The site Android Police is calling out new feature flags in Chrome's early-release Dev and Canary channels (V85) "which modify the appearance and behavior of web addresses in the address bar." The main flag is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref" which hides everything in the current web address except the domain name... There are two additional flags that modify this behavior. One reveals the full address once you hover over the address bar (instead of having to click it), while the other only hides the address bar once you interact with the page...

There's no public explanation yet for why Google is pressing ahead with these changes, but the company has said in the past that it believes showing the full address can make it harder to tell if the current site is legitimate. "Showing the full URL may detract from the parts of the URL that are more important to making a security decision on a webpage," Chromium software engineer Livvie Lin said in a design document earlier this year.

However, it's also worth considering that making the web address less important, as this feature does, benefits Google as a company. Google's goal with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and similar technologies is to keep users on Google-hosted content as much as possible, and Chrome for Android already modifies the address bar on AMP pages to hide that the pages are hosted by Google. Modifying addresses on the desktop is another step towards making them irrelevant, which hurts the decentralized nature of the internet as a whole.

With a net worth of $5 billion, Jack Dorsey is the world's 410th-wealthiest person, reports Recode, and "has now kick-started one of the most radical experiments in this era of historic income inequality — whether it is possible to quickly give away more than $1 billion of his money, and to do it effectively." Dorsey said this April that he would give away what was then one-third of his assets to a new charitable vehicle, Start Small, for coronavirus relief efforts, primarily. It was, by far, the largest dedication of money to Covid-19 by a billionaire. What was more striking, though, was Dorsey's willingness to disclose each gift in real time on a public Google spreadsheet. Dorsey has now given away $90 million to five dozen nonprofit groups, both around the globe and in his backyard, on immediate needs and on longer-term rebuilding projects, for coronavirus issues and for racial justice, and all of this with a standout record when it comes to supporting minorities — a record that is earning Dorsey respect from experts and is surprising even those who originally saw the announcement as a self-serving publicity junket...

Billionaires feel almost burdened by their enormous wealth, wealth advisers say, and feel such a responsibility to not screw up giving it away that they end up doing nothing — stockpiling money into private foundations or donor-advised funds and saving the hard decisions for their retirements, if they ever make them at all... But advocates dream that times are a-changin' in the world of the mega-rich — if only someone could show that it's not so hard to avoid fumbles while moving real money. And that's why so many eyes are on Dorsey as he tests a new way... Dorsey's approach is highly replicable for the billionaire class — even after the pandemic — by serving as a proof point that a lot of the process and bureaucracy that stalls their charitable giving are gratuitous...

"I want to give out all my money in my lifetime," Dorsey said on a podcast earlier this month to his friend Andrew Yang, to whose nonprofit he gave $5 million. "I want to see the impacts, selfishly, in my lifetime."
The article contracts Dorsey's approach to what other tech billionaire's were saying around a decade ago.

• Jeff Bezos: "Sometimes I think we try to solve problems before we understand the problem."

• Google co-founder Sergey Brin: "Our philanthropy is something I want to take my time with and develop and systematize."

But since then Brin "has largely remained AWOL in the world of major giving," the article points out, possibly due to an overabundance of caution. "[B]y modeling an alternative, Dorsey is offering one of the most convincing rebuttals."

"President Trump on Saturday told his Twitter and Facebook followers to drop Comcast..." reports CNN -- adding that "For the most part, people just shrugged." Comcast executives barely batted any eyelashes. The company didn't bother to comment. And Google searches for "Comcast customer service" trended lower than in recent days... Saturday's anti-Comcast post received fewer than 10,000 retweets in 10 hours. On Facebook, where it was reposted, it received fewer than 7,500 comments.

One of the comments with the most reactions said, "You spend way too much time on social media."

Strangely, his post was a reaction to a three-year-old tweet by former Arkansas governor and Fox News commentator Mike Huckabee, who wrote in 2017 that the mafia has "better service than Comcast. Sure they shoot you, but it's over with and they don't charge you for the bullet," Huckabee riffed. It was unclear how the old tweet suddenly grabbed the president's attention.
Though reaction to the tweet seemed muted, CNN still called it "an egregious use" of a presidential platform to hurt an American business...

Tenino, Washington (population: 1,884) has launched its own local currency, reports the Hustle: Mayor Wayne Fournier decided that Tenino would set aside $10k to give out to low-income residents hurt by the pandemic. But instead of using federal dollars, he'd print the money on thin sheets of wood designed exclusively for use in Tenino. His mint? A 130-year-old newspaper printer from a local museum...

Residents below the poverty line can apply to receive money from the $10k fund that Tenino has set aside. Fournier says they also have to prove that the pandemic has impacted them, but "we're pretty open to what that means." Once they're approved, they can pick up their stipends, printed in wooden notes worth $25 each. The city is capping the amount each resident can accrue at 12 wooden notes — or $300 — per month. According to Fournier, each note features a Latin inscription that means, basically, 'We've got this handled'...

By creating its own local currency, Tenino keeps the money in the community. As Fournier puts it, "Amazon will not be accepting wooden dollars."

"The money stays in the city. It doesn't go out to Walmart and Costco and all those places," says Joyce Worrell, who has run the antique shop Iron Works Boutiques for the past decade.
The article notes that during the 1930s hundreds of scrips were issued by American municipalities, worker co-ops, and business associations -- estimated to be worth as much as $1 billion.

And it adds that at least a few small towns in Italy and Mexico are now giving the idea another try.

This fall saw the release of an autobiography by former Disney CEO Bob Iger (2005 to 2020) titled The Ride of a Lifetime.

And Friday Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner shared an interesting excerpt (spotted by blogger John Gruber) in which Iger reveals he saw Twitter as "a potentially powerful platform for us, but I couldn't get past the challenges that would come with it." The challenges and controversies were almost too much to list, but they included how to manage hate speech, and making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech, what to do about fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political "messaging" to influence elections, and the general rage and lack of civility that was sometimes evident on the platform. Those would become our problems. They were so unlike any we'd encountered, and I felt they would be corrosive to the Disney brand. On the Sunday after the board had just given me the go-ahead to pursue the acquisition of Twitter, I sent a note to all of the members telling them I had "cold feet", and explaining my reasoning for withdrawing. Then I called Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, who was also a member of the Disney board. Jack was stunned, but very polite. I wished Jack luck, and I hung up feeling relieved.
Blogger John Gruber speculates that a Twitter owned by Disney "would be a very different Twitter today."

"The U.S. federal government just awarded a grant to the blockchain startup Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (KRNC)," reports Futurism.com, "to study the feasibility of integrating cryptocurrency into the economy." That doesn't mean that the U.S. is going to pivot to a digital blockchain dollar, CoinDesk reports. Rather, the National Science Foundation funded KRNC because it's interested in exploring new ways to improve the security of digital transactions.

The protocol KRNC is developing would meter out a new cryptocurrency in proportion to a user's existing wealth, CoinDesk reports, instead of requiring them to purchase or actively mine new crypto. In other words, it wouldn't make people richer, but it would grant them an alternative means to transfer funds online.

"Bitcoin, which runs on the principle of Proof-of-Work, is wasteful," KRNC CEO Clint Ehrlich told CoinDesk. "It requires people to waste money and computing power solving pointless problems."

In the "quick launch bar" of Windows 10, native app icons "support a shortcut menu for commonly or frequently performed tasks in the app. This menu can be invoked by right-clicking the app's quick launch bar icon," writes the Windows Club site -- adding that Mac users can use similar functionality when opening a web browser from the MacOS dock.

But now Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are working on similar "App Shortcuts" that allow users to do things like send email or composing tweets directly from the Windows 10 taskbar or macOS dock. Slashdot reader techtsp shares their report: Right now, Chromium does not allow users to start a key task within a progressive web app through the Windows 10 taskbar. This is exactly what Chromium-based web browsers are now trying to change.

This feature will enable web developers to add support in Chromium for shortcuts defined in a Web App Manifest. As a result, Chromium progressive web apps can offer App shortcuts for their quick launch bar icon much like native apps.

The App shortcuts feature is currently in development on Microsoft Edge. Meanwhile, Google Chrome 85 is in the Dev channel.

In 1999, Ray Kurzweil made predictions about what the world would be like 20 years in the future. Last month the community blog LessWrong took a look at how accurate Kurzweil's predictions turned out to be: This was a follow up to a previous assessment about his predictions about 2009, which showed a mixed bag, roughly evenly divided between right and wrong, which I'd found pretty good for 10-year predictions... For the 2019 predictions, I divided them into 105 separate statements, did a call for volunteers [and] got 46 volunteers with valid email addresses, of which 34 returned their predictions... Of the 34 assessors, 24 went the whole hog and did all 105 predictions; on average, 91 predictions were assessed by each person, a total of 3078 individual assessments...

Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong.
The assessors ultimately categorized just 12% of Kurzweil's predictions as true, with another 12% declared "weakly true," while another 10% were classed as "cannot decide." But 52% were declared "false" -- with another 15% also called "weakly false."

Among Kurzweil's false predictions for the year 2019:

• "Phone" calls routinely include high-resolution three-dimensional images projected through the direct-eye displays and auditory lenses... Thus a person can be fooled as to whether or not another person is physically present or is being projected through electronic communication.

• The all-enveloping tactile environment is now widely available and fully convincing.

"As you can see, Kurzweil suffered a lot from his VR predictions," explains the LessWrong blogpost. "This seems a perennial thing: Hollywood is always convinced that mass 3D is just around the corner; technologists are convinced that VR is imminent."

But the blog post also thanks Kurzweil, "who, unlike most prognosticators, had the guts and the courtesy to write down his predictions and give them a date. I strongly suspect that most people's 1999 predictions about 2019 would have been a lot worse."

And they also took special note of Kurzweil's two most accurate predictions. First, "The existence of the human underclass continues as an issue." And second:

"People attempt to protect their privacy with near-unbreakable encryption technologies, but privacy continues to be a major political and social issue with each individual's practically every move stored in a database somewhere."

"The terms 'allowlist' and 'blocklist' describe their purpose, while the other words use metaphors to describe their purpose," reads a change description on the source code for Android -- from over a year ago. 9to5Mac calls it "a shortened version of Google's (internal-only) explanation" for terminology changes which are now becoming more widespread.

And Thursday GitHub's CEO said they were also "already working on" renaming the default branches of code from "master" to a more neutral term like "main," reports ZDNet: GitHub lending its backing to this movement effectively ensures the term will be removed across millions of projects, and effectively legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that started this month.

But, in reality, these efforts started years ago, in 2014, when the Drupal project first moved in to replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica." Drupal's move was followed by the Python programming language, Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems... The PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements. Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries.
A recent change description for the Go programming language says "There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate." It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.

Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost.
That change was merged on June 9th -- but 9to5Mac reports it's just one of many places these changes are happening. "The Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.' Google's Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.'" And ZDNet reports more open source projects are working on changing the name of their default Git repo from "master" to alternatives like main, default, primary, root, or another, including the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Vintage computing enthusiasts have recreated NASA's legendary "Apollo Guidance Computer," the 1960s-era assembly-language onboard guidance and navigation computer for the Apollo missions to the moon. Unfortunately, the software had been lost for the Apollo 10 mission (a manned "dress rehearsal" mission which flew to the moon eight weeks before Neil Armstrong's famous moonwalk mission).

But spaceflight engineer Mike Stewart found a clever way to recreate it, according to one science show on YouTube. Stewart found a print-out of an earlier version of the program, and "with the help of a small army of volunteers, Mike hand-transcribed the source listing and all of its programs..." — all 1,735 pages of it. (Though what used to take 25 minutes to compile together on a Honeywell mainframe now takes less than a second on his modern laptop.) There were also NASA memos which described the change, later versions of the program which had implemented the changes — and most importantly, a recently-discovered NASA document giving the checksum for every version of every program run on the Apollo Guidance Computer. So Stewart was able to cut-and-paste carefully-chosen code and variables from later versions of the program — based on the clues in NASA's memos — until he'd recreated a program with the exact same checksum.

There's also a separate video about the Apollo 10 code, highlighting "lighthearted comments in very serious code." (For example, to warn off people who'd change their crucial constants, they'd actually included a Latin phrase — a play on a biblical quote which translates roughly to "Don't touch these.") The ignition routine that actually lights the descent engine for the moon landing is named BURNBABY. The comment accompanying it? "OFF TO SEE THE WIZARD."

"Scientists in Japan successfully triggered a hibernation-like state in mice by activating a specific group of brain cells," reports UPI, which points out that entering a hibernation-like state "could help astronauts conserve food and water, as well as avoid the ill-effects of microgravity, on long journeys through space." The research, published this week in the journal Nature, suggests even animals that don't naturally sleep through the winter are capable of hibernation...

Hibernation isn't simply prolonged sleep. When food gets scarce and winter approaches, hibernating animals begin to slow down their metabolism and drop their body temperature. During their prolonged slumber, hibernating animals quiet their brains and slow their heart rate and breathing. As a result, bears, snakes, turtles and other hibernating species are able to conserve energy. When spring arrives, the animals wake having lost a little weight, but are otherwise healthy.

Mice don't hibernate in the wild. But in the lab, researchers were able to coax mice into a hibernation-like state by activating a type of brain cell called Q neurons... During their approximately weeklong hibernation, the mice had slower heart rates, reduced oxygen consumption and slower respiration.

In New York City, Airbnb "has agreed to hand over personal data about its hosts — like their phone numbers and email addresses, along with a full list of every home they're putting on the platform — in order to help city authorities track down those that flout the city's regulations," reports Gizmodo.

The city is Airbnb's largest market in the U.S. -- but city officials have estimated that up to 35,000 listings were violating a law preventing short-term rentals of apartments that don't have tenants. The heat between Airbnb and New York heated up roughly two years ago, when officials passed another local law forcing home-rental companies like Airbnb to disclose data about their hosts on a regular basis, which would shine a spotlight on any that were, say, caught renting out more space than they legally ought to. In return, Airbnb and Homeaway, another short-stay platform, fired back with a lawsuit of their own, which gleaned the favor of local judges last summer.

According to Bloomberg, the battle has since simmered down in the form of a private settlement between the two companies and the city of New York. Both agreed to share information on a quarterly basis, rather than the month-by-month arrangements first pushed by the regulators in question. Information shared includes the host's full name and address, along with their contact information and income generated on either platform — not to mention information about every listing they're putting up at any given time.

Two VoIP pioneers argue in a Wired opinion piece that "Treating the internet like a public utility only bolsters the platform giants," adding "A more secure model starts with control by the people." As we rely on the internet more and more for work, social connections, and basic needs, it is time to talk about the future of meaningful online experiences, and the need for a new internet architecture. We need a user-focused, localized internet. This competitive architecture would deliver an experience that values real-time connectivity over one-way advertising and puts control with the user, not with big tech platforms.

This paradigm would flip the model on its head, letting people start with complete privacy and security, and from there allow them to open their channels depending on trust level. It inverts the terms of service, where instead of any platform imposing them on users, users impose theirs terms on the platform.

A new architecture that competes with the "public" internet is completely possible, and it begins with a policy approach that fosters the necessary innovation and investment, while allowing for flexibility and experimentation. Fixing the internet is not rooted in treating it like a public utility; it is not to be found in micromanagement by government. In fact, those very backward-looking policies only fuel more harm by protecting the status quo, which is likely why big tech platforms have been so fervently pushing for them... As we argued in challenges to the 2015 Federal Communications Commission's public-utility-based Net Neutrality rules, this also kills investment, startups, and new innovation...

[T]he public internet we experience today created the trillion-dollar tech platforms, but it allows for a few entities in Silicon Valley to colonize the entire planet and kill consumer choice. Six companies control 43 percent of all internet traffic. Of those six, three — Google, Facebook, and Amazon — receive 70 percent of all digital ad revenue in the U.S... Exposing everyone to the equivalent of homelessness online for the purposes of selling advertising already exceeds the tolerance of most of us.

There exist more valuable uses of connectivity in support of human productivity than conjuring ever expanding modes of performance and creepy surveillance to drive advertising revenues.