it helps Verizon "personalize" its "communication with you" and "give you more relevant product and service recommendations" by using "information about websites you visit and apps you use on your mobile device."

Meanwhile, Custom Experience Plus has the same stated purpose -- to help Verizon provide you with a more "personalized" experience. However, it not only uses information about the websites and apps you use on your mobile device, but it also says it uses your "device location," along with "phone numbers you call or that call you" to help Verizon "better understand your interests." This also includes your CPNI, which tracks the times and duration of your calls, and because Verizon is your wireless network provider, it can track your location even if you've turned off location services on your phone. As Verizon explains on its site, it might use your information to, say, present you with an offer that includes music content, or give you a music-related option in its Verizon Up reward program if it knows you like music. Verizon explicitly states that for the more invasive Customer Experience Plus tracking, you "must opt-in to participate and you can change your choice at any time." Signing up for those Up Rewards, or other promotions with consequences buried in the fine print may have opted customers in unknowingly. How to opt-out: "[...] open your My Verizon app, and then hit the gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Scroll down and select 'Manage privacy settings' beneath the 'Preferences' heading. On the next page, toggle off 'Custom Experience' and 'Custom Experience Plus.' To erase the information that Verizon has already collected about you through the program, tap 'Custom Experience Settings,' and hit 'Reset.'"

Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children's movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids' and families' whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it. From the report: Through interviews with two former employees of the company, along with two individuals who formerly worked at location data brokers Cuebiq and X-Mode, The Markup discovered that the app acts as a firehose of data for a controversial industry that has operated in the shadows with few safeguards to prevent the misuse of this sensitive information. The former employees spoke with The Markup on the condition that we not use their names, as they are all still employed in the data industry. They said they agreed to talk because of concerns with the location data industry's security and privacy and a desire to shed more light on the opaque location data economy. All of them described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry.

Non-fungible tokens are one of the hottest things in cryptocurrencies right now, with the prospect of big gains should the latest collection rise in value. But a new study from Chainalysis shows that a small portion of participants reap most of the gains. From a report: Investing frequently in a wide array of collections appears to lead to the highest profits, Chainalysis said in its report. It added that whitelisting -- the practice of allowing a certain set of followers or others to purchase new NFTs at a much lower price than other users during minting events where a digital file is turned into a digital asset on a blockchain -- helps those people significantly.

Users who make the whitelist and later sell their newly-minted NFT gain a profit 75.7% of the time, versus just 20.8% for users who do so without being whitelisted, Chainalysis said, citing Opensea data. The data suggests it's nearly impossible to reap outsized returns on minting purchases without being whitelisted, the study said. "A very small group of highly sophisticated investors rake in most of the profits from NFT collecting," the study said. "This is especially true in minting, where the whitelisting process gives early supporters of collection access to lower prices that result in greater profits. We also see possible evidence of the use of bots by investors looking to purchase during minting events, which could shut out less sophisticated users, and even result in failed transactions that cost them in fees."

An indestructible "black box" is set to be built upon a granite plain on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia, in early 2022. Its mission: Record "every step we take" toward climate catastrophe, providing a record for future civilizations to understand what caused our demise, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. From a report: The project, led by marketing communications company Clemenger BBDO in collaboration with University of Tasmania researchers, is currently in beta and has already begun collecting information at its website. The structure is designed to be about the size of a city bus, made of 3-inch-thick steel and topped with solar panels. Its interior will be filled with "storage drives" that gather climate change-related data such as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and average temperatures. In addition, using an algorithm, it will scour the web for tweets, posts, news and headlines.

The developers estimate that storage will run out in 30 to 50 years, according to the ABC. There are plans to increase the storage capacity and provide a more long-term solution, but it's unclear how the structure will be maintained -- how its solar panels might be replaced before the end of civilization, how well those drives hold up after decades and how impervious the vault will be to vandalism or sabotage. Its remote location, around four hours from the closest major city, is one deterrent -- but will that be enough?

A group of workers at an Activision Blizzard division supporting the Call of Duty franchise plan to call out of work Monday in protest of job cuts that took place last week. The move reflects a broader labor movement taking hold at the embattled video game publisher. From a report: The workers sent a letter to management of their studio Raven Software, which is owned by Activision and works on Call of Duty: Warzone. In it, they ask the company to reinstate the dozen people who were terminated, according to a copy of the email reviewed by Bloomberg. "Those participating in this demonstration do so with the continued success of the studio at the forefront of their mind," they wrote. The job cuts targeted a team of contractors primarily responsible for testing Call of Duty: Warzone, ensuring the free-to-play game operates smoothly and without errors. The staff wasn't given a clear justification for the dismissals, said Alex Dupont, a QA tester on the team and a spokesman for the workers who are striking.

Mozilla has announced through its Mozilla Hacks blog that it plans to ship a 'novel sandboxing technology' called RLBox with Firefox 95 which it has been developing alongside researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas. From a report: It said RLBox makes it easier to isolate subcomponents of the browser efficiently and gives Mozilla more options than traditional sandboxing granted it. Mozilla said this new method of sandboxing, which uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially-buggy code, builds on a prototype that was shipped in Firefox 74 and Firefox 75 to Linux and Mac users respectively. With Firefox 95, RLBox will be deployed on all supported Firefox platforms including desktop and mobile to isolate three different modules: Graphite, Hunspell, and Ogg. With Firefox 96, two more modules, Expat and Woff2, will also be isolated.

The co-founder of a company that has been trusted by technology giants including Google and Twitter to deliver sensitive passwords to millions of their customers also operated a service that ultimately helped governments secretly surveil and track mobile phones, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing former employees and clients. From the report: Since it started in 2013, Mitto AG has established itself as a provider of automated text messages for such things as sales promotions, appointment reminders and security codes needed to log in to online accounts, telling customers that text messages are more likely to be read and engaged with than emails as part of their marketing efforts. Mitto, a closely held company with headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, has grown its business by establishing relationships with telecom operators in more than 100 countries. It has brokered deals that gave it the ability to deliver text messages to billions of phones in most corners of the world, including countries that are otherwise difficult for Western companies to penetrate, such as Iran and Afghanistan. Mitto has attracted major technology giants as customers, including Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, Microsoft's LinkedIn and messaging app Telegram, in addition to China's TikTok, Tencent and Alibaba, according to Mitto documents and former employees.

But a Bloomberg News investigation, carried out in collaboration with the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, indicates that the company's co-founder and chief operating officer, Ilja Gorelik, was also providing another service: selling access to Mitto's networks to secretly locate people via their mobile phones. That Mitto's networks were also being used for surveillance work wasn't shared with the company's technology clients or the mobile operators Mitto works with to spread its text messages and other communications, according to four former Mitto employees. The existence of the alternate service was known only to a small number of people within the company, these people said. Gorelik sold the service to surveillance-technology companies which in turn contracted with government agencies, according to the employees.

NBC News tells the hair-raising tale of Black Oxygen Organics (or "BOO" for short). Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. "A gift from the Ground," it reads. "Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it." BOO, which "can be taken by anyone at any age, as well as animals," according to the company, claims many benefits and uses, including improved brain function and heart health, and ridding the body of so-called toxins that include heavy metals, pesticides and parasites. By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces.... "Who would have thought drinking dirt would make me feel so so good?" one person in a 27,000-member private Facebook group posted, her face nuzzling a jar of black liquid....

Teams of sellers in these private Facebook groups claim that, beyond cosmetic applications, BOO can cure everything from autism to cancer to Alzheimer's disease.... But there may be an incentive for the hyperbole... Participation in multi-level marketing (MLM) boomed during the pandemic with 7.7 million Americans working for one in 2020, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Direct Selling Association, the trade and lobbying group for the MLM industry. Wellness products make up the majority of MLM products, and, as the Federal Trade Commission noted, some direct sellers took advantage of a rush toward so-called natural remedies during the pandemic to boost sales. More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group...

The secret to dealing dirt seems to be Facebook, where sellers have created dozens of individual groups that have attracted a hodgepodge of hundreds of thousands of members.
NBC News had a bag analyzed by a professor of soil and environmental science at Ohio State University. It found two doses per day "exceeded Health Canada's limit for lead, and three doses for daily arsenic amounts." Growing concern among BOO sellers about the product — precipitated by an anti-MLM activist who noticed on Google Earth that the bog that sourced BOO's peat appeared to share a border with a landfill — pushed several to take matters into their own hands, sending bags of BOO to labs for testing. The results of three of these tests, viewed by NBC News and confirmed as seemingly reliable by two soil scientists at U.S. universities, again showed elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Those results are the backbone of a federal lawsuit seeking class action status filed in November in Georgia's Northern District court. The complaint, filed on behalf of four Georgia residents who purchased BOO, claims that the company negligently sold a product with "dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals," which led to physical and economic harm.

Black Oxygen Organics did not respond to requests for comment concerning the complaint.
The anti-MLM forces also formed Facebook groups, monitoring Facebook's pro-Boo sales groups and even documenting sales and company meetings — then filed official complaints with Amreica's product-regulating Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. And it all ended badly for Boo... According to BOO President Carlo Garibaldi, they had weathered the FTC complaints, the FDA seizures, the Health Canada recalls and the online mob. But the "fatal blow" came when their online merchant dropped them as clients....

Members of anti-BOO groups celebrated. "WE DID IT!!!!!!" Ceara Manchester, the group administrator, posted to the "Boo is Woo" Facebook group. "I hope this is proof positive that if the anti-MLM community bans together we can take these companies down. We won't stop with just BOO. A new age of anti-MLM activism has just begun."

In a separate Zoom meeting unattended by executives and shared with NBC News, lower-rung sellers grappled with the sudden closure and the reality that they were out hundreds or thousands of dollars.

"The U.S. military has gone on the offensive against ransomware groups," reports CNET, "as U.S. companies increasingly become targets of malware attacks, the nation's top cyber defender acknowledged on Saturday." Up until about nine months ago, reining in ransomware attacks was seen as the responsibility of law enforcement agencies, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, told the New York Times. But attacks like the ones on Colonial Pipeline and JBS beef plants have been "impacting our critical infrastructure," Nakasone said, leading federal agencies to ramp up the gathering and sharing of intelligence on ransomware groups....

Nakasone didn't describe the action taken or identify the groups targeted, but said one of the goals is to "impose costs" for ransomware groups. "Before, during and since, with a number of elements of our government, we have taken actions and we have imposed costs," Nakasone said. "That's an important piece that we should always be mindful of."