An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of repackaging the same basic smartwatch chip over and over again, Qualcomm has graced Wear OS with a modern smartwatch SoC. Meet the Snapdragon Wear 4100, a Qualcomm smartwatch chip that, for the first time ever, is faster than the previous chip. The Wear 4100 uses four 1.7GHz Cortex A53 CPUs built on a 12nm manufacturing process, a major upgrade from the 28nm Cortex A7s that every other Qualcomm smartwatch chip has been up until now. It's not the state-of-the-art 7nm process that Qualcomm's high-end chip uses, and the Cortex A53 is an old CPU design, but for Qualcomm, it's a major upgrade. Between the new CPU, the Adreno 504 GPU, and faster memory, Qualcomm is promising "85% faster performance" compared to the Wear 3100.

There are actually two versions of the 4100, the vanilla "4100" and the "4100+." The plus version is specifically for smartwatches with an always-on watch face, and like previous Wear SoCs, comes with an extra low-power SoC (based around a Cortex-M0) to keep the time updated and log sensor data (like step counts). Qualcomm is promising a better display image quality in this low-power mode, with more colors and a smoother display. There are also dual DSPs now, which Qualcomm says are for "optimal workload partitioning, support for dynamic clock and voltage scaling, Qualcomm Sensor Assisted Positioning PDR Wearables 2.0, low power location tracking support, and an enhanced Bluetooth 5.0 architecture." There are also dual ISPs with support for 16MP sensors (on a smartwatch?). As usual, connectivity options are plentiful, with onboard LTE, GPS, NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11n, and Bluetooth 5.

Boston is now the largest city on the East Coast to ban facial recognition technology for municipal use. They join cities like San Francisco, Oakland, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. CNET reports: The ordinance passed unanimously and will prevent the capital city from using facial recognition technology or obtaining software for conducting surveillance using the technology. "Boston should not be using racially discriminatory technology and technology that threatens our basic rights," City Councilor Michelle Wu said at the hearing on Wednesday.

The ordinance comes with exceptions, like allowing city employees to use facial recognition for authentication purposes such as unlocking their own devices. City officials can also use facial recognition technology for automatically redacting faces in images. But they can't use it for identifying people. The vote came from City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, who sponsored the bill with Wu. "This is a crucial victory for our privacy rights and for people like Robert Williams, who have been arrested for crimes they did not commit because of a technology law enforcement shouldn't be using," said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts."Lawmakers nationwide should follow suit and immediately stop law enforcement use of this technology. This surveillance technology is dangerous when right, and dangerous when wrong."

Weeks after Zoom said it will offer end-to-end encryption to only paying customers -- a move that was received poorly by several privacy and security advocates, the popular video calling software said on Wednesday it is making some amendments: We are also pleased to share that we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our platform. This will enable us to offer E2EE (end-to-end encryption) as an advanced add-on feature for all of our users around the globe -- free and paid -- while maintaining the ability to prevent and fight abuse on our platform. To make this possible, Free/Basic users seeking access to E2EE will participate in a one-time process that will prompt the user for additional pieces of information, such as verifying a phone number via a text message. Many leading companies perform similar steps on account creation to reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts. We are confident that by implementing risk-based authentication, in combination with our current mix of tools -- including our Report a User function -- we can continue to prevent and fight abuse.

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."

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.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business. CNBC reports: "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency," Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday. "We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies."

IBM decided to shut down its facial recognition products and announce its decision as the death of George Floyd brought the topic of police reform and racial inequity into the forefront of the national conversation, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC. IBM's facial recognition business did not generate significant revenue for the company, the person familiar with the situation said, but the decision remains notable for a technology giant that counts the U.S. government as a major customer. The decision was both a business and an ethical one, the person familiar with the situation said. The company heard in the past few weeks concerns from many constituencies, including employees, about its use of the technology, the person added.

"Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported," Krishna wrote. The letter was addressed to sponsors and co-sponsors of a sweeping police reform bill unveiled by Democrats Monday -- Black Caucus Chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

America's Air Force "is hoping to pit an autonomous drone equipped with an artificial intelligence-driven flight control system against a fighter jet with a human pilot in a little over a year," reports The Drive: [T]he general concept of a fully-autonomous unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) capable of air-to-air combat, as well as air-to-ground strikes, hold great potential to fundamentally change the character of aerial warfare... At its most basic, a UCAV would be able to perform many of the same functions as manned aircraft, but would be able to make key decisions faster and more accurately, taking into account much more information in a shorter period of time, without any concern about being distracted or confused by the general chaos of combat. They can also be networked into swarms that work cooperatively to maximize their combat effectiveness at any given time far beyond what a human-piloted formation could.
The head of Air Force's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center "implied that the scheduled faceoff was very much an aspirational goal," according to the article, "and that it wasn't clear if it would happen as planned."

They also remember when Elon Musk responded to a tweet suggesting there should be a competitor to the Air Force's F-35 program. "The competitor should be a drone fighter plane that's remote controlled by a human," Musk wrote, "but with its maneuvers augmented by autonomy. The F-35 would have no chance against it."

"It's the middle of 2020 and the USB-C standards are confusing even for the most technical person," writes Slashdot reader mprindle. Robert Triggs writes via Android Authority: USB-C is billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power, and data delivery with display and audio connectivity. Ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Despite the USB-C connector supplied as default in modern smartphones, the standard has, unfortunately, failed to live up to its early promises. Even the seemingly most basic function of USB-C -- powering devices -- continues to be a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions. The data speeds available over USB-C have also become increasingly convoluted. The problem is that the features supported by different USB-C devices aren't clear, yet the defining principle of the USB-C standard makes consumers think everything should just work... The article goes on to discuss the charging speed and data transfer speed disparities, USB-C port shortages, and compatibility issues with USB 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1 cables.

"Unfortunately, the USB-C ecosystem is more, not less convoluted in 2020 than it was when I first looked at this issue back in 2018," writes Robert Triggs in closing. "The announcement of USB 3.2 and USB 4 makes the standard more complex without giving the end-user clear information about what's supported. While the growth in USB Power Delivery support is a good sign, the introduction of PPS has already hampered any hopes that the industry might soon coalesce around a single charging standard. The USB spec changes every year, making it impossible for consumers to keep up. Years later, I still don't see a clear way out of this confusing mess."

schwit1 shares news that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would be willing to allow more than 2.8 million people from Hong Kong to live and work in the country if China implements a controversial proposed national security law on the former British colony. The law could take effect as soon as this month, and would expand mainland China's control over Hong Kong. NPR reports: Johnson wrote in a column that appeared in The Times of London that the law would infringe on the "one country, two systems" agreement China reached with Britain in 1997 when Britain ceded control of the territory. He added that the law "would curtail [Hong Kong's] freedoms and dramatically erode its autonomy."

If China were to implement the law, Johnson wrote, Britain is prepared to take in around 350,000 people from Hong Kong who already have British National (Overseas) passports and 2.5 million who would be eligible to apply for them. He also noted that the U.K. would be making "one of the biggest changes in our visa system in history." It would allow Hong Kongers with these passports to come to the U.K. for a renewable period of a year. The current system allows them to come without a visa for up to six months. The potential new system would include a right to work and, potentially, a path to citizenship. Johnson did not elaborate in the column about how the 2.5 million people eligible for a British passport would be able to attain one, or how arrivals from Hong Kong would attain citizenship. "Many people in Hong Kong fear that their way of life -- which China pledged to uphold -- is under threat," Johnson wrote. "If China proceeds to justify their fears, then Britain could not in good conscience shrug our shoulders and walk away... I still hope that China will remember that responsibilities go hand in glove with strength and leadership."

The law would authorize mainland China to prevent "secession, subversion, terrorism and foreign interference" in the semi-autonomous city. "One part that has got people worried is the suggestion that China could set up its own institutions in Hong Kong responsible for security," reports the BBC.

"Hong Kong was handed back to China from British control in 1997, but under a unique agreement -- a mini-constitution called the Basic Law and a so-called 'one country, two systems' principle," the report adds. "They are supposed to protect certain freedoms for Hong Kong: freedom of assembly and speech, an independent judiciary and some democratic rights -- freedoms that no other part of mainland China has." People in Hong Kong believe the law will result in a loss of these freedoms and could see Beijing punish people for criticizing the country, as happens in mainland China.

The US Department of Defense is woefully behind on its plan to upgrade its IT infrastructure to support the newer IPv6 protocol, according to a government report published on Monday. From a report: This current effort is the third time the DOD attempts to upgrade its infrastructure to support IPv6 over in the past 17 years. The first two attempts took place in 2003 and 2010, respectively. The 2003 effort was abandoned with the DOD citing security risks and a lack of personnel trained in IPv6, while the second attempt was also abandoned, similarly on the grounds that IPv6 was not yet secure enough for the DOD's sensitive networks.

On Monday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing agency of the US government, said that the DOD's third attempt isn't doing any better either. GAO officials said the DOD failed to follow four basic requirements that were set out by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2006. The four requirements were part of an OMB guideline sent to all federal agencies detailing the proper procedure for upgrading networks from IPv4 to IPv6. "For its current [third] initiative, DOD has not completed three of four longstanding OMB requirements," GAO auditors said in a report published on Monday.

Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Wall Street Journal: A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart. "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had in public and private expressed concern about "sensationalism and polarization." But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products. Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were "paternalistic," said people familiar with his comments.

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: The rise of artificial intelligence will make even software engineers less sought after. That's because artificial intelligence will soon write its own software, according to Jack Dorsey, the tech billionaire boss of Twitter and Square. And that's going to put some beginning-level software engineers in a tough spot.

"We talk a lot about the self-driving trucks in and whatnot" when discussing how automation will replace jobs held by humans, Dorsey told former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang on an episode of the "Yang Speaks" podcast published Thursday. But A.I. "is even coming for programming" jobs, Dorsey said.

"A lot of the goals of machine learning and deep learning is to write the software itself over time so a lot of entry-level programming jobs will just not be as relevant anymore," Dorsey told Yang.
Dorsey also told Yang that he belives a Universal Basic Income could give workers "peace of mind" that they'll be able to "eat and feed their children while they are learning how to transition into this new world."

"Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter," reports ZDNet, adding that GW-BASIC "can trace its roots back to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's implementation of Microsoft's first product, the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer."

"Interested to look at thousands of lines of glorious 8088 assembly code for the original 1983 GW-BASIC...?" writes Slashdot reader sonofusion82, adding "there are not Makefiles or build scripts, just a bunch of 8088 ASM files."

Or as Hackaday jokes, "Microsoft releases the source code you wanted almost 30 years ago." In the late 1970s and early 1980s, if you had a personal computer there was a fair chance it either booted into some version of Microsoft Basic or you could load and run Basic... Now you can get the once-coveted Microsoft Basic source code...

They put up a read only GW-BASIC repository, presumably to stop a flood of feature requests for GPU acceleration...

From what we understand, GW-Basic was identical to IBM's BASICA, but didn't require certain IBM PC ROMs to operate. Of course, BASICA, itself, came from MBASIC, Microsoft's CP/M language that originated with Altair Basic... We did enjoy the 1975 copyright message, though:

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN ON THE PDP-10 FROM FEBRUARY 9 TO APRIL 9 1975

BILL GATES WROTE A LOT OF STUFF.
PAUL ALLEN WROTE A LOT OF OTHER STUFF AND FAST CODE.
MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE (F4I.MAC).
Bill Gates was 19 years old, Paul Allen was 22.

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and mobile-payments firm Square, said today he is giving $5 million to Humanity Forward, a group launched by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang to build the case for a universal basic income. A report adds: The donation is part of Dorsey's Start Small LLC, a $1 billion foundation he launched last month to support global COVID-19 relief efforts. "Not only will Jack's donation directly impact tens of thousands of people in need during the current economic downturn, it will help Humanity Forward and our movement continue to make a case for Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the United States," Yang said in a statement. "We know UBI for every American is possible, and this $5 million from Start Small is going to help demonstrate what is possible for families across the country."

Microsoft is releasing a new Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows 10 today. Designed to replace and modernize the existing Win + R shortcut, the new PowerToys Run launcher includes quick search for apps and files across Windows, plugins like a calculator, and the ability to find running processes. From a report: This early version will support basic search tasks that are typically handled by the built-in Windows Start menu search functionality. But there are plans to make this a more powerful launcher that's similar to Alfred on macOS and more functional than Apple's Spotlight search. The current Win + R functionality is basic and used by Windows power users to launch cmd prompts, regedit, powershell instances, and even shortcuts to areas in Windows like the Control Panel. This new PowerToys Run launcher will support all of the same commands that Run does currently in Windows, but Microsoft is collaborating with an open-source community that's contributing to make it far more powerful. Also read: Microsoft Debuts Windows Package Manager for Your Dev Environment.

Yes, economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week arguing that Covid-19 "is illustrating that some aspects of a Universal Basic Income may be more necessary and more workable than previously thought. But there is one big piece missing: The economic output required to pay for such policies."

Their suggestion is to boost "abilities to succeed with major projects" and "to invest ambitiously in innovation." And TechCrunch recently hinted at one very specific suggestion. "If policymakers want to do more than just keep the floor from falling out and start laying the groundwork for an actual recovery, then they ought to be discussing a different UBI as well: Universal Basic Internet." The government has delegated providing access to internet to the private sector for far too long. Only the "more prosperous" have been able to enjoy the full benefits of high-speed internet...

[T]he math makes clear that closing the digital divide will generate a digital dividend. There's no easy to way to measure the impact of broadband access on the economy, but several studies indicate that this is exactly the sort of investment we should make in a time of crisis: some have estimated that doubling broadband speeds adds around 0.3% to GDP growth; others forecast that every broadband-related job generates between 2.5 and 4.0 additional jobs; and, yet another study determined that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband access could increase GDP per capita by $13,036. Simply put, there's a high ROI — return on internet — associated with increasing broadband access.
The article points out that somewhere between 23% and 28% of Americans currently don't have broadband internet access. And it also suggests "trainers to increase digital literacy around the nation.

"This approach to closing the digital divide will go a long way in helping the nation recover from the COVID collapse."

Economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week in Bloomberg arguing that "a pandemic is providing a tragic preview of some of the conditions UBI was conceived to address."

Though they worry about the cost of such a program, "And, though there are some important qualifications, Covid-19 is making UBI look better..." Job creation during the pandemic is as slow as many UBI advocates feared. Even in health care, where one might expect employment to be rising dramatically in the midst of a pandemic, it is sluggish... In response to an unemployment level unseen since the Great Depression, the federal government has instituted cash transfers, which in some cases result in unemployment payments that are higher than wages. This is a radical experiment. It is being called stimulus, inaccurately, when it is a humanitarian program designed to tide people over during economic duress — and it draws explicitly upon UBI-like ideas.

In contrast, many European countries have been guaranteeing wages in the hopes of "freezing" the economy and then "defrosting" it when it is safe to return to work. Yet some recent U.S. estimates suggest there will be 3 new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the pandemic, and furthermore 42% of the new layoffs will be permanent. (In post-pandemic America, there will be less need for waiters.) That suggests the American UBI-like strategy is likely to outperform the European approach, because the world is changing rapidly and labor will need to be reallocated accordingly...

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as Senator Mitt Romney have argued that UBI is an appropriate response to a pandemic, though Ocasio-Cortez favors making it permanent.... Covid-19 is illustrating that some aspects of a UBI may be more necessary and more workable than previously thought.
The New York Times also reported today that "three dozen influential figures at labor unions, think tanks and other progressive institutions have convened a weekly virtual meeting — known as the Friday Morning Group... one of several brainstorming-and-planning initiatives underway in Washington" to consider responses to new economic challenges, "including mainstream proposals like major new spending on public health and child care and less widely supported options like creating a universal basic income or offering a federal jobs guarantee."

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than a million health care workers, said she had briefed Democratic lawmakers in both the House and Senate about her organization's view that it was time to "change the rules of the economy for the long term," including a powerful expansion of the rights and employment benefits of lower-income workers.
And former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris "has endorsed a plan called the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act," writes an editor at the conservative and libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute, "which would send $2,000 per month to Americans who make less than $120,000 per year. Married couples would receive $4,000 per month, as well as $2,000 for each child... the checks would be sent for up to three months after the coronavirus crisis ends."

But that editor calls it "a preposterous plan," adding "is it such a logical leap to assume that some on the left are using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to introduce another 'temporary' welfare program...?"

Working with the city of Hudson, New York and a local career center, Andrew Yang's nonprofit, Humanity Forward will be giving 20 people a basic income of $500 a month for five years, in a collaboration called HudsonUP. Business Insider reports: A spokesperson for HudsonUP said the 20 residents will be selected later in 2020, likely in the fall, and will begin receiving payments shortly thereafter. Humanity Forward will cover half the bill, which according to Chris Sommerfeldt of the Daily News will be $600,000. Spark of Hudson will cover the other half, and will, together with community organizers, select the 20 participants, the Daily News reports.

While the project is starting in Hudson, Yang said he hopes more Americans get access to UBI policies soon... "I think that millions of Americans got the $1,200 stimulus and liked it," he said, "and felt that this is something that we should continue to do in a time when there are record levels of unemployment, and tens of millions of jobs lost, many of which will not return..."

Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger, founders of The Spark of Hudson, are longtime UBI advocates. They're hopeful the five-year program will have long-term impact. "UBI gives freedom — freedom to be entrepreneurs, to run for office, to stay home with the kids, to take care of sick parents, to leave abusive relationships, and to help our community in times of crisis," Danziger said in a press release.
The article also notes that Spain "is moving to establish a permanent basic income in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic for low-income citizens."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago's Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find an official who'd fix them. The Atlantic describes the holes as "the most basic lapses in cybersecurity — preventable with code learned in an introductory computer-science class — and they remained even though similar gaps had been identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention widely reported in the media." And then this "teenager in a dorm room" discovered "many other" states had similar security holes...

Fortunately, the former head of security at Facebook (who now teaches at Stanford) had gotten approval from the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a team of undergraduates to search for election-security holes. "Less than six months before Election Day, the government will attempt to identify democracy's most glaring weakness by deploying college kids on their summer break." But there's other equally disturbing anecdotes in the article. On election night in 2016, Russians had queued up a Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities, and "Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate..."

And yet there's also this anecdote about the Internet Research Agency, "a troll farm serving the interests of the Kremlin."

Starting in 2017, it launched a sustained effort to exaggerate the specter of its interference, a tactic that social-media companies call "perception hacking." Its trolls were instructed to post about the Mueller report and fan the flames of public anger over the blatant interference it revealed... If enough Americans come to believe that Russia can do whatever it wants to our democratic processes without consequence, that, too, increases cynicism about American democracy, and thereby serves Russian ends.
The article notes that some techniques are apparently borrowed from mainstream cybercriminals, and "In the cybercrime world, you're starting to see audio phishes," warns Microsoft's Corporate VP of Security and Trust. "[S]omebody gets a voicemail message from their boss, for example, saying, 'Hey, I need you to transfer this money to the following account right away.' It sounds just like your boss and so you do it."

What's really remarkable is the reach of the activities. The Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks illicit campaign financing, "has identified at least 60 instances of Russia financing political campaigns beyond its borders," according to the article. And sometimes the efforts actually go offline... What the Russians can't obtain from afar, they will attempt to pilfer with agents on the ground. The same GRU unit that hacked John Podesta has allegedly sent operatives to Rio de Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur, and The Hague to practice what is known as "close-access hacking." Once on the ground, they use off-the-shelf electronic equipment to pry open the Wi-Fi network of whomever they're spying on. The Russians, in other words, take risks few other nations would dare. They are willing to go to such lengths because they've reaped such rich rewards from hacking.

Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru shares a story from the alternative newsweekly the Arkansas Times. "A computer programmer applying for unemployment on Arkansas's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program discovered a vulnerability in the system that exposed the Social Security numbers, bank account and routing numbers and other sensitive information of some 30,000 applicants.

"Anyone with basic computer knowledge could have accessed personal information for malicious purposes." Alarmed, the computer programmer called the Arkansas Division of Workforce Services Friday morning and was told by an operator that there was no one available who could talk to him. He then tried someone at the Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division, who told the programmer he would find the person he needed to talk with to fix the situation. The programmer later called the Arkansas Times for advice on whom to call. The Times alerted the Division of Workforce Services to the issue at 4:30 p.m. Soon after a message appeared on the website that said, "The site is currently under maintenance...."

In exploring the website, the computer programmer determined that by simply removing part of the site's URL, he could access the administrative portal of the site, where he had the option of editing the personal information of applicants, including bank account numbers. From the admin portal, he viewed the page's source code and saw that the site was using an API (application programming interface) to connect with a database. That API was also left unencrypted, and he could access all of the applicants' raw data, included Social Security numbers and banking information...

The computer programmer said he thought he could have programmed a script that would gather all of the information from the API in under an hour.