Following much speculation and political lobbying, Amazon revealed on Tuesday that it will open its second headquarters in Crystal City in Virginia and New York City. Furthermore, Amazon announced that Nashville will be the base for its new Center of Excellence for its Operations business. The center will be responsible for the company’s customer fulfillment, transportation, supply chain and related tasks. The Washington Post outlined the significance of the decision for the places that the online retail behemoth has selected:

The choice of Crystal City in Arlington County as one of the winners cements Northern Virginia’s reputation as a magnet for business and potentially reshape the Washington region into an eastern outpost of Silicon Valley over the next decade.

Another Facebook vulnerability has been found that could have exposed information about users and their friends.

The security company Imperva has released new details on a Facebook vulnerability that could have exposed user data. The bug allowed websites to obtain private information about Facebook users and their friends through unauthorized access to a company API, playing off a specific behavior in the Chrome browser. The bug was disclosed to Facebook and resolved in May.

At this point Facebook is a giant dumpster fire. Get out while you still can.

In another BGP hijack, Google traffic was rerouted yesterday through Russia and China. This included Google Cloud, YouTube, and other services.

Specifically, network connectivity to Google was instead routed through TransTelekom in Russia (mskn17ra-lo1.transtelecom.net), and into a China Telecom gateway (ChinaTelecom-gw.transtelecom.net) that black-holed the packets. Both hostnames have since stopped resolving to IP addresses.

Hijack me once, shame on you. Hijack me twice, shame on me.

A new HTTP version is coming, and it will work differently than previous versions. Instead of using TCP, it will use a Google technology called QUIC.

In its continued efforts to make Web networking faster, Google has been working on an experimental network protocol named QUIC: “Quick UDP Internet Connections.” QUIC reinstates the reliability and ordering that TCP has but without introducing the same number of round trips and latency.

For example, if a client is reconnecting to a server, the client can send important encryption data with the very first packet, enabling the server to resurrect the old connection, using the same encryption as previously negotiated, without requiring any additional round trips.

Contactless payments and bank apps are introducing kids to a cashless society. Some parents are using these apps instead of forking over cash allowances.

 “Young people are seeing less and less cash transactions, which just means that we have to be even more careful to talk about what is happening at each of those stages, because it has become more abstract,” said Winnard.

This is also how Apple seems to be marketing Apple Pay Cash in part. Parents can use iMessage to give their kids money.

An iPhone X seized as part of an investigation was remotely wiped by its owner. This begs the question: Does wiping an iPhone count as destruction of evidence?

Police believe Juelle L. Grant, 24, of Willow Avenue, may have been the driver of a vehicle involved in an Oct. 23 drive-by shooting on Van Vranken Avenue, near Lang Street, so they obtained her phone, according to police allegations filed in court.

No one was injured in the shooting. After police took her iPhone X, telling her it was considered evidence, “she did remotely wipe” the device, according to police.

This will be an interesting case to watch, and could set the tone for future phone-related incidents.

Buzzfeed News has discovered a  sophisticated digital advertising fraud scheme targeting Android devices, in which ads were shown to bots, not real users. The article estimates that those behind the scheme “stole close to $10 million from advertisers who used Google’s ad network to place ads in the affected websites and apps”. The fraudulent scheme operated across a  large network of Android apps, including some aimed at children.  It raises major questions about the reviews process used by Google. The article noted that “the Google Play store has a less rigorous app review process than Apple’s App Store.” Here’s some of what Buzzfeed News found:

An investigation by BuzzFeed News reveals that these seemingly separate apps and companies are today part of a massive, sophisticated digital advertising fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites connected to a network of front and shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. More than a dozen of the affected apps are targeted at kids or teens, and a person involved in the scheme estimates it has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from brands whose ads were shown to bots instead of actual humans.

An ongoing study by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts claims that Sprint is throttling Skype without telling customers.

Choffnes and his team analyzed more than 719,417 tests conducted by 100,000 users across 135 countries, and discovered that wireless carriers routinely throttle streaming video applications. While carriers often claim this kind of throttling only occurs in response to network congestion, evidence suggests the practice is often tied to efforts to upsell users to pricier plans.

We need net neutrality more than ever.

The USPS Informed Delivery Service is vulnerable to identity thieves. The services lets you see a preview of your mail on the web and mobile, and this week the U.S Secret Service issued a warning about it.

The internal alert — sent by the Secret Service on Nov. 6 to its law enforcement partners nationwide — references a recent case in Michigan in which seven people were arrested for allegedly stealing credit cards from resident mailboxes after signing up as those victims at the USPS’s Web site.

According to the Secret Service alert, the accused used the Informed Delivery feature “to identify and intercept mail, and to further their identity theft fraud schemes.”

Ugh, why can’t we have nice things?

Writing in his iPad Pro Diary series, Ben Lovejoy argues that the iPad needs a computer OS in order to be closer to a computer. He calls it “padOS.”

But while the iPad Pro isn’t trying to be a Mac, it is a grown-up device and it needs a grown-up operating system. Not macOS, but rather a tailored version of iOS, designed to take advantage of the additional capabilities of the iPad. What some people have termed padOS.

To Mr. Lovejoy I say this: Have no fear, this is what iOS 13 will be. *crosses fingers*

The Phoblographer writes about why film emulator apps like VSCO and iPhone don’t replace traditional film photography. My argument is that yes, they have. Film isn’t dead just like vinyl isn’t dead, but both have been relegated to a small group of people. I’ve tried to use VSCO as an editor for years, but I never stuck with it until they VSCO. Now I use VSCO for 90% of my own editing. You can write about how things like film and vinyl make you feel all artsy-fartsy, and how iPhone photographers aren’t real photographers. But the photographer’s goal is to capture the world, and you should use the best tools you can in service of that goal. Whether those tools are film, a DSLR, or a disposable camera, the end result is that you created something.

Google wants to make it easier for scientists to share scientific models, so today it announced Kubeflow pipelines and AI Hub to help.

To help fix that, Google is announcing Kubeflow pipelines, which are an extension of Kubeflow, an open source framework built on top of Kubernetes designed specifically for machine learning…The company is also announcing AI Hub, which as the name implies is a central place where data scientists can go to find different kinds ML content including Kubeflow pipelines, Jupyter notebooks, TensorFlow modules and so forth.

In an unusually repair-friendly move by Apple, you will be able to replace the new MacBook Air battery yourself.

“This is a huge step forward,” said Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a popular website dedicated to repairing Apple products. “Apple’s glued-down battery design has been a challenge for consumers, recyclers, and for Apple’s own technicians. Preserving the removability of the MacBook Air’s battery is really important.”