Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Reuters: Aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman is working with SpaceX [...] on a classified spy satellite project already capturing high-resolution imagery of the Earth, according to people familiar with the program. The program, details of which were first reported by Reuters last month, is meant to enhance the U.S. government's ability to track military and intelligence targets from low-Earth orbits, providing high-resolution imagery of a kind that had traditionally been captured mostly by drones and reconnaissance aircraft. The inclusion of Northrop Grumman, which has not been previously reported, reflects a desire among government officials to avoid putting too much control of a highly-sensitive intelligence program in the hands of one contractor, four people familiar with the project told Reuters. 'It is in the government's interest to not be totally invested in one company run by one person,' one of the people said.

It's unclear whether other contractors are involved at present or could join the project as it develops. Northrop Grumman is providing sensors for some of the SpaceX satellites, the people familiar with the project told Reuters. Northrop Grumman, two of the people added, will test those satellites at its own facilities before they are launched. At least 50 of the SpaceX satellites are expected at Northrop Grumman facilities for procedures including testing and the installation of sensors in coming years, one of the people said. In March, Reuters reported that the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, in 2021 awarded a $1.8 billion contract to SpaceX for the classified project, a planned network of hundreds of satellites. So far, the people familiar with the project said, SpaceX has launched roughly a dozen prototypes and is already providing test imagery to the NRO, an intelligence agency that oversees development of U.S. spy satellites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: If you think you've been seeing an awful lot more Reddit results lately when you search on Google, you're not imagining things. The internet is in upheaval, and for website owners the rules of "winning" Google Search have never been murkier. Google's generative AI search engine is coming from one direction. It's creeping closer to mainstream deployment and bringing an existential crisis for SEOs and website makers everywhere. Coming from the other direction is an influx of posts from Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in August 2023. At the time of publishing, it was projected to have over 346 million visitors in April 2024.

None of this is accidental. For years, Google has been watching users tack on "Reddit" to the end of search queries and finally decided to do something about it. Google started dropping hints in 2022 when it promised to do a better job of promoting sites that weren't just chasing the top of search but were more helpful and human. Last August, Google rolled out a big update to Search that seemed to kick this into action. Reddit, Quora, and other forum sites started getting more visibility in Google, both within the traditional links and within a new "discussions and forums" section, which you may have spotted if you're US-based. The timing of this Reddit bump has led to some conspiracy theories. In February, Google and Reddit announced a blockbuster deal that would let Google train its AI models on Reddit content. Google said the deal, reportedly worth $60 million, would "facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information," leading to some speculation that Google promised Reddit better visibility in exchange for the valuable training data. A few weeks later, Reddit also went public.

Steve Paine, marketing manager at Sistrix, called the rise of Reddit "unprecedented." "There hasn't been a website that's grown so much search visibility so quickly in the US in at least the last five years," he told Business Insider. Right now, Reddit ranks high for product searches. Reddit's main competitors are Wikipedia, YouTube, and Fandom, Paine said, and it also competes in "high-value commercial searches," putting it up against Amazon. The "real competitors," he said, are the subreddits that compete with brands on the web. A Google spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is essentially just giving users what they want: "Our research has shown that people often want to learn from others' experiences with a topic, so we've continued to make it easier to find helpful perspectives on Search when it's relevant to a query. Our systems surface content from hundreds of forums and other communities across the web, and we conduct rigorous testing to ensure results are helpful and high quality."

Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: "As we've noted in previous letters, we're focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics -- and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction," the company said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. "In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential." Netflix said now that it is generating substantial profit and free cash flow -- as well as developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password-sharing crackdown -- its membership numbers are not the only factor in the company's growth. It said the metric lost significance after it started to offer multiple price points for memberships. The company said it would still announce "major subscriber milestones as we cross them."

Netflix also noted that it expects paid net additions to be lower in the second quarter compared to the first quarter "due to typical seasonality." Its second-quarter revenue forecast of $9.49 billion was just shy of Wall Street's estimate of $9.54 billion Shares of the company fell around 4% in extended trading. Netflix reported first-quarter net income of $2.33 billion, or $5.28 per share, versus $1.30 billion, or $2.88 per share, in the prior-year period. The company posted revenue of $9.37 billion for the quarter, up from $8.16 billion in the year-ago quarter.

U.S. telecom provider Frontier Communications shut down its systems after a cybercrime group breached some of its IT systems in a recent cyberattack. BleepingComputer reports: Frontier is a leading U.S. communications provider that provides gigabit Internet speeds over a fiber-optic network to millions of consumers and businesses across 25 states. After discovering the incident, the company was forced to partially shut down some systems to prevent the threat actors from laterally moving through the network, which also led to some operational disruptions. Despite this, Frontier says the attackers could access some PII data, although it didn't disclose if it belonged to customers, employees, or both.

"On April 14, 2024, Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. [..] detected that a third party had gained unauthorized access to portions of its information technology environment," the company revealed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. "Based on the Company's investigation, it has determined that the third party was likely a cybercrime group, which gained access to, among other information, personally identifiable information." Frontier now believes that it has contained the breach, has since restored its core IT systems affected during the incident, and is working on restoring normal business operations.

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech -- formerly known as Lambda School -- with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices. From a report: The business, which claims on its site it will help students land their "dream job" in tech at companies like Amazon, Cisco, and Google, accepted the consent order without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. In an announcement yesterday, the CFPB said it had taken action against BloomTech and its CEO Austen Allred for allegedly not disclosing the true cost of its loans to students and allegedly claiming overoptimistic hiring rates for BloomTech graduates. BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, has operated since 2017 and offers six- to nine-month vocational programs in science and engineering, with a focus on computer technology.

"BloomTech and its CEO sought to drive students toward income share loans that were marketed as risk-free, but in fact carried significant finance charges and many of the same risks as other credit products," said Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB. With income share loans or income share agreements, BloomTech allowed students to pay tuition later but in exchange had to pay a percentage of their future income, CFPB claimed. The agency alleged that BloomTech explicitly told students that its income share loans (which cost an average of $4k "finance charge" to use) weren't actually loans at all. The CFPB claimed in the settlement order a "significant majority" of students used these loans to finance their education, and alleged each student could end up paying up to $30k of their income to BloomTech to settle the loans. From the CFPB's press release: BloomTech advertised on its website that 71 to 86 percent of students were placed in jobs within six months of graduation, when its non-public reporting to investors consistently showed placement rates closer to 50 percent. Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.

U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities. Nikkei: Boeing Chief Technology Officer Todd Citron revealed the plans in an interview with Nikkei. The company is developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft at subsidiary Wisk Aero. The aircraft will adopt autonomous technology, rare among eVTOL craft. The plan is to first obtain certification in the U.S. before expanding into Asia. Details of the Asia business will be finalized in the future, including whether Boeing will sell the aircraft to companies aiming to provide eVTOL transportation services or operate the services itself.

Boeing is currently considering which country in Asia to enter first, including Japan. In Japan, domestic startup SkyDrive and Germany's Volocopter are scheduled to operate air taxi services at the 2025 Osaka World Expo. Boeing opened a research and development base in Nagoya on Thursday. It first established R&D operations in Japan in 2022 but had been renting space from other companies until now.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called "Platforms and Devices" that will oversee all of Google's Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. From a report: The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google's hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS, will be taking on other projects inside of Google and Alphabet. This is a huge change for Google, and it likely won't be the last one. There's only one reason for all of it, Osterloh says: AI. "This is not a secret, right?" he says.

Consolidating teams "helps us to be able to do full-stack innovation when that's necessary," Osterloh says. He uses the example of the Pixel camera: "You had to have deep knowledge of the hardware systems, from the sensors to the ISPs, to all layers of the software stack. And, at the time, all the early HDR and ML models that were doing camera processing... and I think that hardware / software / AI integration really showed how AI could totally transform a user experience. That was important. And it's even more true today."

Google said on Thursday it had terminated 28 employees after some staff participated in protests against the company's cloud contract with the Israeli government. From a report: The Alphabet unit said a small number of protesting employees entered and disrupted work at a few unspecified office locations. "Physically impeding other employees' work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior," the company said in a statement.

Google said it had concluded individual investigations, resulting in the termination of 28 employees, and would continue to investigate and take action as needed. In a statement on Medium, Google workers affiliated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign called it a "flagrant act of retaliation" and said that some employees who did not directly participate in Tuesday's protests were also among those Google fired.

Amazon staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called "Big River," WSJ reports. The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. From the report: For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. "We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators," Big River says on its website. "We have a passion for customers and aren't afraid to experiment."

What the website doesn't say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant's competitors. Born out of a 2015 plan code named "Project Curiosity," Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business.

[...] The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon's elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals' seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon. They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally -- in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses -- and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren't even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: In a new blog post from LastPass, the password management firm used by countless personal and corporate clients to help protect their login information, the company explains that someone used AI voice-cloning tech to spoof the voice of its CEO in an attempt to trick one of its employees. As the company writes in the post, one of its employees earlier this week received several WhatsApp communications -- including calls, texts, and a voice message -- from someone claiming to be its CEO, Karim Toubba. Luckily, the LastPass worker didn't fall for it because the whole thing set off so many red flags. "As the attempted communication was outside of normal business communication channels and due to the employee's suspicion regarding the presence of many of the hallmarks of a social engineering attempt (such as forced urgency)," the post reads, "our employee rightly ignored the messages and reported the incident to our internal security team so that we could take steps to both mitigate the threat and raise awareness of the tactic both internally and externally."

While this LastPass scam attempt failed, those who follow these sorts of things may recall that the company has been subject to successful hacks before. In August 2022, as a timeline of the event compiled by the Cybersecurity Dive blog detailed, a hacker compromised a LastPass engineer's laptop and used it to steal source code and company secrets, eventually getting access to its customer database -- including encrypted passwords and unencrypted user data like email addresses. According to that timeline, the clearly-resourceful bad actor remained active in the company's servers for months, and it took more than two months for LastPass to admit that it had been breached. More than six months after the initial breach, Toubba, the CEO, provided a blow-by-blow timeline of the months-long attack and said he took "full responsibility" for the way things went down in a February 2023 blog post.

Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston said he views his employees like customers, and that means giving them what they want -- which isn't in-person work. From a report: "We will support however they want to gather," Houston said in a new interview with The Verge. "But we're finding that these retreats and off-sites and things like that are often a lot more effective than asking people to commute." Houston said other business leaders are making the wrong move by forcing employees back to the office. Many companies are pushing employees to return to office in a hybrid structure, including giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon.

"They keep mashing the go back to 2019 button, and they see it's not working," Houston said in the interview, speaking generally about return-to-office mandates. "Then they just push harder, and then you have this really toxic relationship." He compared returning to the office to returning to movie theaters or malls. It may have been cool for a time and people might still occasionally want to watch a big movie like "Top Gun" at the cinema, he said, "but the world has moved on." The CEO said the reason it used to be so easy to get people to the office was because they didn't have a choice. A lot of CEOs today don't understand that flexibility wasn't an option in the past, Houston said.

The SEC has blocked third-party messaging apps and texts from employees' work phones, "bringing its own practices closer to the standards it's enforcing for the industry," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The SEC's decision to block disappearing-messaging apps will help improve record-keeping and address potential security vulnerabilities at the agency, which saw one of its social-media accounts compromised earlier this year. It follows about $3 billion in fines imposed on financial firms to settle allegations that they failed to keep adequate records of work-related communications on mobile devices and apps such as Signal and Meta's WhatsApp.

The scrutiny prompted Wall Street to overhaul how employees communicate on business matters using mobile phones. Meanwhile, the SEC took a hard look at policies covering its own staff's communications on agency-issued phones. The agency has restricted access to third-party messaging applications, as well as SMS (short message service) and iMessage texts "to lower risk that our systems could be compromised and to enhance recordkeeping," an SEC spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. The process of blocking the apps began in September and has continued over the past several months, she added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet service providers would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The rules mirror the ones imposed by the FCC during the Obama era and repealed during Trump's presidency. But some advocates are criticizing a decision to let Internet service providers speed up certain types of applications as long as application providers don't have to pay for special treatment. Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick, who has consistently argued for stricter net neutrality rules, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that "harmful 5G fast lanes are coming."

"T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are all testing ways to create these 5G fast lanes for apps such as video conferencing, games, and video where the ISP chooses and controls what gets boosted," van Schewick wrote. "They use a technical feature in 5G called network slicing, where part of their radio spectrum gets used as a special lane for the chosen app or apps, separated from the usual Internet traffic. The FCC's draft order opens the door to these fast lanes, so long as the app provider isn't charged for them." In an FCC filing yesterday, AT&T said that carriers will use network slicing "to better meet the needs of particular business applications and consumer preferences than they could over a best-efforts network that generally treats all traffic the same."

Van Schewick warns that carriers could charge consumers more for plans that speed up specific types of content. For example, a mobile operator could offer a basic plan alongside more expensive tiers that boost certain online games or a tier that boosts services like YouTube and TikTok. Ericsson, a telecommunications vendor that sells equipment to carriers including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, has pushed for exactly this type of service. In a report on how network slicing can be used commercially, Ericsson said that "many gamers are willing to pay for enhanced gaming experiences" and would "pay up to $10.99 more for a guaranteed gaming experience on top of their 5G monthly subscription."

UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million. From a report: That's on top of the amount in advance funding and interest-free loans UnitedHealth provided to support care providers reeling from the disruption, a sum said to be north of $6 billion. In its results for the quarter ended March 31, filed today, UnitedHealth stated that the total impact on the company from the attack in Q1 was $0.74 per share, which is expected to rise to a sum between $1.15 and $1.35 per share by the end of the year.

The remediation efforts spent on the attack are ongoing, so the total costs related to business disruption and repairs are likely to exceed $1 billion over time, potentially including the reported $22 million payment made to the ALPHV/BlackCat-affiliated criminals behind the attack. It's a charge that eclipsed that of casino group MGM, which didn't pay a ransom following an attack on its systems last year, and which faces recovery costs of $100 million to rebuild its systems and paying for the fallout from outages, operational disruptions, allegedly leaked data and more.

Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union starting Tuesday. Developers who opt in -- and who meet Apple's criteria, including app notarization requirements -- will be able to offer iPhone apps for direct download to EU users from their own websites. From a report: It's a massive change for a mobile ecosystem that otherwise bars so-called "sideloading." Apple's walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past. But, in the EU, that moat is being dismantled as a result of new regulations that apply to the App Store and which the iPhone maker has been expected to comply with since early last month. In March, Apple announced that a web distribution entitlement would soon be coming to its mobile platform as part of changes aimed at complying with the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The pan-EU regulation puts a set of obligations on in-scope tech giants that lawmakers hope will level the competitive playing field for platforms' business users, as well as protecting consumers from Big Tech throwing its weight around.

The Justice Department is preparing to sue Live Nation as soon as next month [non-paywalled link], an antitrust challenge that could spur major changes at the biggest name in concert promotion and ticketing. WSJ: The agency is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Ticketmaster parent in the coming weeks that would allege the nation's biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events, according to people familiar with the matter.

The specific claims the department would allege couldn't be learned. The federal government opted out of trying to block Live Nation and Ticketmaster's 2010 tie up. Since then, the company has faced accusations of exorbitant ticket fees, flawed customer service and anticompetitive practices from lawmakers, regulators and state attorneys general. Critics of the merger say it has stifled competition in ticketing and that the company should be broken up. Live Nation's size and power in concert promotion, ticketing and venues are at the heart of a Justice Department investigation that began in 2022. The investigation gained momentum in November 2022 after Ticketmaster crashed during a fan presale to Taylor Swift's "Eras Tour."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot, it still represents one of the most significant experiments in tax filing in decades -- a free platform letting Americans file online directly to the government. Monday's announcement aside, though, Direct File's success has proven highly subjective.

By and large, people who tried the Direct File software -- which looks a lot like TurboTax or other commercial tax software, with its question-and-answer format -- gave it rave reviews. "Against all odds, the government has created an actually good piece of technology," a writer for the Atlantic marveled, describing himself as "giddy" as he used the website to chat live with a helpful IRS employee. The Post's Tech Friend columnist Shira Ovide called it "visible proof that government websites don't have to stink." Online, people tweeted praise after filing their taxes, like the user who called it the "easiest tax experience of my life."

While the users might be a happy group, however, there weren't many of them compared to other tax filing options -- and their positive reviews likely won't budge the opposition that Direct File has faced from tax software companies and Republicans from the outset. These headwinds will likely continue if the IRS wants to renew it for another tax season. The program opened to the public midway through tax season, when many low-income filers had already claimed their refunds -- and was restricted to taxpayers in 12 states, with only four types of income (wages, interest, Social Security and unemployment). But it gained popularity as tax season went on: The Treasury Department said more than half of the total users of Direct File completed their returns during the last week.

Ubisoft has come under fire from players who claim the company has revoked access to a game they had previously purchased. Users attempting to launch "The Crew" on Ubisoft Connect are met with a message stating, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" The game has also been moved to a separate "inactive games" section in players' libraries.

While the game can still be launched, it reportedly only plays a limited demo version. Ubisoft has yet to comment on the matter, but some speculate that the decision may be related to the game's reliance on servers that are no longer operational. The incident has sparked concerns among gamers about the control platform holders have over digital purchases. Ubisoft's subscription boss, Philippe Tremblay, recently stated that players will need to get "comfortable" with not owning games.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax "continues to relentlessly upsell" customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free. From a report: As noted in the letter, Warren's staff analyzed TurboTax's services using a sample taxpayer and found that the company attempted to upsell the customer eight times during the tax filing process. Warren writes that in "several cases," these solicitations "appear to be efforts to mislead customers into thinking that they must pay the extra fees in order to file their taxes when that is not the case." Some show up as full-screen prompts, forcing users to scroll to the bottom to deny the upgrade.

In one instance, Warren's team found that TurboTax highlighted its $89 tax filing package as "the right option" for their sample taxpayer, leaving the free option at the bottom of the page. After choosing just one upgrade, Warren's staff found that their sample taxpayer with "simple" filing requirements had to pay an extra $69 to report her unemployment income and educator expenses, plus $64 to file Massachusetts state tax returns. That makes for a grand total of $133 -- a sum people wouldn't have to pay through the IRS's free Direct File service, Warren argues.

AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon are quietly trying to weaken a $42.5 billion federal program to improve internet access across the nation, aiming to block strict new rules that would require them to lower their poorest customers' monthly bills in exchange for a share of the federal aid. From a report: In state after state, the telecom firms have blasted the proposed price cuts as illegal -- forcing regulators in California, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere to rethink, scale back or abandon their plans to condition the federal funds on financial relief for consumers. The lobbying campaign threatens to undermine the largest burst of money to upgrade the country's internet service in U.S. history. Enacted by President Biden as part of a sprawling 2021 infrastructure law, the funds are intended to deliver speedy and affordable broadband to the final unserved pockets of America by 2030 -- a goal that the White House likens to the federal campaign nearly a century ago to electrify the nation's heartland.