Twitter has locked President Trump's Twitter account for 12 hours and forced the removal of three offending tweets. It also warned it could suspend his account permanently. TechCrunch reports: "As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy," the site writes. As part of the action, Trump will be locked out of his account for at least 12 hours. The account will remain locked beyond that, as long as the tweets are not deleted, the site adds. Beyond the current action, Twitter adds that future violations of its policies, "will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account."

The service has long contended that tweets from a prominent figure like Trump were in the public interest, in spite of breaking its stated terms of service. According to Twitter guidelines: "A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable. With this in mind, there are certain cases where it may be in the public's interest to have access to certain Tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules." The removed tweets include content that was early flagged by the service, "due to a risk of violence," all arriving in the wake of a violent storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Microsoft is making a big change to its Windows 10 taskbar soon, with the addition of a news and weather widget. The Verge reports: The new feature is available to testers today, and it will allow Windows 10 users to access a feed of news, stocks, and weather information straight from the taskbar. You'll be able to quickly glance at the weather without having to open the Start menu, install a third-party app, or check online. The taskbar feature will pop out into a mini feed of content that can be personalized with the latest sports news, headlines, and weather information. Microsoft is using its Microsoft News network to surface news and content from more than 4,500 sources. The company has been curating this through artificial intelligence in recent months, and this particular feature will also learn what news is relevant to you when you dismiss or like stories in the feed.

This new taskbar feature will also require Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge to be installed on a PC. That means any link you click within the feature will force you into Edge to read it, and Microsoft is presenting content in the reading view by default. You can of course disable this new taskbar feature, and Microsoft says it will be an ad-free experience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: President-elect Joe Biden's transition team announced that David Recordon, one of OpenId and oAuth's developers, has been named the White House Director of Technology. Recordon most recently was the VP of infrastructure and security at the non-profit Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation. Before that, Recordon was Facebook's engineer director. There, he had led Facebook's open-source initiatives and projects. Among other programs, this included Phabricator, a suite of code review web apps, which Facebook used for its own development. He also led efforts on Cassandra, the Apache open-source distributed database management system; HipHop, a PHP to C++ source code translator; and Apache Thrift, a software framework, for scalable cross-language services development. In short, he's both a programmer and manager who knows open-source from the inside out.

Recordon learned to program at a public elementary school. According to the Biden-Harris transition team, he's spent his almost two-decade career working at the intersection of technology, security, open-source software, public service, and philanthropy. Looking forward to the challenges Recordon faces in his new position, he wrote on LinkedIn: "The pandemic and ongoing cybersecurity attacks present new challenges for the entire Executive Office of the President, but ones I know that these teams can conquer in a safe and secure manner together." The report notes that Recordon served as the first Director of White House Information Technology during President Barack Obama's term of office, working on IT modernization and cybersecurity issues. He's also served as the Biden-Harris transition team's deputy CTO.

The machine learning company OpenAI is developing models that improve computer vision and can produce original images from a text prompt. From a report: The new models are the latest steps in ongoing efforts to create machine learning systems that exhibit elements of general intelligence, while performing tasks that are actually useful in the real world -- without breaking the bank on computing power. OpenAI this week is announcing two new systems that attempt to do for images what its landmark GPT-3 model did last year for text generation. DALL-E is a neural network that can "take any text and make an image out of it," says Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist. That includes concepts it would never have encountered in training, like the drawing of an anthropomorphic daikon radish walking a dog. DALL-E operates somewhat similarly to GPT-3, the huge transformer model that can generate original passages of text based on a short prompt. CLIP, the other new neural network, "can take any set of visual categories and instantly create very strong and reliable visually classifiable text descriptions," says Sutskever, improving on existing computer vision techniques with less training and expensive computational power.

Facebook's planned smart glasses will arrive "sooner than later" in 2021, but won't feature the kind of digital overlay technology that is associated with augmented reality, according to hardware chief Andrew Bosworth. From a report: The glasses, which are being built in partnership with Ray-Ban and parent Luxottica Group SpA, will connect to a device -- though users won't be able to overlay digital objects onto their real-world view, a foundational element of AR. "These are certainly connected glasses, they are certainly providing a lot of functionality, [but] we're being quite coy about which functionality precisely we are providing," Bosworth said. "We're excited about it but we don't want to over-hype it. We're not even calling it augmented reality, we're just calling it 'smart glasses,'" he added.

Verizon has backtracked on its plan to turn off its 3G network by the end of 2020. Light Reading reports: In response to questions from Light Reading, Verizon spokesperson Kevin King said "our 3G network is operational and we don't have a plan to shut it down at this time. We'll work with customers to move them to newer technology." That's a decided change from Verizon's plans from roughly a year ago. In July 2019, Verizon spokesperson Howie Waterman confirmed to Light Reading that the operator had delayed the shuttering of its 3G network from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020. He said the action would give impacted customers "an extra year to decide what they want to do." Verizon's decision to keep its 3G network up and running means the service provider will continue to operate three separate wireless network technologies -- 3G, 4G and 5G -- for the foreseeable future. As for the other carriers, AT&T plans to shutter its own 3G network in "early" 2022 and T-Mobile has said it will shut down its 3G network "over the next several years" but "we haven't shared timing."

Last July, GitHub prevented users in Iran and several other nations from accessing portions of the service due to U.S. sanction laws. Today, the world's largest host of source code announced that it has secured a license from the U.S. government to operate in Iran. It's also working to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well. MSPoweruser reports: "Over the course of two years, we were able to demonstrate how developer use of GitHub advances human progress, international communication, and the enduring U.S. foreign policy of promoting free speech and the free flow of information. We are grateful to OFAC for the engagement which has led to this great result for developers. We are in the process of rolling back all restrictions on developers in Iran, and reinstating full access to affected accounts," wrote Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub. GitHub is also working with the U.S. government to secure similar licenses for developers in Crimea and Syria as well.

Dell is launching three new monitors next month, and all of them come with a dedicated Microsoft Teams button. The Verge reports: Dell claims it has created the "world's first video conferencing monitors certified for Microsoft Teams," after Microsoft started certifying displays, webcams, and headsets last year. Three monitors will be available next month, all offering quick access to Microsoft Teams. The button will let Microsoft Teams users quickly launch the app to make and receive video calls. Hands-free commands will also be supported through Cortana and the built-in microphone.

The Teams button is the main surprise with these displays, but Dell's trio of videoconferencing monitors also have some useful specs designed for an era where remote work and video calling is key. Each includes a 5-megapixel pop-up infrared camera, which supports facial recognition with Windows Hello. Dell also bundles a noise-canceling microphone and dual 5-watt integrated speakers. There's even a built-in mode to reduce blue light emissions. Dell is launching a 24-inch (FHD) version for $519.99, a 27-inch (QHD) model for $719.99, and a curved 34-inch (WQHD) variant for $1,149.99. All three will launch on February 16th. In other Dell-related news, the company has announced new versions of its Latitude laptops with Intel's new 11th Gen vPro chips and new features like an automated, integrated webcam shutter to physically block your camera when it's not in use.

Internet shutdowns cost India $2.8 billion, putting the South Asian nation at the top of a list of 21 countries that curbed citizens' web access in 2020. From a report: India -- the second-worst-hit nation by the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of overall confirmed infections -- accounted for about three-quarters of the $4 billion lost worldwide to internet curbs. Its losses more than doubled compared to 2019, a report from a U.K.-based digital privacy and security research group showed. Some countries known to limit Internet access or censor material like China and North Korea were not included in the report because researchers relied on publicly available open source information and documented internet and social media shutdowns. With 8,927 hours of blacked out or curbed bandwidth access, India restricted internet use more than any other nation, as restrictions originally imposed in 2019 continued throughout 2020, according to the Global Cost of Internet Shutdowns report released by Top10VPN.

Microsoft is building a universal Outlook client for Windows and Mac that will also replace the default Mail & Calendar apps on Windows 10 when ready. This new client is codenamed Monarch and is based on the already available Outlook Web app available in a browser today. From a report: Project Monarch is the end-goal for Microsoft's "One Outlook" vision, which aims to build a single Outlook client that works across PC, Mac, and the Web. Right now, Microsoft has a number of different Outlook clients for desktop, including Outlook Web, Outlook (Win32) for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Mail & Calendar on Windows 10. Microsoft wants to replace the existing desktop clients with one app built with web technologies. The project will deliver Outlook as a single product, with the same user experience and codebase whether that be on Windows or Mac. It'll also have a much smaller footprint and be accessible to all users whether they're free Outlook consumers or commercial business customers. I'm told the app will feature native OS integrations with support for things like offline storage, share targets, notifications, and more. I understand that it's one of Microsoft's goals to make the new Monarch client feel as native to the OS as possible while remaining universal across platforms by basing the app on the Outlook website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Tens of thousands of website owners who are based in the UK might have started the year with an unpleasant surprise: Eurid, the registry manager of .eu domain names, has suspended .eu domain names registered by UK citizens as a result of the regulatory changes caused by Brexit. Suspended domain names can no longer support a website or service like email, and owners now have three months to prove their right to run a .eu domain. This means updating contact data to transfer the .eu domain to an EU-subsidiary outside the UK; or declaring citizenship or residence of an EU member state.

Domain names will be re-instated as soon as contact data is updated, said Eurid -- but only for the next few months. Those who, after 31st March 2021, still haven't demonstrated their eligibility will see their domain name withdrawn, and made available again for general registration from January 2022 if no action is taken by then. Eurid said 81,000 domains, from 50,000 users, have been suspended. Eurid's suspension of UK domains comes after a series of mixed signals from the European Commission, which decides on the rules that guide the registration of .eu domains. EU regulations currently stipulate that .eu websites can only be allocated to EU citizens -- regardless of their place of residence -- as well as non-EU citizens and organizations established in a member state. In other words, once Brexit happened, UK-based .eu domains owned by UK citizens suddenly became non-EU websites hosted in a non-EU country.

Not a single one of Google's iOS apps have been updated in almost a month -- an unusually long period for a tech behemoth not to release, at the very least, even a minor bug fix or stability update for one of its dozens of insanely popular iPhone and iPad apps. From a report: And after reviewing the latest release dates for all of Google's iOS apps, one reason for this lack of updates seems more likely than others: It could be related to Apple's new App Store privacy labels. The last time any Google iOS app was updated was on December 7. This includes updates to major Google apps like Google Drive, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Sheets, YouTube Music, Google Duo, Google Authenticator, and Gboard. Why is December 7 a significant date? Because starting on December 8, Apple mandated that any new apps or app updates submitted to the App Store would require the developer to fill out the privacy label information for the app it was submitting. This privacy label reveals exactly what data the app is collecting about the user and how that user data is being used. The label can then be viewed on an app's App Store listing page. The feature is part of Apple's push to make developers be more transparent in the ways they collect and use user data, so users can make more informed choices about the apps they choose to download.

Amazon.com is buying 11 used Boeing 767-300 planes, the first time the online retail giant has purchased, rather than leased, aircraft for its fast-growing air cargo operation. From a report: The company on Tuesday said it was buying seven aircraft from Delta Air Lines and four from WestJet Airlines. The WestJet aircraft are currently being converted from passenger to cargo use and will join Amazon's fleet this year. The Delta jets will start flying routes in 2022. By the end of next year, Amazon expects to have more than 85 planes in service, a spokesperson said. Seattle-based Amazon has rapidly expanded its air cargo operations in recent years, part of an effort to speed up delivery of packages to customers and supplement capacity from such carriers as United Parcel Service.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Georgians head to the polls to vote on their two U.S. Senators -- and effectively, partisan control of Congress -- on Tuesday, voters face an online landscape far different from what they saw in the weeks surrounding November's general election. In the fall, Facebook -- by far the most popular social network -- clamped down on sponsored posts about politics in order to ensure that misinformation would not spread the way that it had during the 2016 presidential election. But a few weeks before the Georgia race, Facebook turned off this safeguard in Georgia. The Markup decided to take a look behind the curtain to see if we could determine the impact on Georgia voters' news feeds. We recruited a panel of 58 Facebook users in the state and paid them to allow us to monitor their feeds, starting in late November, using custom software we built for our Citizen Browser project. The Citizen Browser project is a data-driven initiative to examine what content social media companies choose to amplify to their users.

While Facebook's controls were in place, we found that links to traditional news sites were present in almost all election-related posts that appeared on our Georgia panelists' feeds. After Dec. 16, however, when Facebook flipped the switch to turn on political advertising for the Georgia election, we noticed that partisan content quickly elbowed out news sites, replacing a significant proportion of mentions of the election in our users' feeds. The Markup defined election-related content as anything containing mentions of Trump or Biden, the names of the four major-party senate candidates, or the terms "senate," "vote," "election," or "ballot." We looked at the URLs attached to those election-related posts and tabulated the most common domains. For the first half of the month, the most commonly appearing election-related content came primarily from news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But after Dec. 16, just over one third of the most commonly appearing domains were partisan campaign sites buying ads, including WrongForGeorgia.com, an attack site targeting the Democratic candidates; and DeserveBetter.org, an attack site targeting the incumbent Republican senators. We discarded any domains that only appeared on a single panelist's feed.

The reason why the Windows UI has a 32GB limit on the formatting of FAT32 volumes is because retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer "said so." The confession comes "in the latest of a series of anecdotes hosted on his YouTube channel Dave's Garage," reports The Register. From the report: In the closing years of the last century, Plummer was involved in porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT. Part of that was a redo of Windows Format ("it had to be a replacement and complete rewrite since the Win95 system was so markedly different") and, as well as the grungy lower-level bits going down to the API, he also knocked together the classic, stacked Format dialog over the course of an hour of UI creativity. As he admired his design genius, he pondered what cluster sizes to offer the potential army of future Windows NT 4.0 users. The options would define the size of the volume; FAT32 has a set maximum number of clusters in a volume. Making those clusters huge would make for an equally huge volume, but at a horrifying cost in terms of wasted space: select a 32-kilobyte cluster size and even the few bytes needed by a "Hello World" file would snaffle the full 32k.

"We call it 'Cluster Slack'," explained Plummer, "and it is the unavoidable waste of using FAT32 on large volumes." "How large is too large? At what point do you say, 'No, it's too inefficient, it would be folly to let you do that'? That is the decision I was faced with." At the time, the largest memory card Plummer could lay his hands on for testing had an impossibly large 16-megabyte capacity. "Perhaps I multiplied its size by a thousand," he said, "and then doubled it again for good measure, and figured that would more than suffice for the lifetime of NT 4.0. I picked the number 32G as the limit and went on with my day."

While Microsoft's former leader may have struggled to put clear water between himself and the infamous "640K" quote of decades past, Plummer was clear that his decision process was aimed at NT 4.0 and would just be a temporary thing until the UI was revised. "That, however, is a fatal mistake on my part that no one should be excused for making. With the perfect being the enemy of the good, 'good enough' has persisted for 25 years and no one seems to have made any substantial changes to Format since then..." ... However, as Plummer put it: "At the end of the day, it was a simple lack of foresight combined with the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent."

Microsoft is planning a "sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows" that is designed to signal to users of the operating system that "Windows is BACK." From a report: That's according to a job listing posted by Microsoft recently, advertising for a software engineering role in the Windows Core User Experiences team: "On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers." Microsoft quietly removed references to this "sweeping visual rejuvenation" this morning, after several Windows enthusiasts spotted the job listing over the weekend.

Slack is down on the first full work day of 2021. From a report: The company said Monday morning "customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused." The company is reporting issues with connecting to the service and messaging.

Employees of Google and parent company Alphabet announced the creation of a union on Monday, escalating years of confrontation between workers and management of the internet giant. From a report: The Alphabet Workers Union said it will be open to all employees and contractors, regardless of their role or classification. It will collect dues, pay organizing staff and have an elected board of directors. The unionizing effort, a rare campaign within a major U.S. technology company, is supported by the Communications Workers of America as part of a recent tech-focused initiative known as CODE-CWA. Googlers who join the Alphabet Workers Union will also be members of CWA Local 1400. The group, which represents more than 200 workers in the U.S., plans to take on issues including compensation, employee classification and the kinds of work Google engages in. "We will hire skilled organizers to ensure all workers at Google know they can work with us if they actually want to see their company reflect their values," Dylan Baker, software engineer at Google, said in a statement. A letter from the union organizers published in the New York Times said workplace concerns at the company have been dismissed by executives for too long. Google has clashed with some employees in recent years over contracts with the military, the different treatment of contract workers and a rich exit package for an executive ousted for alleged sexual harassment.

Heading into the new year, the Atlantic's executive editor penned a scathing warning that vast social networks like Facebook "can harm society just by existing..." Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren't enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person. At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result...

We're still in the infancy of this century's triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible. The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people...

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today's platforms — and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web's existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that's despite the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people's time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century's Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

It does not have to be this way.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history.
Some tips from the article:

• If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....)

• Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues...

• The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms.

• Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension...

• Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper.

But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."