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Enlarge (credit: Mongkol Chuewong, GettyImages)

During preparation for a workshop at DEF CON in August on locating privacy leaks in network traffic, we discovered a number of applications on both iOS and Android that were broadcasting precise location data back to the applications' developers—in some cases in unencrypted formats. Research released late Friday by Sudo Security's Guardian mobile firewall team provided some confirmation to our findings—and demonstrated that many apps are sharing location data with firms that market location data information without the users' knowledge.

In a blog post entitled "Location Monetization in iOS Apps," the Guardian team detailed 24 applications from the Apple iOS App Store that pushed data to 12 different "location-data monetization firms"—companies that collect precise location data from application users for profit. The 24 identified applications were found in a random sampling of the App Store's top free applications, so there are likely many more apps for iOS surreptitiously selling user location data. Additionally, the Guardian team confirmed that one data-mining service was connected with apps from over 100 local broadcasters owned by companies such as Sinclair, Tribune Broadcasting, Fox, and Nexstar Media.

While some of these applications use location data from various sources as part of their service—several were weather applications, and one was a fitness tracker—others use location mostly "for providing you more relevant ads." None explicitly stated that data was being shared with a third party.

Enlarge / An employee pushes a trolley with a Vizio Inc. high-definition television (HDTV) at a Target Corp. store on Black Friday in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, Nov. 24, 2017. (credit: Laura Buckman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In what is likely a first in the industry, Vizio is on the verge of agreeing to display a class-action lawsuit message through its previously sold "Smart TV" televisions as part of a legal settlement. This message is meant to alert customers who bought the TV that they will be party to the forthcoming settlement and likely will get a small amount of money.

As Ars has reported previously, the manufacturer has been under scrutiny since a 2015 revelation that it was snooping on its customers.

The tracking started in February 2014 on both new TVs and previously sold devices that didn't originally ship with ACR software installed. The software periodically appended IP addresses to the collected data and also made it possible for more detailed personal information—including age, sex, income, marital status, household size, education level, home ownership, and home values—to be associated.

Enlarge / The atoms and bowl are exactly like this. Except the bowl is red and the atoms have a softer shell. (credit: Bart Everson)

Lasers? Individual atoms trapped next to hot surfaces? Lots of dense text about degrees of freedom and stuff? I have found the after life, and it is a big quantum optics experiment.

Researchers have shown how to trap and cool atoms right next to a hot surface. This sounds a bit abstract. But if we ever want to make use of ultra cold atoms in sensors, this is exactly what we need to be able to do. 

The basic idea behind these sorts of studies is that single atoms make highly sensitive probes for magnetic fields. They can be used to model complicated quantum systems to perform calculations for us. They can be used to help with quantum key distribution. There is almost nothing that cannot be done given a laser and some ultra cold atoms.

Enlarge / Azure DevOps Pipeline. (credit: Microsoft)

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Microsoft's application lifecycle management system, is to undergo a major shake-up and rebranding. Instead of a single Visual Studio-branded service, it's being split into five separate Azure-branded services, under the banner Azure DevOps.

The five components:

• Azure Pipelines, a continuous integration, testing, and deployment system that can connect to any Git repository
• Azure Boards, a work tracking system with Kanban boards, dashboards, reporting
• Azure Artifacts, a hosting facility for Maven, npm, and NuGet packages
• Azure Repos, a cloud-hosted private Git repository service
• Azure Test Plans, for managing tests and capturing data about defects.

VSTS has been broken up in this way to further Microsoft's ambition of making its developer tooling useful to any development process and workflow, regardless of language or platform. The division into individual components should make it easier for developers to adopt portions of the Azure DevOps platform, without requiring them to go "all in" on VSTS. The reduced scope of each component means that it's cheaper than the VSTS pricing, making incremental adoption more palatable. For example, a Pipelines process could build and test a Node.js service from a GitHub repository and then deploy to a container on Amazon's AWS cloud, without requiring use of any of the other Azure DevOps components.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | nevarpp)

Frontier Communications is asking employees for help in its fight against state net neutrality rules in California, claiming that the rules will give "free" Internet to major Web companies while raising costs for consumers.

The Internet service provider urged employees to submit a form letter asking Governor Jerry Brown to veto the net neutrality bill that was recently approved by the state legislature. Frontier sent an email to employees and set up an online form for them to send the form letter to Brown.

"I am proud to work at Frontier and help operate a network that is part of an incredibly successful Internet ecosystem that is the backbone of our economy and daily life," the form letter says. But net neutrality rules "will harm consumers and impose complex layers of costly regulation," and therefore "deter investment and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas that still lack high-speed Internet access," the letter says.