The Wall Street Journal remembers how five years ago, Uber's co-founder "was so confident that Uber's rides would prompt people to leave their cars at home that he told a tech conference: 'If every car in San Francisco was Ubered there would be no traffic.'"

He was wrong. Rather than the apps becoming a model of algorithm-driven efficiency, drivers in major cities cruise for fares without passengers an estimated 40% of the time. Multiple studies show that Uber and Lyft have pulled people away from buses, subways and walking, and that the apps add to the overall amount of driving in the U.S. A study published last year by San Francisco County officials and University of Kentucky researchers in the journal Science Advances found that over 60% of the slowdown of traffic speeds in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016 was due to the introduction of the ride-hail companies...

The reversal of ride-hailing from would-be traffic hero to congestion villain is the sort of unintended consequence that has become a recurring feature of Silicon Valley disruption. Companies seeking rapid growth by reinventing the way we do things are delivering solutions that sometimes create their own problems... Silicon Valley is particularly prone to focusing on positive potential effects of new technologies given a decadeslong culture of utopian ideals, said Fred Turner, a Stanford University communications professor who has written a book on the topic... Tech companies tend to have an engineering-like, narrow focus on solving specific problems, often missing the broader picture as a result. "You're not rewarded for seeing the landscape within which your device will be deployed," he said... [I]n hindsight, some of the pitfalls -- such as cars cruising empty between passengers -- seem obvious...

Riders also take car trips that wouldn't have happened before Uber and Lyft. Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant and former New York City official who has studied the topic, said in his paper that surveys in numerous cities found roughly 60% of riders in Ubers and Lyfts would have walked, biked, taken public transit or stayed home if a ride-hail car hadn't been available.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed published in The Financial Times "once again calling for more regulation of Big Tech," reports MarketWatch, "even if it affects his company's bottom line." Zuckerberg has previously called for more government regulation of internet companies, and reiterated his arguments in favor of laws covering four major areas: elections, harmful content, privacy and data portability. "I don't think private companies should make so many decisions alone when they touch on fundamental democratic values," he wrote, adding: "We have to balance promoting innovation and research against protecting people's privacy and security."

Zuckerberg warned that regulation could have "unintended consequences, especially for small businesses that can't do sophisticated data analysis and marketing on their own...."

At his Munich appearance, Zuckerberg spoke about what type of regulation he envisioned: "Right now there are two frameworks that I think people have for existing industries — there's like newspapers and existing media, and then there's the telco-type model, which is 'the data just flows through you', but you're not going to hold a telco responsible if someone says something harmful on a phone line... I actually think where we should be is somewhere in between," he said, according to Reuters.
Reuters also reports that Zuckerberg said Facebook is already employing 35,000 people to review online content and implement security measures.

"Those teams and Facebook's automated technology currently suspend more than 1 million fake accounts each day, he said, adding that 'the vast majority are detected within minutes of signing up.'"

Waterfox is an open-source web browser for x64, ARM64, and PPC64LE systems, "intended to be speedy and ethical, and maintain support for legacy extensions dropped by Firefox, from which it is forked," according to Wikipedia. (Its tabs also still have angled sides with rounded corners.)

Friday Waterfox's original creator, 24-year-old Alexandros Kontos, announced that the browser "now has funding and a development team, so Waterfox can finally start to grow!" after its acquisition by a company called System1. I started Waterfox when I was 16. It was a way for me to understand how large software projects worked and the Mozilla documentation was a great introduction... I've touted Waterfox as an ethical and privacy friendly browser... I never wanted Waterfox to be a part of the hyper-privacy community. It would just feel like standards that would be impossible to uphold, especially for something such as a web browser on the internet. Throughout the years people have always asked about Waterfox and privacy, and if they've ever wanted more than it can afford, I've always pushed them to use Tor. Waterfox was here for customisations and speed, with a good level of privacy...

I wasn't doing anything with Waterfox except developing it and making some money via search. Why I kept going throughout the years, I'll never know... System1 has been to Waterfox a search syndication partner. Essentially a way to have a search engine partnership (such as Bing) is through them, because companies such as Microsoft are too big and too busy to talk to small players such as Waterfox... It's probably the one easy way a browser can make money without doing anything dodgy, and it's a way I've been happy to do it without having to compromise Waterfox (and will be the same way System1 makes money from Waterfox -- nothing else). People also don't seem to understand what System1 does...
"Now I can finally focus on making Waterfox into a viable alternative to the big browsers," Kontos concludes.

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed contextualized the news with this brief history of the alternate browser ecosystem: As the usage share of web browsers continues to show a lopsideded dominance by Google Chrome, many previously-independent browsers have fallen by the wayside or have been reinvented as Chrome variants (i.e. Opera, Edge, Brave). Apple forges on with its Safari browser while other, smaller projects tend to be quite limited for multi-platform users, such as Dolphin and Bromite.

Mozilla continues independently with Firefox for almost every platform, while variants such as Pale Moon and Sea Monkey have attempted to provide products that avoid drastic and/or controversial changes made by Mozilla but sometimes do not match the multi-platform support of Firefox. Let us not forget Tor, the Firefox-based anonymity-focused browser.

Alex Kontos is a developer who attempted to provide continuity with dropped Firefox capabilities in his multi-platform Waterfox browser, proudly declaring that Firefox's user data sharing and telemetry collection was not included. For that privacy focus a certain popularity of Waterfox occurred. Now Kontos has revealed that his Waterfox project has been sold to System1, a company describing itself as "a consumer internet and applications company with the most powerful audience expansion platform in the industry."

"Google has revealed plans to initially warn Chrome users about 'insecure' downloads and eventually block them outright," reports The Verge. The warnings will begin in April: "Today we're announcing that Chrome will gradually ensure that secure (HTTPS) pages only download secure files," Joe DeBlasio of the Chrome security team wrote in a blog post. "Insecurely-downloaded files are a risk to users' security and privacy. For instance, insecurely-downloaded programs can be swapped out for malware by attackers, and eavesdroppers can read users' insecurely-downloaded bank statements."

Beginning with Chrome 82, due for release in April, Chrome will warn users if they're about to download mixed content executables from a secure website. Then, when version 83 is released, those executable downloads will be blocked and the warning will be applied to archive files. PDFs and .doc files will get the warning in Chrome 84, with audio, images, text, and video files displaying it by version 85. Finally, all mixed content downloads — a non-secure file coming from a secure site — will be blocked as of the release of Chrome 86. Right now, Google is estimating an October release for that build of the popular web browsing.

"A multibillion-dollar, privately-owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy," writes Wired. And if you care about net neutrality, "That should freak you out." [T]here's an even bigger issue brewing, and it's time to start talking about it: cloud neutrality. "While its name sounds soft and fluffy," Microsoft president and general counsel Brad Smith and coauthor Carol Ann Browne write in their recent book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, "in truth the cloud is a fortress...." Each data center costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build and many millions more to maintain; and you pretty much can't build a successful new company without them. So, thank goodness for Microsoft, right?

The book means to portray this might and power as both a source of wonder and an enabling feature of the modern economy. To me, it reads like a threat. The cloud economy exists at the pleasure, and continued profit, of a handful of companies. The internet is no longer the essential enabler of the tech economy. That title now belongs to the cloud. But the infrastructure of the internet, at least, was publicly financed and subsidized. The government can set rules about how companies have to interact with their customers. Whether and how it sets and enforces those rules isn't the point, for now. It can.

That's not the case with the cloud. This infrastructure is solely owned by a handful of companies with hardly any oversight. [Besides Microsoft, the article also notes Google and Amazon.] The potential for abuse is huge, whether it's through trade-secret snooping or the outright blocking, slowing, or hampering of transmission. No one seems to be thinking about what could happen if these behemoths decide it's against their interests to have all these barnacles on their flanks.

They should be.
Cloud companies "are essentially incubating and hosting their competition..." the article points out.

"The problem is that few have the resources to replicate the cloud infrastructure, should the landlords suddenly turn on their tenants."

"Lazy Loading" would augment HTML's <img> tag (and <iframe> tag) with two new attributes -- "eager" (to load immediately) and "lazy" (to load only when it becomes relevant in the viewport).

Felix Arntz, a developer programs engineer at Google (and a WordPress core committer) notes the updates in the HTML specification for the lazy loading attributes, adding that it's "already supported by several browsers, including Chrome and Edge" and also the Android browser and Opera.

And lazy loading can now also be toggled on for Firefox 75 Nightly users, reports Neowin, though it's disabled by default: It's not clear if it will be enabled by the time Firefox 75 reaches the stable branch but according to comments on the Bugzilla thread, it's in high demand. Previously, websites could employ lazy loading by using JavaScript but now lazy loading syntax is supported directly in the web browser.

The implementation in Firefox comes after Google added the feature to its browser.
Google's Arntz has also written a post describing a proposal to begin lazy-loading images by default in Wordpress. The proposed solution is available as a feature plugin WP Lazy Loading in the plugin repository. The plugin is being developed on GitHub. Your testing and feedback will be much appreciated.

Slashdot reader golden_donkey quotes Forbes: Are you booting up your Windows 10 machine and discovering you can't log in to your profile? It appears you're not alone. Reports are increasing across Twitter and Microsoft forums that following the most recent Patch Tuesday update (KB4532693), users are complaining that their profiles and desktop files are missing, and that custom icons and wallpaper have all been reset to their default state...

The KB4532693 update is allegedly causing much more serious headaches for some users. A newer report by Windows Latest cites multiple users in their comments section complaining that the data is nowhere to be found and allegedly not recoverable.
Microsoft has now "yanked KB4524244 from its update servers..." reports ZDNet, "after acknowledging reports of 'an issue affecting a sub-set of devices.'" Microsoft says customers who have successfully installed the update don't need to take any further steps. Those who have configured PCs to defer installation of updates by at least four days should also be unaffected.

For those who are experiencing issues related to this update, Microsoft recommends uninstalling the update.
Forbes also shared a video "on a related note." Its title? "How To Choose A Linux Distro That's Right For You..."

The Free Software Foundation sent Microsoft a hard drive for Valentine's Day -- along with a petition calling for the release of the source code for Windows 7 (which is no longer supported by Microsoft): It's as easy as copying the source code, giving it a license notice, and mailing it back to us. As the author of the most popular free software license in the world, we're ready to give them all of the help we can. All they have to do is ask.

We want them to show exactly how much love they have for the "open source" software they mention in their advertising. If they really do love free software -- and we're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt -- they have the opportunity to show it to the world. We hope they're not just capitalizing on the free software development model in the most superficial and exploitative way possible: by using it as a marketing tool to fool us into thinking that they care about our freedom.

Together, we've stood up for our principles. They can reject us, or ignore us, but what they cannot do is stop us. We'll go on campaigning, until all of us are free.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: For more than 70 years, India and Pakistan have waged sporadic and deadly skirmishes over control of the mountainous region of Kashmir. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict, including three just this month. Both sides claim the Himalayan outpost as their own, but web surfers in India could be forgiven for thinking the dispute is all but settled: The borders on Google's online maps there display Kashmir as fully under Indian control. Elsewhere, users see the region's snaking outlines as a dotted line, acknowledging the dispute. Google's corporate mission is "to organize the world's information," but it also bends it to its will. From Argentina to the U.K. to Iran, the world's borders look different depending on where you're viewing them from. That's because Google -- and other online mapmakers -- simply change them.
[...]
Unlike mapping geographical features, sketching the contours of towns or countries is ultimately a human construct. So, Google consults with local governments and other official bodies to help make a decision about where to draw its lines, according to people familiar with the matter. And it refers to historical maps, news events and atlases, these people said. But changes are also made with little fanfare and can be done immediately, while physical maps are beholden to printing schedules. When it comes to contested borders, people in different countries often see different things. Take the body of water between Japan and the Korean Peninsula. To almost all it is known as the Sea of Japan, but for Google Maps users in South Korea it's listed as the East Sea. More than 4,000 miles away, the waterway separating Iran from Saudi Arabia may be either the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf, depending on who's looking online. And the line in Western Sahara marking the northern border with Morocco disappears for Moroccans seeking it out on the Web -- along with the region's name altogether. The sparsely populated northwest Africa region is disputed between Morocco, which seized it in 1975, and the indigenous Sahrawi. One of Google's contract employees said they "are often told to alter maps with no reason given and that their changes take effect almost immediately," the report says. "That typically includes relatively minor adjustments like widening a path in a park or removing mentions of landmarks like a statue or traffic circle. But, these people said, Google has a special team employees refer to as 'the disputed region team' that addresses more prickly matters..."

"The company also responds to feedback, such as once changing the name of Native American tribal land to 'nation' from 'reservation,'" notes The Washington Post. "Google's maps can also be revised by a band of enthusiasts known as Local Guides who can submit suggestions for alterations, which often are implemented automatically. [...] In some cases, local laws dictate how Google and others must represent maps to avoid censure, as is the case in China or Russia, according to people familiar with the matter."

Ben Zhao and his wife, Heather Zheng, computer science professors at the University of Chicago, designed what they are calling a "bracelet of silence" that will jam the Echo or any other microphones in the vicinity from listening in on the wearer's conversations. The New York Times reports: The bracelet is like an anti-smartwatch, both in its cyberpunk aesthetic and in its purpose of defeating technology. A large, somewhat ungainly white cuff with spiky transducers, the bracelet has 24 speakers that emit ultrasonic signals when the wearer turns it on. The sound is imperceptible to most ears, with the possible exception of young people and dogs, but nearby microphones will detect the high-frequency sound instead of other noises. "It's so easy to record these days," Mr. Lopes said. "This is a useful defense. When you have something private to say, you can activate it in real time. When they play back the recording, the sound is going to be gone." During a phone interview, Mr. Lopes turned on the bracelet, resulting in static-like white noise for the listener on the other end. At this point, the bracelet is just a prototype. The researchers say that they could manufacture it for as little as $20, and that a handful of investors have asked them about commercializing it. "The 'bracelet of silence' is not the first device invented by researchers to stuff up digital assistants' ears," the report notes. "In 2018, two designers created Project Alias, an appendage that can be placed over a smart speaker to deafen it. But Ms. Zheng argues that a jammer should be portable to protect people as they move through different environments, given that you don't always know where a microphone is lurking."

"Other precursors to the bracelet include a 'jammer coat' designed by an Austrian architecture firm in 2014 to block radio waves that could collect information from a person's phone or credit cards," reports The New York Times. "In 2012, the artist Adam Harvey created silver-plated stealth wear garments that masked people's heat signature to protect them from the eyes of drones, as well as a line of makeup and hairstyles, called CV Dazzle, to thwart facial recognition cameras."

Earlier this week, freelance journalist Tyler Coats had an organ-buying service appear on his feed in the form of a promoted tweet. Gizmodo has the details: The fact that this cropped up in front of his face to begin with is indicative of how badly these ads are targeted in the first place. "Despite my cold, dead heart, I am not in the market for new organs," Coates later told Gizmodo. Understanding how broken Twitter's system is requires a bit of context. Since being pressured to juice its promoted content roughly half a decade ago, Twitter's been, shall we say, "experimenting" with new ways to push that content in front of its user base and milk those eyeballs for profit. At the same time, it's been gradually limiting the ways advertisers can target the people who might want to see that content in the first place. The result? Weird promoted tweets -- about organs or otherwise -- flooding people's feeds.

Though the account running the human organ ads has since been suspended, it looks like the same person created another account under a similar name (which was also suspended). And they will likely just keep going. In a statement to Gizmodo, a Twitter spokesperson said that this particular tweet violated the company's Unacceptable Business Practices policy and Inappropriate Content policy. "In general we have both humans and machines that review our content for policy compliance," they added. "And, of course, we're constantly investing in both our automated and human review processes and systems."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 3D model is sliced up into hundreds of 2D horizontal layers and slowly built up, one layer at a time. This layer-by-layer process can take hours or even days, but what if we could print the entire model at once? A new technique demonstrated by researchers from Switzerland's Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) -- and further detailed in this Nature article -- does just that and can print an entire model in seconds. The new technique builds a model by hardening a photosensitive resin with a laser, not unlike existing stereolithography (SLA) printers. The big difference here is the application of tomographic techniques, the same used in x-rays and ultrasounds, that allows for rotational printing. Laser light is modulated with a DLP chip (just like in old rear-projection HDTVs) and is blasted into a container full of resin. The laser covers the entire build volume, and the container of resin actually rotates while it's being exposed to the light. The laser projects the model at different rotational perspectives, which is synced up with the spinning resin, and a whole 3D model can be produced in seconds.

The EPFL writes, "The system is currently capable of making two-centimeter structures with a precision of 80 micrometers, about the same as the diameter of a strand of hair. But as the team develops new devices, they should be able to build much bigger objects, potentially up to 15 centimeters." In this first public demonstration, the build volume is 16mm x 16mm x 20mm, making it one of the smallest 3D printers on earth. An 80 um resolution is also nothing to write home about and can be bested by ~$500 consumer SLA printers. It is very fast, though, and the technique is just getting started. The researchers have set up a spin-off company called "Readily 3D" to develop and market the technology.

CNN Business has learned that the once-popular live mobile trivia game "HQ Trivia" is shutting down. From the report: When HQ launched in 2017, its first game HQ Trivia quickly attracted millions of people across the world who stopped whatever they were doing twice a day to play the game on their smartphones. The company was profiled by The New York Times and its original host Scott Rogowsky became a household name, appearing on programs like NBC's "Today" show. But over the next year, the game's popularity faded and its parent company was hit with a series of setbacks. The company grappled with internal turmoil, including the death of HQ cofounder Colin Kroll, who died in December 2018 from a drug overdose.

CEO Rus Yusupov said in a company-wide email on Friday that "lead investors are no longer willing to fund the company, and so effective today, HQ will cease operations and move to dissolution." In the email, which was obtained by CNN Business, Yusupov also disclosed that the company had hired a banker "to help find additional investors and partners to support the expansion of the company." He said the company had "received an offer from an established business" and was expected to close the deal on Saturday, but the potential acquisition fell through.

Alphabet's appeal against a multibillion-dollar fine for alleged anticompetitive behavior by its Google unit risks backfiring after a European Union court floated the prospect of increasing the fine (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), rather than scrapping it. The Wall Street Journal reports: In a surprise twist Friday at the end of a three-day hearing, one of five judges on the panel said the EU's General Court has the power to increase the $2.6 billion fine, levied in 2017, if it finds that the sum was insufficient to deter the company from further anticompetitive behavior. "The fine of ~$2.6 billion was described as eye-catching, but it is a small amount of cash in your hands," Judge Colm Mac Eochaidh said in court. "Did that level of fine deter you from repeating your behavior?" he asked Google's counsel. Increasing a fine has only one precedent in the court's history, according to Mr. Mac Eochaidh, when German chemicals giant BASF SE was ordered to pay ~$58,000 in 2007 on top of an initial ~$38 million fine for participating in a chemicals cartel.

Christopher Thomas, a counsel for Google, dismissed the idea that the fine was warranted and said the company takes the entire antitrust process "with extreme seriousness." Google disputes the findings of the commission that it had willingly or negligently squeezed competitors out of its shopping searches. The prospect of raising the fine was described as theoretical by the panel's presiding judge. Still, it sent Google lawyers scrambling for arguments, with one sitting on the floor outside the courtroom frantically researching how to contest such a move. If Google loses the case, it has the right to appeal to the bloc's highest court, the European Court of Justice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [Cryptographer and coder known as Moxie Marlinspike] has always talked about making encrypted communications easy enough for anyone to use. The difference, today, is that Signal is finally reaching that mass audience it was always been intended for -- not just the privacy diehards, activists, and cybersecurity nerds that formed its core user base for years -- thanks in part to a concerted effort to make the app more accessible and appealing to the mainstream. That new phase in Signal's evolution began two years ago this month. That's when WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton, a few months removed from leaving the app he built amid post-acquisition clashes with Facebook management, injected $50 million into Marlinspike's end-to-end encrypted messaging project. Acton also joined the newly created Signal Foundation as executive chairman. The pairing up made sense; WhatsApp had used Signal's open source protocol to encrypt all WhatsApp communications end-to-end by default, and Acton had grown disaffected with what he saw as Facebook's attempts to erode WhatsApp's privacy.

Since then, Marlinspike's nonprofit has put Acton's millions -- and his experience building an app with billions of users -- to work. After years of scraping by with just three overworked full-time staffers, the Signal Foundation now has 20 employees. For years a bare-bones texting and calling app, Signal has increasingly become a fully featured, mainstream communications platform. With its new coding muscle, it has rolled out features at a breakneck speed: In just the last three months, Signal has added support for iPad, ephemeral images and video designed to disappear after a single viewing, downloadable customizable "stickers," and emoji reactions. More significantly, it announced plans to roll out a new system for group messaging, and an experimental method for storing encrypted contacts in the cloud. Many of those features might sound trivial. They certainly aren't the sort that appealed to Signal's earliest core users. Instead, they're what Acton calls "enrichment features." They're designed to attract normal people who want a messaging app as multifunctional as WhatsApp, iMessage, or Facebook Messenger but still value Signal's widely trusted security and the fact that it collects virtually no user data. Wired explains how adding simple-sounding enhancements can require significant feats of security engineering to fit within Signal's privacy constraints. Adding downloadable customizable stickers, for example, "required designing a system where every sticker 'pack' is encrypted with a 'pack key,'" reports Wired. "That key is itself encrypted and shared from one user to another when someone wants to install new stickers on their phone, so that Signal's server can never see decrypted stickers or even identify the Signal user who created or sent them."

For Signal's new group messaging, Signal partnered with Microsoft Research to invent a novel form of "anonymous credentials" that let a server gatekeep who belongs in a group, but without ever learning the members' identities.

Thelasko shares a report from Automotive News Europe: Jaguar Land Rover is pausing production of the Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV due to battery supply issues from LG Chem's Poland plant. JLR said it has adjusted production schedules of the model due to temporary supplier scheduling issues. "We are working with the supplier to resolve this and minimize impact on customer orders," JLR said. JLR did not name the supplier [A source familiar with the matter told Automotive News Europe that the battery supplier is LG Chem]. It also did not say when the production pause would start. The I-Pace is a rival to the Tesla Model X, featuring a large 90kWh battery and a range of about 377 km (234 miles). According to The Times newspaper, production of the I-Pace will stop for a week starting on Monday, Feb. 17.

Tesla has restored the Autopilot driver assistance features it remotely disabled on a Model S, just days after the story was first reported by Jalopnik. The owner in question, who Jalopnik refers to as Alec, said he was contacted by a Tesla customer experience rep who "apologized for my troubles, told me that Tesla has restored all missed options" and "cited a miscommunication" as the reason why the company pulled the Autopilot features in the first place. The Verge reports: Alec had purchased the used 2017 Model S in December from a third-party dealer that acquired the car from Tesla at auction in November. The original owner had equipped the car with the (now-retired) "Enhanced Autopilot" version of Tesla's driver assistance package and the company's "Full Self-Driving" package, which promises increased autonomy over the years. Three days after Tesla sold the car to the dealer, Tesla performed a "remote audit" that flagged those features for removal, according to Jalopnik. Even then, the features were never removed, and the dealer posted the car for sale with both Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving featured on the car's Monroney sticker -- meaning Alec paid for a car with those features.

But when Alec took the car to a Tesla service center a few weeks after his purchase, he was told that the features were removed. Tesla has removed features from used cars in the past, but typically does so before the car is sold off to a third-party dealer or a new owner. Since Tesla pulled these features both after it sold the car to the dealer, and after that dealer sold it to Alec, it caused some fear that the company was setting a precedent for yanking features on a whim.

Facebook said Friday that political candidates, campaigns and groups can use paid branded content across its platforms, a clarification prompted by a move from Michael Bloomberg's campaign to pay top Instagram influencers to post memes on its behalf. Axios reports: Its policy didn't explicitly state that it was OK for candidates to use branded content posts, but after hearing from various campaigns about the issue, Facebook moved to clarify its stance. Facebook has agreed that branded content should be allowed to be used by candidates, as long as the candidates are authorized and the creators disclose paid partnerships through branded content tools, according to a spokesperson.

Facebook previously prohibited political candidates and campaigns from running branded content by default because it wanted to avoid any risk that such actions could be viewed as accounts giving monetary contributions to campaigns. It's tweaking its approach now -- only in the U.S. -- because it believes that this is no longer a concern, given that it doesn't provide payments as a feature of its branded content tools. If a campaign were to buy ads to boost its branded content, then it would be subject to Facebook's advertising policies. That paid promotion would then need to be included in Facebook public, searchable political ad library for seven years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A test by Penumbra Brands to measure how much radiofrequency energy an iPhone 11 Pro gives off found that the phone emits more than twice the amount allowable by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC measures exposure to RF energy as the amount of wireless power a person absorbs for each kilogram of their body. The agency calls this the specific absorption rate, or SAR. For a cellphone, the FCC's threshold of safe exposure is 1.6 watts per kilogram. Penumbra's test found that an iPhone 11 Pro emitted 3.8 W/kg.

Ryan McCaughey, Penumbra's chief technology officer, said the test was a follow up to an investigation conducted by the Chicago Tribune last year. The Tribune tested several generations of Apple, Samsung, and Motorola phones, and found that many exceeded the FCC's limit. Penumbra used RF Exposure Labs, an independent, accredited SAR testing lab for the tests (The Tribune also used the San Diego-based lab for its investigation). Penumbra was conducting the test, which also included testing an iPhone 7, to study its Alara phone cases, which the company says are designed to reduce RF exposure in a person. It's worth noting that when the FCC conducted a follow-up investigation they did not find evidence that any of the phones exceed SAR limits. "That said, while the Tribune and Penumbra both used off-the-shelf phones, the FCC largely tested phones supplied by the manufacturers, including Apple," adds IEEE Spectrum.

Joel Moskowitz, a researcher at UC Berkeley, says that could be because there's a systematic problem with RF Exposure Lab's testing methods, or Apple rigged the software in the provided test phones to ensure they didn't put out enough power to exceed the SAR limit. Either way, both McCaughey and Moskowitz agree that the FCC's RF exposure testing is woefully out of date, as the limits reflect what the FCC deemed safe 25 years ago.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The retailpocalypse started in 2010. It followed the 2008 global recession, with the parallel birth and rise of social media adding fuel to the growth of online shopping. Suburban and rural malls sat empty, underutilized or poorly maintained as the most affected brands lost their customer base in the squeezed middle class. Meanwhile, online retailers thrived without the overhead costs of a physical space. Nearly a decade later, the online-only platforms that disrupted retail are choosing to pay rent as an additional, unnecessary expense. There are items available for purchase in each space, but the stores' ultimate goal is to offer a tangible experience offline to their users or consumers.

Hunker describes itself as an editorial website to help "first-timers improve their homes -- with inspiring tours, practical solutions and design advice for real people." Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform where users can start and run an online business, facilitating 820,000 online stores since June 2019. Depop calls itself "the creative community's marketplace" and projects that its existing user base will increase threefold over the next three years, from 5 million to 15 million users. In the last two years, each company has added a physical space that isn't exactly a store and isn't really an office, though they definitely borrow aspects of each. Hunker's space, known as Hunker House, is a three-story loft in the Abbot-Kinney neighborhood of Venice, CA. Shopify opened a 1,600 square foot location in downtown Los Angeles' The Row, and Depop's two community spots are in Little Italy, Manhattan, and Silver Lake, LA.