Security researchers from Sophos say they’ve discovered a new set of “fleeceware” apps that appear to have been downloaded and installed by more than 600 million Android users. From a report: The term fleeceware is a recent addition to the cyber-security jargon. It was coined by UK cyber-security firm Sophos last September following an investigation that discovered a new type of financial fraud on the official Google Play Store. It…

Since the dawn of Twitter, users have been begging and pleading for a way to edit Tweets. Sadly, despite the entreaties of those upon whose usage the service depends, Twitter head honcho Jack Dorsey says you’ll “probably” never be able to edit a tweet. From a report: Dorsey was asked during a video Q&A with Twitter users conducted by Wired whether 2020 would be the year Twitter would introduce an…

Glacial viruses are understudied, and climate change may keep it that way. From a report: 15,000 years ago, some water froze atop the Tibetan Plateau and became part of a glacier. While humans were busy domesticating dogs, the ice entrapped millions of microscopic organisms per square inch. Many of the tiny life forms died, and their genomes — the only proof that they had been there in the first place…

India welcomed Jeff Bezos this week with an antitrust probe. On top of that, thousands of small merchants who typically compete with one another are beginning to gather across the country to hold a protest against the alleged predatory practices by the e-commerce giant. But Amazon founder and chief executive’s love for one of the company’s most important overseas markets remains untainted. From a report: At a conference in New…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced it is funding a bug bounty program for Kubernetes. Security researchers who find security vulnerabilities in Kubernetes’ codebase, as well as the build and release processes, will be rewarded with bounties ranging from $100 to $10,000. Bug bounty programs motivate individuals and hacker groups to not only find flaws but disclose them properly, instead…

iONiUM writes: LIGO has detected gravitational waves deep in space. The source is currently unknown. The Independent reports: “Scientists think they have detected an ‘unknown or unanticipated’ burst of gravitational waves coming from somewhere deep in space. The wobble in spacetime was picked up unexpectedly by the LIGO experiment, which was specifically built to detect gravitational waves. Astronomers have a picture of what part of the sky the burst originated…

Researchers from the University Hospital Zurich, ETH Zurich, Wyss Zurich and the University of Zurich have developed a machine that repairs injured human livers and keeps them alive outside the body for one week. ScienceDaily reports: Until now, livers could be stored safely outside the body for only a few hours. With the novel perfusion technology, livers — and even injured livers — can now be kept alive outside of…

A research team at Google has developed a deep neural network that can make fast, detailed rainfall forecasts. Google says that its forecasts are more accurate than conventional weather forecasts, at least for time periods under six hours. Ars Technica reports: The researchers say their results are a dramatic improvement over previous techniques in two key ways. One is speed. Google says that leading weather forecasting models today take one…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a “privacy-focused” search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers. With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode…

The Norwegian Consumer Council published an analysis of how popular apps are sharing user data with the behavioral ad industry. TechCrunch reports the findings: A majority of the apps that were tested for the report were found to transmit data to “unexpected third parties” — with users not being clearly informed about who was getting their information and what they were doing with it. Most of the apps also did…