The New York Times describes a six-year grass roots effort to fund historic preservation and natural resource conservation in Montana — and how it collided with Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never before been involved in politics, and her very influential Facebook group: Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.

Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.

She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.

None of this was true.

Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana's leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana.

It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.
Some comments on the episode (via the New York Times):

• Ellen Sievert, retired historic preservation officer for Cascade County:
  "We've run into the uneducable. I don't know how we get through that."

• Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls:
  "Misinformation is the new playbook. You don't like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality." (In fact, it's now become an issue in the mayor's race.)

The episode was especially distressing for Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the town's local newspaper until being laid off in 2016 — and is also vice chairman of the proposed heritage area's board. The Times reports that "In the paper's place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski."

And meanwhile, "Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist." [There are 55 of them, in 34 different states.]

Finally the Times interviewed Ed Bandel, who'd led the Montana Farm Bureau's opposition to the Montana heritage area. When asked for his supporting evidence, "Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski."

And when asked about the argument that it in fact posed no threat to property rights, Bandel remained unconvinced. "They say, 'Don't worry, we're going to do it right. Don't worry, we'll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn't he...?"

"HT Aero, an affiliate of Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng Inc., launched a new flying car on Sunday that it says can also drive on roads," reports CNBC (in a story shared by Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid ): The company says it plans for a rollout in 2024. The car is not commercially available right now. And HT Aero said the final design might change. HT Aero's vehicle will have a lightweight design and a rotor that folds away, the company said. That will allow the car to drive on roads and then fly once the rotors are expanded.

The vehicle will have a number of safety features including parachutes, the company said.
Elsewhere CNBC reports that Xpeng also launched a new charger for its electric cars. "The company says that with just five minutes of charging with the new charger, the car's battery will have a range of 200 kilometers [123 miles]." And Xpeng also makes an assisted-driving system, Bloomberg notes, and "will also partner with others to explore robo-taxi operations starting from the second half of next year."

And in addition, Bloomberg adds, the company also unveiled its prototype for a ridable robot horse, "equipped with bionic senses and multi-mode recognition technologies."

This week the U.S. Air Force announced that it's chosen Alaska's Eielson Air Force Base as the site for its first "micro" nuclear reactor test program.

The Drive reports: The U.S. military, as a whole, together with the Department of Energy has been increasingly looking into micro-reactor designs as possible ways to meet ever-growing electricity demands, including for units on the battlefield, as well as to help cut costs and improve general operational efficiency by reducing reliance on fossil fuels. The base is situated deep within the interior of Alaska near the city of Fairbanks and is around 110 miles south of the Arctic Circle [and 26 miles from Fairbanks].

It is not clear exactly what the specifications might be for the reactor that is now set to be constructed at Eielson... The Air Force did say that the project in question had been initiated in response to language in the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act for the 2019 Fiscal Year and that the goal is for the micro-reactor to be fully operational by the end of 2027. This would seem to indicate that this reactor is the one that the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Strategic Capabilities Office is leading the development of as part of an effort known as Project Pele. The goal of that project, which started in 2019 and that you can read more about here, is to demonstrate a small reactor capable of producing between one and five megawatts of power...

In March, the Pentagon awarded contracts for prototype Project Pele reactors to X-Energy and BWX Technologies. These deals cover the continued maturation of the respective designs over the next two years, with the expectation being that a winning design will be selected afterward. The hope is that work on an actual microreactor will begin by the end of the 2022 Fiscal Year...

It is worth pointing out that 19,780 acres associated with Eielson are already designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a so-called "Superfund site," due to existing toxic chemical contamination related to "closed and active unlined landfills, shallow trenches where weathered tank sludge was buried, a drum storage area, and other disposal and spill areas."
Waste from the micro-reactor "will be subject to the same rigorous storage and control requirements of the commercial nuclear industry," explains an Air Force FAQ. (Though more specifically, it says that "Used fuel will be stored on-site using NRC-licensed storage casks pending a decision on the ultimate disposition of commercial spent fuel.") The FAQ also notes the reactor will not be connected to the commercial grid.

The Drive points out that currently the Air Force has just been using a fleet of diesel locomotives that bring the base trainloads of coals.

Time magazine spotted three things in the terms of service for former U.S. president Trump's "Truth Social" site: - Despite advertising itself as a platform that will "give a voice to all," according to a press release, TRUTH Social's terms of service state that users may not "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site." In other words, any user who criticizes Trump or the site can be kicked off the platform...

- [W]hile portraying itself as a refuge for free speech and the "first major rival to 'Big Tech,'" TRUTH Social's terms of service make it clear that the platform not only intends to moderate content — just as Twitter and Facebook do — but reserves the right to remove users for any reason it deems necessary. The terms go on to say that if TRUTH Social decides to terminate or suspend your account, the platform may also sue you — something that Twitter and Facebook's terms don't say. "In addition to terminating or suspending your account, we reserve the right to take appropriate legal action, including without limitation pursuing civil, criminal, and injunctive redress," TRUTH Social's terms state...

- Maybe most notably, the site's list of prohibited activities includes the "excessive use of capital letters," an idiosyncrasy that Trump became known for on Twitter and that no other major social network specifically bans. TRUTH Social's terms also contain some sections written in all-caps.
The terms also specify explicitly that the site considers itself "not responsible" for the accuracy/reliability of what's posted on the site. Yet the Washington Post reports the newly-formed "Trump Media & Technology Group" has already applied for trademark rights for the terms "truthing," "post a truth," and "retruth."

Meanwhile, the Software Freedom Conservancy believes the end of the site's public test launch was directly tied to a recently-discovered violation of a Conservancy license. "Once caught in the act, Trump's Group scrambled and took the site down."

One of the license's authors emphasizes that the license "purposefully treats everyone equally (even people we don't like or agree with), but they must operate under the same rules of the copyleft licenses that apply to everyone else..." To comply with this important FOSS license, Trump's Group needs to immediately make that Corresponding Source available to all who used the site today while it was live. If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently terminated. That's how AGPLv3's cure provision works — no exceptions — even if you're a real estate mogul, reality television star, or even a former POTUS."

"Facebook has filed a lawsuit on Friday against a Ukrainian national for allegedly scraping its website and selling the personal data of more than 178 million users on an underground cybercrime forum," reports the Record. According to court documents filed Friday, the man was identified as Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, a resident of Kirovograd, Ukraine. Facebook alleges that Solonchenko abused a feature part of the Facebook Messenger service called Contact Importer. The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had a Facebook account in order to allow users to reach out to their friends via Facebook Messenger. Between January 2018 and September 2019, Facebook said that Solonchenko used an automated tool to pose as Android devices in order to feed Facebook servers with millions of random phone numbers. As Facebook servers returned information for which phone numbers had an account on the site, Solonchenko collected the data, which he later collected and offered for sale on December 1, 2020, in a post on RaidForums, a notorious cybercrime forum and marketplace for stolen data.
The article also notes that Facebook's court documents say Solonchenko scraped data from some of the largest companies in the Ukraine, including its largest commercial bank and largest private delivery service.

And the Record points out that he's not the only person known to have this hole to scrape Facebook's user data and then sell it on the forum.) Days after another incident in April involving 533 leaked phone numbers of Facebook user, Facebook "revealed that it retired the Messenger Contact Importer feature back in September 2019 after it discovered Solonchenko and other threat actors abusing it."

Big data "has big designs on a big cloud," reports NBC News: A steady drumbeat from some of the most influential executives in the technology industry has emerged in recent months to push the idea that the U.S. government should invest in a "national research cloud" — a hub for U.S. research into artificial intelligence where researchers from academia and smaller tech companies could share data sets and other resources.

It's an idea that has been backed by a government commission led by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and including executives from Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, which recommended that the Biden administration create a hub for U.S. research into artificial intelligence. The White House has warmed up to the idea, ordering another report on it due next year with an eye toward competing with China on the development of artificial intelligence. "We should be able to stay ahead of China. We estimated that we are one to two years ahead of China, broadly speaking, in this area. I hope that's true," Schmidt said in an interview with NBC News. "Investments that are targeted in research — new algorithms — should be able to keep us ahead," he said.

The stakes could be enormous. Some experts in artificial intelligence believe it has the potential to transform the economy — automating some jobs, while creating new ones — and the potential military applications have spurred investment by the Pentagon.

But this month, the idea began getting fresh pushback. Research groups including New York University's AI Now Institute and Data & Society, a nonprofit technology research group based in New York, say the very tech companies pushing this idea stand to profit from it, because the national hub would likely be housed in the same companies' commercial cloud computing services. They say that's a conflict, and little more than a cash grab by what's effectively the next generation of military contractors. The plan also could entrench the very same tech companies that President Joe Biden's antitrust enforcers are working to rein in, these critics say.

"Microsoft has been mainly telling consumers that Windows 11 is meant for newer PCs," reports PC Magazine.

"However, an internet user has uploaded a video that shows the OS can actually run on a 15-year-old Pentium 4 chip from Intel." Last week, Twitter user "Carlos S.M." posted screenshots of his Pentium 4-powered PC running Windows 11. He then followed that up with a video and benchmarks to verify that his machine was running the one-core Pentium chip with only 4GB of DDR2 RAM.

To install the OS onto the system, Carlos S.M. said he used a Windows 10 PE Installer, which can be used to deploy or repair Windows via a USB drive. "Windows 11 is installed in MBR (Master Boot Record)/Legacy Boot mode, no EFI emulation involved," he added.

Of course, the OS runs a bit slow on the Pentium 4 chip. Nevertheless, it shows Windows 11 can easily run on decade-old hardware... Officially, Microsoft has said a PC must possess a newer security feature called TPM 2.0 in order to run Windows 11. To underscore the point, the company released a list of eligible CPUs, and the processors only go as far back as late 2017. However, the company has also quietly acknowledged that older PCs without TPM 2.0 can run Windows 11 — so long as the user decides to manually install the OS onto their machine...

If you do install Windows 11 on an unsupported PC, Microsoft warns your machine may not be eligible to receive automatic updates. But apparently Carlos S.M. has had no problems receiving updates for his own Pentium-powered PC. "Windows update still works on this machine and even installed the Patch Tuesday," Carlos S.M. said in a follow-up tweet.
Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for the tip!

A new whistleblower affidavit submitted by a former Facebook employee "alleges that the company prizes growth and profits over combating hate speech, misinformation and other threats to the public," reports the Washington Post: The SEC affidavit goes on to allege that Facebook officials routinely undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content out of fear of angering then-President Donald Trump and his political allies, or out of concern about potentially dampening the user growth key to Facebook's multi-billion-dollar profits...

Friday's filing is the latest in a series since 2017 spearheaded by former journalist Gretchen Peters and a group she leads, the Alliance to Counter Crime Online. Taken together, the filings argue that Facebook has failed to adequately address dangerous and criminal behavior on its platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger... "Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives repeatedly claimed high rates of success in restricting illicit and toxic content — to lawmakers, regulators and investors — when in fact they knew the firm could not remove this content and remain profitable," Peters said in a statement.

Friday's filing, which was accompanied by a second affidavit from Peters based on interviews she conducted with other former company employees, argues that top leaders at Facebook, including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, are aware of the severity of problems within the company but have failed to report them in SEC filings available to investors... Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which some lawmakers are pushing to reform, gives broad immunity to Internet companies for content that users post on their platforms. That is a barrier to some kinds of legal scrutiny but not necessarily to an investigation by the SEC, which has wide-ranging enforcement powers.
There appears to be a convenient case study available. Facebook "had set up safeguards that were aimed at combating misinformation and other forms of platform abuse" in the run-up to America's 2020 election, "but it dismantled many of them by mid-December," Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a new package of redacted documents provided to Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

And in addition, "In early December, Facebook disbanded a 300-person squad known as Civic Integrity, which had the job of monitoring misuse of the platform around elections... even as efforts to delegitimize the election intensified." Meanwhile, Stop the Steal groups were "amplifying and normalizing misinformation and violent hate in a way that delegitimized a free and fair election," Facebook's internal analysis concluded.
But there's more in that company after-action report, adds the Washington Post: The documents also provide ample support that the company's internal research over several years had identified ways to diminish the spread of political polarization, conspiracy theories and incitements to violence but that in many instances, executives had declined to implement those steps...

The documents and interviews with former employees make clear that Facebook has deep, highly precise knowledge about how its users are affected by what appears on its sites. Facebook relentlessly measures an astonishing array of data points, including the frequency, reach and sources of falsehoods and hateful content and often implements measures to suppress both. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their impacts on user growth and other factors key to corporate profits, such as engagement, the extent of sharing and other reactions.
The article adds that at Facebook, even the public relations and political impacts "are carefully weighed — to the point that potentially flattering and unflattering news headlines about the company are sketched out for review."

"The BBC is reporting that Facebook has been fined a record £50 million by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority," writes long-time Slashdot reader Hope Thelps, "for deliberately failing to provide required information" (pertaining to Facebook's 2020 acquisition of Gif-sharing service Giphy).

The BBC reports: The £50m fine the CMA handed Facebook is more than 150 times higher than the previous record handed down for similar offences, at £325,000.

Speaking about its decision to fine the social media giant, the CMA said in a statement: "This is the first time a company has been found by the CMA to have breached an [order] by consciously refusing to report all the required information."

Giphy is widely used by Facebook's competitors to power animated Gif images used in social media apps, on mobile keyboards, and elsewhere online. That led to potential competition concerns. The CMA issued something called an "initial enforcement order", which limits how companies that are merging, but under investigation, operate. It is designed to keep the entities semi-separate and in competition with each other until the investigation is over. Facebook is obliged to provide updates and information to make clear how it is complying with the order.

"Given the multiple warnings it gave Facebook, the CMA considers that Facebook's failure to comply was deliberate," the CMA said.

That "fundamentally undermined its ability to prevent, monitor and put right any issues".

The fine for that offence is £50m. Separately, the CMA announced a £500,000 fine for Facebook changing its chief compliance officer — twice — "without seeking consent first".

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the military alliance of 30 countries that border the North Atlantic Ocean, this week announced that it would adopt its first AI strategy and launch a "future-proofing" fund with the goal of investing around $1 billion. VentureBeat reports: Military.com reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will join other NATO members in Brussels, Belgium, the alliance's headquarters, to formally approve the plans over two days of talks. Speaking at a news conference, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the effort was in response to "authoritarian regimes racing to develop new technologies." NATO's AI strategy will cover areas including data analysis, imagery, cyberdefense, he added.

NATO's overtures come after a senior cybersecurity official at the Pentagon resigned in protest because of the slow pace of technological development at the department. Speaking to the press last week, Nicolas Chaillan, former chief software officer at the Air Force, said that the U.S. has "no competing fighting chance against China" in 15 to 20 years, characterizing the AI and cyber defenses in some government agencies as being at "kindergarten level."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus may have officially discontinued its low-end Oculus Go headset last year, but the company has one more "official" update to help future-proof the hardware. On Thursday, Oculus released an unlocked build of the Oculus Go operating system, allowing for "full root access" on more than 2 million existing units. Oculus "Consulting CTO" (and former id Software co-founder) John Carmack announced his plans for this update last month, saying it was something he had "been pushing on for years." In part, the unlocking is an attempt to guarantee that Go hardware will continue to be fully functional well into the future, allowing for "a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now [to] be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down," Carmack wrote.

Before that, though, the update will allow tinkerers to "repurpose the hardware for more things today," as Carmack puts it. Go hardware running the unlocked OS will no longer check for a Facebook signature at the kernel level, meaning developers can create new versions of low-level system software for the entire Android-based OS. That could allow for custom versions of low-level features like the app launcher and the removal of otherwise locked system apps. The update also allows for easy sideloading of apps outside of Go's store interface, though this was already possible on older OS versions.

Intel has open-sourced ControlFlag , a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code -- ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. From a report: In tests, the company's machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, "production-quality" software, demonstrating its usefulness. "Last year, ControlFlag identified a code anomaly in Client URL (cURL), a computer software project transferring data using various network protocols over one billion times a day," Intel principal AI scientist Justin Gottschlich wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn.

"Most recently, ControlFlag achieved state-of-the-art results by identifying hundreds of latent defects related to memory and potential system crash bugs in proprietary production-level software. In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories." The demand for quality code draws an ever-growing number of aspiring programmers to the profession. After years of study, they learn to translate abstracts into concrete, executable programs -- but most spend the majority of their working hours not programming. A recent study found that the IT industry spent an estimated $2 trillion in 2020 in software development costs associated with debugging code, with an estimated 50% of IT budgets spent on debugging.

ISPs around the world claim the unprecedented bandwidth demands Netflix's Squid Game is placing on their broadband networks means they should be getting more money. From a report: But experts say that's not how telecom networks work, suggesting that already cash-flush telecom giants are just positioning themselves for an underserved hand out. The popular South Korean thriller, a not so thinly-veiled critique of late-stage capitalism, tracks a group of indebted people who compete in deadly children's games for cash. According to Netflix, Squid Game is the most popular show in company history, the number one program in 94 countries, and has been watched by 142 million households. ISPs around the world also claim the show's popularity is driving a massive surge in bandwidth consumption, and they want their cut.

In South Korea, Internet service provider SK Broadband sued Netflix earlier this month, claiming that between May and September the ISP's network traffic jumped 24 times to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed every second. This surge is Netflix's fault, the ISP insists, and Netflix should be held financially responsible. In the UK, British Telecom executives have been making similar complaints, insisting that Netflix should be forced to help pay for the surge in network traffic caused by the show. But broadband experts say that's not how broadband networks actually work. "It makes no sense for ISPs to cry victim because they provide a popular service, and are expected to provide it," John Bergmayer, telecom expert at consumer group Public Knowledge told Motherboard. "People subscribe to broadband to do things like stream video, and it's broadband customers who are requesting all these Squid Game streams. They are not somehow imposed on ISPs by Netflix."

Epic Games is ending a pandemic-inspired policy of granting every other Friday off, sparking an uproar among staff. From a report: An internal Slack channel was filled with pleas from employees for the game publisher to reconsider. Several people said the extra vacation days had helped their mental health, allowed them to be better parents and even improved their productivity while working on updates for Fortnite, which is one of world's most popular games. Epic said the policy was always meant to be temporary and that the company's goal was to allow employees and contractors to take paid time off on their own schedules. The company also closes for two-week breaks in the summer and winter.

"Right now, we are seeing lots of Fridays off for deep work, and lots of people who must work Fridays anyways," Chief Operating Officer Daniel Vogel wrote in an email to staff reviewed by Bloomberg. "This meant that many people were not benefiting from this policy equally." But in a survey of 581 employees reviewed by Bloomberg, 93% said they had found the alternating Fridays off to be "extremely beneficial" and 61% said they felt worried, guilty or stressed when taking separate vacation days. Almost 90% of employees said they wanted to keep Fridays off as a standard.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the last few years the justified fixation on the bad behavior of Google, Amazon, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants has let the abuses of the telecom sector fly under the radar. But a new FTC report showcases how when it comes to consumer privacy, broadband providers are every bit as terrible as you thought they were. The new FTC report studied the privacy practices of six unnamed broadband ISPs and their advertising arms, and found that the companies routinely collect an ocean of consumer location, browsing, and behavioral data. They then share this data with dodgy middlemen via elaborate business arrangements that often aren't adequately disclosed to broadband consumers.

"Even though several of the ISPs promise not to sell consumers personal data, they allow it to be used, transferred, and monetized by others and hide disclosures about such practices in fine print of their privacy policies," the FTC report said. The FTC also found that while many ISPs provide consumers tools allowing them to opt out of granular data collection, those tools are cumbersome to use -- when they work at all. "Many of the ISPs also claim to offer consumers choices about how their data is used and allow them to access such data," the FTC said. "The FTC found, however, that many of these companies often make it difficult for consumers to exercise such choices and sometimes even nudge them to share even more information." ISPs often provide privacy-specific website portals proclaiming to provide users with a wide variety of opt out options but these choices are often "illusory," the FTC found.

EFF: The Utah Supreme Court is the latest stop in EFF's roving campaign to establish your Fifth Amendment right to refuse to provide your password to law enforcement. Yesterday, along with the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in State v. Valdez, arguing that the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination prevents the police from forcing suspects to reveal the contents of their minds. That includes revealing a memorized passcode or directly entering the passcode to unlock a device.

In Valdez, the defendant was charged with kidnapping his ex-girlfriend after arranging a meeting under false pretenses. During his arrest, police found a cell phone in Valdez's pocket that they wanted to search for evidence that he set up the meeting, but Valdez refused to tell them the passcode. Unlike many other cases raising these issues, however, the police didn't bother seeking a court order to compel Valdez to reveal his passcode. Instead, during trial, the prosecution offered testimony and argument about his refusal. The defense argued that this violated the defendant's Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, which also prevents the state from commenting on his silence. The court of appeals agreed, and now the state has appealed to the Utah Supreme Court.

Russia's boldest moves to censor the internet began in the most mundane of ways -- with a series of bureaucratic emails and forms. From a report: The messages, sent by Russia's powerful internet regulator, demanded technical details -- like traffic numbers, equipment specifications and connection speeds -- from companies that provide internet and telecommunications services across the country. Then the black boxes arrived. The telecom companies had no choice but to step aside as government-approved technicians installed the equipment alongside their own computer systems and servers. Sometimes caged behind lock and key, the new gear linked back to a command center in Moscow, giving authorities startling new powers to block, filter and slow down websites that they did not want the Russian public to see.

The process, underway since 2019, represents the start of perhaps the world's most ambitious digital censorship effort outside of China. Under President Vladimir V. Putin, who once called the internet a "C.I.A. project" and views the web as a threat to his power, the Russian government is attempting to bring the countryâ(TM)s once open and freewheeling internet to heel. The gear has been tucked inside the equipment rooms of Russia's largest telecom and internet service providers, including Rostelecom, MTS, MegaFon and Vympelcom, a senior Russian lawmaker revealed this year. It affects the vast majority of the country's more than 120 million wireless and home internet users, according to researchers and activists. The world got its first glimpse of Russia's new tools in action when Twitter was slowed to a crawl in the country this spring. It was the first time the filtering system had been put to work, researchers and activists said. Other sites have since been blocked, including several linked to the jailed opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny.

Scott Gilbertson, writing for The Register: The legacy of Internet Explorer 6 haunts web developer nightmares to this day. Microsoft's browser of yore made their lives miserable and it's only slightly hyperbolic to say it very nearly destroyed the entire internet. It really was that bad, kids. It made us walk to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways. You wouldn't understand. Or maybe you would. Today developers who want to use "cutting-edge" web APIs find themselves resorting to the same kind of browser-specific workarounds, but this time the browser dragging things down comes from Apple. Apple's Safari lags considerably behind its peers in supporting web features. Whether it's far enough behind to be considered "the new IE" is debatable and may say more about the shadow IE still casts across the web than it does about Safari. But Safari -- or more specifically the WebKit engine that powers it -- is well behind the competition. According to the Web Platform Tests dashboard, Chrome-based browsers support 94 per cent of the test suite, and Firefox pulls off 91 per cent, but Safari only manages 71 per cent.

On the desktop this doesn't matter all that much because users can always switch to Google Chrome (or even better, Vivaldi). On iOS devices, however, that's not possible. According to Apple's App Store rules: "apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript." Every iPhone user is a Safari/WebKit user whether they use Safari or Chrome. Apple has a browser monopoly on iOS, which is something Microsoft was never able to achieve with IE. In Windows you could at least install Firefox. If you do that on iOS it might say Firefox, but you're still using WebKit. The reality is if you have an iOS device, you use Safari and are bound by its limitations. Another thing web developers find distressing is Apple's slow development cycle. Apple updates Safari roughly every six months at best. Blink-based browsers update every six weeks (soon every four), Firefox releases every four weeks, and Brave releases every three. This means that not only is Apple slow to add new features, but its development cycle means that even simple bug fixes have to wait a long time before they actually land on users' devices. Safari workarounds are not quick fixes. If your website is affected by a Safari bug, you can expect to wait up to a year before the problem is solved. One theme that emerges when you dig into the Web Platform Tests data on Safari's shortcomings is that even where WebKit has implemented a feature, it's often not complete.

ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: The new social network founded by former President Trump may violate the terms of use of the software on which it is based. On Wednesday night, after Trump revealed the TRUTH social app, Twitter users began to note that the network appeared to be based on an open-source social networking software called Mastodon, which allows people to modify the underlying code so long as they abide by its license. But the Trump network appears to have taken the publicly available code for the website while violating the terms that make it free to use.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told TPM in an email that TRUTH appeared to violate the terms of use that the software sets forth: making the source code available, and having a copy of the general product license available to users. "I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation though," Rochko told TPM, while declining to discuss any specific legal action he may be contemplating. "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free," Rochko added.

The AGPL license mandates that software developed for free -- like Mastodon -- remain publicly available after its been modified. Under the license, TRUTH needs to share any modifications to Mastodon's code. The requirement allows developers to remain aware of how the software is being used so long as its run on public servers, continuing the chain by which different open-source developers continue to work on and further modify code that's been created. Former President Trump announced plans to launch the social media platform yesterday, saying his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise. TRUTH social will be open to "invited users" for a beta launch in November, with plans for it to launch publicly beginning early next year.

With that said, the "invite only" system has already run into some problems, according to Slashdot reader slack_justyb. Some users were able to sign up to create accounts using a publicly available link, allowing them to generate their own handles, like @donaldtrump.

"Apparently a bug in GPSD, the daemon responsible for deriving time from the GPS system, is going to trigger on October 24, 2021, jumping the time back to March of 2002," writes Slashdot reader suutar. "There's a fix that's been committed since August, but of course not everything is up to date." ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes: This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, "I have a feeling that there will be some 'interesting moments' in the early morning when a bunch of the world's stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to 2002." GPSD maintainer Gary E. Miller has acknowledged the problem, and a fix has been made to the code. To be exact, the fix is in August 2021's GPSD 3.23 release. So, what's the problem if the fix is already in?

Well, there are two problems. First, it won't be backported to previous releases. If you're still using an older version, you may be out of luck. Second, as Miller observed, not all distros "pick up GPSD updates or upstream their patches. [This] is a very sore spot with me." So, just because your operating system is up to date does not mean that it will have the necessary GPSD fix. Miller suggests that you check it and do it yourself: "I [am] gonna fall back on Greg K_H's dictum: All users must update."

Oh, wondering what the mysterious root cause of all this commotion GPS Week Rollover? It's a legacy GPS problem. The GPS signal GPS week number uses a 10-bit code with a maximum value of 1,023. This means every 19.7 years; the GPS week number rolls over to zero. Or, as Miller noted, "This code is a 1024 week time warp waiting to happen." So, check your systems now for this problem. And, if, like most of us, you're relying on someone upstream from you for the correct time, check with them to make sure they've taken care of this forthcoming trouble.