That came in a Senate hearing on Wednesday which signified the increasing agreement among Democrats, Republicans and smaller companies that the world’s biggest tech firms have become too powerful.

Amy Klobuchar, the top Senate Democrat on antitrust issues, said Apple and Google can use their power to “exclude or suppress apps that compete with their own products” and “charge excessive fees that affect competition.”

Several small companies including Tile, Spotify and Match Group criticized the two tech giants over their dominance.

While Tile said Apple boxed out its products and then copied them, Spotify testified Apple blocked it from informing customers that they could find cheaper prices outside its iPhone app and yet Match Group said that it now paid nearly $500 million a year to Apple and Google in app store fees, the company’s single largest expense.

In response to their complaints, representatives for Apple and Google said the companies need to have tight control over their stores and the associated revenue-sharing requirements in order to enforce and pay for security measures aimed at protecting consumers from harmful apps and practices.

They also said they do not copy competitors and that few apps pay their commissions.

However, both Democratic and Republican senators were skeptical of those explanations.

“Google and Apple are here to defend the patently indefensible,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. “If you presented this fact pattern in a law school antitrust exam, the students would laugh the professor out of the classroom, because it is such an obvious violation of our antitrust laws.”

In addition, explanations from Apple’s Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer and Google’s Wilson White, senior director for government affairs, as to why the companies’ fees do not apply to Uber Technologies Inc, (UBER.N) and apps selling physical goods did not satisfy senators either.

“I feel like unfrozen caveman lawyer,” Senator Mike Lee said. “I’m not grasping it.”

Meanwhile, Blumenthal expressed concern about a call Match said it received late on Tuesday from its business counterpart at Google.

Match Group said one of its employees received the call from a Google account representative who raised questions about its written testimony.

Match’s Chief Legal Officer Jared Sine said Google sought to know why his planned testimony deviated from previous comments the company had made.

“It looks like a threat, it talks like a threat, it’s a threat,” Blumenthal said of the call, promising to probe Google’s action further.

Sine also said Google and Apple both exact an onerous 30% of any digital transaction, causing the prices to increase for consumers.

Match pays around $500 million in fees to the app stores per year, the company’s single largest expense, according to Sine.

The testimony came a day after Apple said it would start to sell AirTags – which can be attached to items like car keys to help users find them when they are lost – in direct competition with Tile, which has been selling a similar tracking device for over a decade.

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The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Facebook pledged to help one another if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising. The tech giants reportedly cut a deal in 2018 in which Facebook agreed not to compete with Google’s online advertising tools. They were reportedly aware the deal could result in an antitrust probe and agreed to team up if they ever faced an antitrust investigation.

The story is based on an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 U.S. states against Google last week that was seen by the Journal.

Google and Facebook reportedly made a deal in September 2018 in which Facebook agreed not to compete with Google’s online advertising tools. In return, the social media giant was given “special treatment” when it used them itself, according to the Journal.

The lawsuit reportedly states that Google and Facebook knew their deal could result in antitrust investigations.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the claims made in the lawsuit were inaccurate. “The idea that this was a secret deal is just wrong. We’ve been public about this partnership for years,” they said.

Facebook did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

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Initially, the technology was made available for Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows 10 devices. Today, Google announced it is expanding this technology to iOS as well.

Today’s news means that iPhone and iPad users can now use their (secondary) Android smartphones as a security key whenever logging into their Google accounts on an iOS device.

The technology works basically the same, as Google explained in April, at the Cloud Next 2019 conference.

To use it, users will have to have Bluetooth enabled on both their iOS and Android devices, so the Android smartphone can sign and authorize any login attempts for Google accounts initiated from the iOS counterpart.

The only difference in the login mechanism, is who will be managing the login operations. On desktops and laptops, the Chrome browser is used to communicate with the Android phone’s built-in security key over Bluetooth using FIDO’s CTAP2 protocol.

Because there’s no actual Chrome browser on iOS (Chrome for iOS is actually running on WebKit — aka a customized Safari), for iOS devices, the Chrome browser will be replaced by Google’s Smart Lock app, which users will have to install on their iOS devices.

If iOS users need help in setting up their Android smartphones as a security key for iOS devices, Google has some instructions in this blog post.

Only Android smartphones running Android 7.0 (Nougat) or later support the built-in security key mechanism.

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You type, hacker deciphers, your password is doomed. That is the grim scenario being discussed in a paper that is now on arXiv. “Hearing your touch: A new acoustic side channel on smartphones,” is by authors Ilia Shumailov, Laurent Simon, Jeff Yan and Ross Anderson, TechXplore reported.

What goes on in the theft process in this manner? Short and simple, sound waves emanating from your typing on a phone are decoded. They evaluated the effectiveness of the attack with 45 participants on an Android tablet and an Android smartphone.

Buster Hein in Cult of Mac said with sound waves traveling through the screen and the air to the phone’s mic, the algorithm predicts where certain vibrations come from.

The researchers said, “by recording audio through the built-in microphone(s), a malicious app can infer text” as the user enters it on his or her device. The team successfully recovered 27 out of 45 passwords on a phone, and 19 out of 27 passwords on a tablet, via typing vibrations.

They designed a machine-learning algorithm able to decode vibrations for keystrokes. The Washington Post: “Among a test group of 45 people across several tests, the researchers could correctly replicate passwords on smartphones seven times out of 27, within 10 attempts. On tablets, the researchers achieved better results, nailing the password 19 times out of 27 within 10 attempts.”

Really, a hacker can steal your password just by listening to you type? Ian Randall in Daily Mail had more about this “machine-learning algorithm.” He said it was built to try to matcheach vibration to a particular point on the devices’ screen where the users had touched the on-screen keyboard while typing or entering a password.

The authors themselves explained what was going on: “When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap generates a sound wave that propagates on the screen surface and in the air. We found the device’s microphone(s) can recover this wave and ‘hear’ the finger’s touch, and the wave’s distortions are characteristic of the tap’s location on the screen.”

The result: by recording audio through the built-in microphone, a malicious app can infer text as the user enters it on his or her device.

For their experiment, they used phones and a tablet. There were 45 participants in a real-world environment. And, when they say real-world, they really mean real-world:

“We conducted the experiments outside of the lab environment in order to simulate real- life conditions more closely, thereby improving the validity of the study.”

The participants performed in three different places: 1) in a common room, where people chat and occasionally a coffee machine makes some drink with loud sounds; 2) in a reading room where people type or speak in a semi-loud voice; and 3) in the library where there are a lot of clicking sounds from laptops. All three places had ambient noise coming in from windows left open.

What did the authors recommend as safeguards and solutions?

The authors said, “Mobile devices may need a richer capability model, a more user-friendly notification system for sensor usage and a more thorough evaluation of the information leaked by the underlying hardware.”

Elsewhere in the discussion, they explored various options, and one of them was to offer “a properly-engineered PIN entry facility, which when called by one application would temporarily blank, and/or introduce noise into, the microphone channel seen by other apps. This approach should logically be extended to other sensors that can be used to harvest PINs via side-channels such as the accelerometer, gyro and camera.”

They also mentioned for the OS to introduce timing jitter, or decoy tap sounds, into the microphone data stream. This would hinder an attacker aiming to identify tap locations.

“As the taps themselves are pretty unnoticeable for humans, this should not disturb applications that run in the background and collect audio with user consent.”

At the application level, they said, “an app might itself introduce false tap sounds into the device, in order to jam and confuse any hostile apps that happen to be listening.” Tactical jamming, they said, was a low-cost countermeasure.

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Although the Iranian state broadcaster’s YouTube channels can still be accessed, no new content can be published, despite the media outlets stating that they have not violated any of Google’s policies.

The Times of Israel speculated Monday that the move by Google may have been in reaction to a publication by Hispan TV titled “Israel uses Palestinian prisoners for new medical trials.”

Hispan TV has announced that the censorship is the “price of being the voice of the oppressed,” while Press TV reported that Google “refused to offer an explanation for shutting down the accounts,” Forbes reported Tuesday.

“I think it’s really shocking,” Shadjareh told host John Kiriakou.

“We don’t expect anything [less] from [US President Donald] Trump and his administration than to behave in this way. And the international community has come to learn and accept this kind of outrageous behavior [against Iran],” he said, also noting that social media platforms and technology companies like Google are supposed to represent freedom of expression.

“We have been getting a lot of reports, which we [Islamic Human Rights Commission] are investigating right now, that companies like Google are putting algorithms in place so that if you search for certain issues, [the ranking] that comes up will be artificially manipulated, so those views are hidden and not presented… this is actually extremely dangerous, because it creates dictatorship of ideas and thoughts and it gives them [Google] absolute power to manipulate ideas and exclude certain views, and that is not really what social media is supposed to be,” Shadjareh added.

This is not the first time that the Iranian channels have been blocked by Google.

“[Our] original YouTube channel was established in December 2009 and closed in September 2013,” noted a recent report by Press TV. “A new channel was then opened, but it was shut [down] almost two months later. Another channel was opened, but it suffered the same fate after five months. The fourth channel, however, remained active with over 270,000 subscribers until it was closed today.”

Google’s actions coincide with the White House’s Monday announcement that it will not reissue sanctions waivers to countries that purchase Iranian oil after they expire in May. Washington has claimed that the decision “is intended to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero,” destroying a vital source of revenue for Tehran. The move to end waivers comes after the US withdrew from the so-called Iran Nuclear Deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, last year, triggering the reimposition of US sanctions against Tehran.

According to Shadjareh, the censorship move by Google will set a dangerous precedent for all “alternative views.”

“Alternative views are going to be put under pressure, and this is what is so dangerous,” Shadjareh told Sputnik.

“We know institutions, like the current Trump administration, want to keep people ignorant on certain realities. There seems to be coordinated effort to control what we read and control what we think and control how we behave, and this affects every single one of us, and it’s very dangerous to give this level of control to companies who are adhering to the Trump administration. This [sets] a very dangerous precedent.”

“Iranians are recognizing that they have to stand on their own merit. Countries like China, Russia, and Turkey will continue doing deals with them, but [the sanction efforts by the US] will… have an impact on not just Iran’s economy but economies of the West as the well. We need to recognize that we are all going to suffer because of the restrictions [against Iran] because of the erosion of our civil liberties,” he added.

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To find them, the team, led by an undergraduate at UT Austin, Anne Dattilo, created an algorithm that sifts through the data taken by Kepler to ferret out signals that were missed by traditional planet-hunting methods. Long term, the process should help astronomers find many more missed planets hiding in Kepler data. The discoveries have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of The Astronomical Journal, Phys reported.

Other team members include NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin Andrew Vanderburg and Google engineer Christopher Shallue. In 2017, Vanderburg and Shallue first used AI to uncover a planet around a Kepler star—one already known to harbor seven planets. The discovery made that solar system the only one known to have as many planets as our own.

Dattilo explained that this project necessitated a new algorithm, as data taken during Kepler’s extended mission K2 differs significantly from that collected during the spacecraft’s original mission.

“K2 data is more challenging to work with because the spacecraft is moving around all the time,” Vanderburg explained. This change came about after a mechanical failure. While mission planners found a workaround, the spacecraft was left with a wobble that AI had to take into account.

The Kepler and K2 missions have already discovered thousands of planets around other stars, with an equal number of candidates awaiting confirmation. So why do astronomers need to use AI to search the Kepler archive for more?

“AI will help us search the data set uniformly,” Vanderburg said. “Even if every star had an Earth-sized planet around it, when we look with Kepler, we won’t find all of them. That’s just because some of the data’s too noisy, or sometimes the planets are just not aligned right. So, we have to correct for the ones we missed. We know there are a lot of planets out there that we don’t see for those reasons.

“If we want to know how many planets there are in total, we have to know how many planets we’ve found, but we also have to know how many planets we missed. That’s where this comes in,” he explained.

The two planets Dattilo’s team found “are both very typical of planets found in K2,” she said. “They’re really close in to their host star, they have short orbital periods, and they’re hot. They are slightly larger than Earth.”

Of the two planets, one is called K2-293b and orbits a star 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. The other, K2-294b, orbits a star 1,230 light-years away, also located in Aquarius.

Once the team used their algorithm to find these planets, they followed up by studying the host stars using ground-based telescopes to confirm that the planets are real. These observations were done with the 1.5-meter telescope at the Smithsonian Institution’s Whipple Observatory in Arizona and the Gillett Telescope at Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.

The future of the AI concept for finding planets hidden in data sets looks bright. The current algorithm can be used to probe the entire K2 data set, Dattilo said—approximately 300,000 stars. She also believes the method is applicable to Kepler’s successor planet-hunting mission, TESS, which launched in April 2018. Kepler’s mission ended later that year.

Dattilo plans to continue her work using AI for planet hunting when she enters graduate school in the fall.

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The new feature, named USBGuard, will block access to the USB port access while the device’s screen is locked.

According to a Chrome OS source code commit spotted by Chrome Story earlier this week, the new feature is currently available in Chrome OS Canary builds and is expected to land in the stable branch of Chrome OS soon.

Once this happens, users can enable it by modifying the following Chrome OS flag: chrome://flags/#enable-usbguard

The way this security feature is meant to work is by preventing the operating system from reading or executing any code when a USB-based device is plugged in, and the screen is locked.

Google took this precaution to prevent Rubber Ducky-type of attacks. A Rubber Ducky is a well-known term used to describe a malicious USB thumb drive that when plugged into a computer mimics a keyboard and runs malicious commands, ZDnet reported.

Variations, such as BadUSB, PoisonTap, USBdriveby, or USBHarpoon have popped up online, allowing anyone to create their own malicious USB-based attack tool.

A threat actor that has even temporary access to a computer can plug in one of these tools into a PC while the target is away from his computer and retrieve data or infect it with malware.

Most of these attacks can be prevented by disabling the USB port, and this is what Google is doing by giving Chromebook owners an option that disables the USB port altogether while they’re away and the device is in a locked state.

Apple rolled out a similar feature for iOS in July this year. iOS 11.4.1 included a new feature that required users to unlock their device after an hour of inactivity before allowing any activity over a USB port.

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The bug, which was introduced to Google+ in November, allowed developers to access personal profile information including name, birthday, gender, nickname and more even if those users had limited access to that information.

“We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced,” wrote Google vice president David Thacker in a blog post, Extremetech reported. “No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.”

The disclosure comes two months after Google revealed another security vulnerability affecting the social network. Back in October, the company disclosed that it had discovered and patched a bug that allowed application developers to access personal data earlier this year.

At the time, Google said that Google+ had seen “low usage and engagement,” with over 90 percent of all usage sessions lasting 5 seconds or less. This led to the decision to shutter the network, with Google first saying that it would turn off access in August of next year.

Google’s disclosures are a bit different from the issues that Facebook was facing earlier this year. Companies regularly find security flaws in their products, and there are currently no reports that anyone actually used the bugs in Google+ to steal any personal data.

Facebook on the other hand had purposefully designed its product in a way that allowed app developers to access a vast amount of data. The Trump campaign-linked data consultancy Cambridge Analytica made use of those design decisions to siphon data off the platform, which was possibly used to aid political campaigns.

Still, the latest disclosure will likely put a bigger spotlight on Google’s privacy practices. It is also poised to come up when Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before Congress on Tuesday.

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