An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Chinese hackers infiltrated the Vatican's computer networks in the past three months , a private monitoring group has concluded, in an apparent espionage effort before the beginning of sensitive negotiations with Beijing. The attack was detected by Recorded Future, a firm based in Somerville, Mass. The Chinese Communist Party has been waging a broad campaign to tighten its grip on religious groups, in what government leaders have periodically referred to as an effort to "Sinicize religions" in the country.

China officially recognizes five religions, including Catholicism, but the authorities often suspect religious groups and worshipers of undermining the control of the Communist Party and the state, and of threatening the country's national security. Chinese hackers and state authorities have often used cyberattacks to try to gather information on groups of Buddhist Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs and Falun Gong practitioners outside China. But this appears to be the first time that hackers, presumed by cybersecurity experts at Recorded Future to be working for the Chinese state, have been publicly caught directly hacking into the Vatican and the Holy See's Study Mission to China, the Hong Kong-based group of de facto Vatican representatives who have played a role in negotiating the Catholic Church's status. The Vatican and Beijing are expected to start talks in September over control of the appointment of bishops and the status of houses of worship as part of a renewal of a provisional agreement signed in 2018 that revised the terms of the Catholic Church's operations in China. One of the attacks, which began in early May, was hidden inside a document that appeared to be a legitimate letter from the Vatican to Msgr. Javier Corona Herrera, the chaplain who heads the study mission in Hong Kong," reports The New York Times.

"It was an artful deception: an electronic file that looked as if it was on the official stationery of Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra. The letter carried a message from Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's secretary of state, the pope's second in command and an old China hand who has defended the deal. In his message, Cardinal Parolin expressed the pope's sadness about the death of a bishop. It is unclear whether the letter was fabricated or a real document that the attackers had obtained and then linked to malware that gave them access to the computers of the Hong Kong church offices and the Vatican's mail servers. Recorded Future concluded that the attack was most likely connected to negotiations over the extension of the 2018 agreement."

Thelasko writes: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase. After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power. The $23.5 billion facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis. Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction. Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one. This releases vast amounts of energy with very little radioactivity. Iter will confine hot plasma within a structure called a tokamak in order to control fusion reactions. The project will aim to help demonstrate whether fusion can be commercially viable. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the effort would unite countries around a common good.

In 100 days the U.S. will vote on whether Donald Trump, Joe Biden or somebody else should be America's president. But both candidates are also running political ads attacking social media — on social media.

"They're shooting the messenger while giving it lots of money," reports the Associated Press: Biden has focused on Facebook, with a #MoveFastFixIt campaign that admonishes Facebook for not doing enough to protect users from foreign meddling or being duped by falsehoods, particularly those spread by Trump about mail-in voting. His campaign just last month spent nearly $10,000 to run ads scolding the company on its own platform. "We could lie to you, but we won't," says one of Biden's ads.... Despite criticizing Facebook, Biden's campaign said it's still purchasing millions of dollars in Facebook ads because it's one of the few ways to counter Trump's false posts — since Facebook won't fact check him. The ads are also a cheap and effective way for the campaigns to rally supporters who are unhappy with the platforms, said Kathleen Searles, a Louisiana State University political communications professor. "We do know that anger can be very motivating — it motivates them to get their name on an email list, or donate $20," Searles said...

While Biden has focused on Facebook, Trump has honed in on Twitter, and occasionally Snapchat, with his campaign running online ads that accuse both companies of "interfering" in the election. Twitter became a Trump campaign target after the company rolled out its first fact check of his inaccurate tweet about voting in late May. Twitter has since applied similar labels to five other Trump tweets, including two that called mail-in ballots "fraudulent" and predicted that "mail boxes will be robbed" if voting doesn't take place in person... Republican leaders have since joined in railing against Twitter. This month, Rep. Jim Jordan, a firebrand conservative from Ohio, demanded Twitter hand over a full accounting, including emails, of how it decided to fact check the president...

Facebook could be next for a face-off with the president and his allies now that the company has vowed to label any posts — Trump's included — that violate its rules against voting misinformation or hate speech. Facebook has yet to take such action, though.

"Social media censorship is going to be a very potent campaign issue," Brooking said. "And there's going to be incentive from a number of folks running for office in 2020 to push the envelope still further, to try to invite more and more social media moderation because they see it as a potent political stunt."

"DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop's magnetic hard drive," reports Popular Mechanics.

"Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it." In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin and company detail their new error correction method... They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz, translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We're on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are certainly not the first to have encoded a work of art onto strands of DNA... [A] team of researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington fit 200 megabytes of data onto lengths of DNA, including the entirety of War and Peace. In March 2019, they even came up with the first automated system for storing and retrieving data in the manufactured genetic material. Today, other major technology firms are also working in the space, including both IBM and Google. The ultra-secretive U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity — the government's version of DARPA, but for spies — is even invested in the work. These researchers envision a future where some of the most precious, but rarely accessed data, can be stored in vials of DNA, only pulled down from the cool, dark storage of the lab, as needed....

Because there are four building blocks in DNA, rather than the binary 1s and 0s in magnetic hard drives, the genetic storage method is far more dense, explains John Hawkins, another co-author of the new paper. "A teaspoon of DNA contains so much data it would require about 10 Walmart Supercenter-sized data centers to store using current technology," he tells Popular Mechanics. "Or, as some people like to put it, you could fit the entire internet in a shoe box." Not only that, but DNA is future-proof. Hawkins recalls when CDs were the dominant storage method, back in the 1990s, and they held the promise that their storage could last forever, because plastic does (but scratches can be devastating). Data stored on DNA, on the other hand, can last for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, there is a whole field of science called archaeogenetics that explores the longevity of DNA to understand the ancient past... DNA storage doesn't require any energy, either — just a cool, dark place to hang out until someone decides to access it. But the greatest advantage, Hawkins says, is that our ability to read and write DNA will never become obsolete....

But like all data storage methods, DNA has a few shortcomings as well. The most significant upfront hurdle is cost. Hawkins says that current methods are similar to the cost for an Apple Hard Disk 20 back in 1980. Back then, about 20 megabytes of storage — or the amount of data you'd need to use to download a 15-minute video — went for about $1,500.

Steven Levy from Wired remembers the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. From the report: I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost to the day. It documented a two-hour session with Jobs in Cupertino, California, shortly before the launch. The main reason he had summoned me to Apple's headquarters was sitting under the over of a dark sheet of fabric on the long table in the boardroom of One Infinite Loop. "We have made the coolest computer ever," he told me. "I guess I'll just show it to you." He yanked off the fabric, exposing an 8-inch stump of transparent plastic with a block of electronics suspended inside. It looked less like a computer than a toaster born from an immaculate conception between Philip K. Dick and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (But the fingerprints were, of course, Jony Ive's.) Alongside it were two speakers encased in Christmas-ornament-sized, glasslike spheres.

"The Cube," Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement. He began by emphasizing that while the Cube was powerful, it was air-cooled. (Jobs hated fans. Hated them.) He demonstrated how it didn't have a power switch, but could sense a wave of your hand to turn on the juice. He showed me how Apple had eliminated the tray that held CDs -- with the Cube, you just hovered the disk over the slot and the machine inhaled it. And then he got to the plastics. It was as if Jobs had taken to heart that guy in The Graduate who gave career advice to Benjamin Braddock. "We are doing more with plastics than anyone else in the world," he told me. "These are all specially formulated, and it's all proprietary, just us. It took us six months just to formulate these plastics. They make bulletproof vests out of it! And it's incredibly sturdy, and it's just beautiful! There's never been anything like that. How do you make something like that? Nobody ever made anything like that! Isn't that beautiful? I think it's stunning!"

For one thing, the price was prohibitive -- by the time you bought the display, it was almost three times the price of an iMac and even more than some PowerMacs. By and large, people don't spend their art budget on computers. That wasn't the only issue with the G4 Cube. Those plastics were hard to manufacture, and people reported flaws. The air cooling had problems. If you left a sheet of paper on top of the device, it would shut down to prevent overheating. And because it had no On button, a stray wave of your hand would send the machine into action, like it or not. In any case, the G4 Cube failed to push buttons on the computer-buying public. Jobs told me it would sell millions. But Apple sold fewer than 150,000 units.

More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors as of earlier this year had access to internal tools that could change user account settings and hand control to others, Reuters is reporting citing two former employees said, making it hard to defend against the hacking that occurred last week. From the report: Twitter and the FBI are investigating the breach that allowed hackers to repeatedly tweet from verified accounts of the likes of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Twitter said on Saturday that the perpetrators "manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials" to log into tools and turn over access to 45 accounts. here On Wednesday, it said that the hackers could have read direct messages to and from 36 accounts but did not identify the affected users.

In a new report on Science Advances, Minwoo Choi and a team of scientists in Electronic Engineering and Materials Science in the Republic of Korea, developed a wearable, full-colour OLED display using a two-dimensional (2-D) material-based backplane transistor. Phys.Org reports: They engineered an 18-by-18 thin-film transistor array on a thin molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) film and transferred it to an aluminium oxide (Al2O3)/polyethylene terephthalate (PET) surface. Choi et al. then deposited red, green and blue OLED pixels on the device surface and observed excellent mechanical and electrical properties of the 2-D material. The surface could drive circuits to control the OLED pixels to form an ultrathin, wearable device.

In this work, Choi et al. developed a large-area MoS2 TFT array to operate 324 pixels in a 2-inch RGB OLED, in which the full-color display demonstrated an active-matrix configuration. The RGB OLEDs were made of different optoelectronic characteristics, therefore the team designed the backplane TFTs to control each color pixel. The experimental setup was promising as a wearable display and functioned steadily on human skin without adverse effects. The team used heterogenous material designs to form optoelectronics in the present work. [...] The low stiffness of the ultrathin device prevented the deterioration of optical and electrical properties during substantial mechanical deformation reflexes -- after its transfer to a human hand. Based on the current-voltage characteristics (I-V), the current level did not change during skin shrinkage or skin stretching exercises and the on-state also did not fluctuate during active-matrix display operation. While the device stability is still in development, the team aim to conduct further engineering to improve the MoS2 film for practical applications as a wearable, full-color AMOLED display.

transporter_ii shares a report from Politico: A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that fosters technology aimed at undermining internet censorship around the globe. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an order Tuesday morning preventing U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack from installing a hand-picked board to replace the previously existing leadership of the Open Technology Fund. Weeks after his Senate confirmation last month, Pack purged leadership at a series of taxpayer-funded media outlets, including the storied Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia networks, as well as the lesser-known OTF.

Trump has taken the global broadcasters to task for being too critical of the administration and its policies, including its response to the coronavirus. Pack's drive to oust the leaders of the media outlets was seen as an effort to draw friendlier coverage. Veterans of the organizations have said the massive leadership change undermined their traditional independence. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell turned down a request by the existing members of the OTF board to block Pack's move against them. However, in the new appeals court order, the judges from the D.C. Circuit said Pack appeared to lack the same authority over the internet-focused nonprofit that he enjoys over the other federally funded international media organizations. "The government's actions have jeopardized OTF's relationships with its partner organizations, leading its partner organizations to fear for their safety," the D.C. Circuit order said. "Further, absent an injunction during the appellate process, OTF faces an increasing risk that its decision-making will be taken over by the government, that it will suffer reputational harm, and that it will lose the ability to effectively operate in light of the two dueling boards that presently exist." The appeals court order is temporary and does not amount to a final ruling on Pack's authority.

A federal appeals court has blocked a bid by one of President Donald Trump's appointees to take over a government-funded nonprofit organization that fosters technology aimed at undermining internet censorship around the globe. From a report, shared by reader transporter_ii: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an order Tuesday morning preventing U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack from installing a hand-picked board to replace the previously existing leadership of the Open Technology Fund. Weeks after his Senate confirmation last month, Pack purged leadership at a series of taxpayer-funded media outlets, including the storied Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia networks, as well as the lesser-known OTF. Trump has taken the global broadcasters to task for being too critical of the administration and its policies, including its response to the coronavirus. Pack's drive to oust the leaders of the media outlets was seen as an effort to draw friendlier coverage. Veterans of the organizations have said the massive leadership change undermined their traditional independence.

Mr. Cooper was a retired high school history teacher using what NBC News calls those peer-to-peer networks where "the lack of corporate oversight creates the illusion of safety for people sharing illegal images."
Police were led to Cooper's door by a forensic tool called Child Protection System, which scans file-sharing networks and chatrooms to find computers that are downloading photos and videos depicting the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. The software, developed by the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit, can help establish the probable cause needed to get a search warrant... Cooper is one of more than 12,000 people arrested in cases flagged by the Child Protection System software over the past 10 years, according to the Child Rescue Coalition... The Child Protection System, which lets officers search by country, state, city or county, displays a ranked list of the internet addresses downloading the most problematic files...

The Child Protection System "has had a bigger effect for us than any tool anyone has ever created. It's been huge," said Dennis Nicewander, assistant state attorney in Broward County, Florida, who has used the software to prosecute about 200 cases over the last decade. "They have made it so automated and simple that the guys are just sitting there waiting to be arrested." The Child Rescue Coalition gives its technology for free to law enforcement agencies, and it is used by about 8,500 investigators in all 50 states. It's used in 95 other countries, including Canada, the U.K. and Brazil. Since 2010, the nonprofit has trained about 12,000 law enforcement investigators globally. Now, the Child Rescue Coalition is seeking partnerships with consumer-focused online platforms, including Facebook, school districts and a babysitter booking site, to determine whether people who are downloading illegal images are also trying to make contact with or work with minors...

The tool has a growing database of more than a million hashed images and videos, which it uses to find computers that have downloaded them. The software is able to track IP addresses — which are shared by people connected to the same Wi-Fi network — as well as individual devices. The system can follow devices even if the owners move or use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to mask the IP addresses, according to the Child Rescue Coalition.... Before getting a warrant, police typically subpoena the internet service provider to find out who holds the account and whether anyone at the address has a criminal history, has children or has access to children through work.
A lawyer who specializes in digital rights tells NBC that these tools need more oversight and testing. "There's a danger that the visceral awfulness of the child abuse blinds us to the civil liberties concerns. Tools like this hand a great deal of power and discretion to the government. There need to be really strong checks and safeguards."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at IBM's X-Force security team revealed today that they've obtained roughly five hours of video footage that appears to have been recorded directly from the screens of hackers working for a group IBM calls ITG18, and which other security firms refer to as APT35 or Charming Kitten. It's one of the most active state-sponsored espionage teams linked to the government of Iran. The leaked videos were found among 40 gigabytes of data that the hackers had apparently stolen from victim accounts, including U.S. and Greek military personnel. Other clues in the data suggest that the hackers targeted U.S. State Department staff and an unnamed Iranian-American philanthropist.

The IBM researchers say they found the videos exposed due to a misconfiguration of security settings on a virtual private cloud server they'd observed in previous APT35 activity. The files were all uploaded to the exposed server over a few days in May, just as IBM was monitoring the machine. The videos appear to be training demonstrations the Iran-backed hackers made to show junior team members how to handle hacked accounts. They show the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents, as well as exfiltrating other Google-hosted data from victims. This sort of data exfiltration and management of hacked accounts is hardly sophisticated hacking. It's more the kind of labor-intensive but relatively simple work that's necessary in a large-scale phishing operation. But the videos nonetheless represent a rare artifact, showing a first-hand view of state-sponsored cyberspying that's almost never seen outside of an intelligence agency.

Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer -- an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge. TechXplore reports: Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal's fourth year Master's project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr. Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer -- an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing's machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War. Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders.

Rejewski's cyclometer exploited the German's procedure at the time of double encipherment of the Enigma message key, and semi-automated the process for calculating what were known as 'characteristics' for every possible Enigma rotor starting position. There were more than 100,000 of these rotor starting positions, and they each needed their characteristic to be calculated and catalogued in a card index system. The cyclometer therefore eliminated the arduous task of calculating these characteristics by hand. The machine consisted of, in effect, two interlinked Enigma systems side-by-side -- one offset by three positions relative to the other -- and 26 lamps and switches to cover the alphabet. On operation, a certain number of bulbs illuminated, indicating the lengths of the characteristics. These were recorded for every single possible rotor starting position to create an immense look-up catalogue. Once this was completed, obtaining the daily Enigma rotor starting settings to decode messages was a simple matter of intercepting enough messages and referencing the catalogue, taking only a matter of minutes.

"The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21," reports Aviation Week.

"By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism." The Skyborg family of aircraft is expected to fill an emerging "attritable" category for combat aircraft that blurs the line between a reusable unmanned aircraft system and a single-use cruise missile. As the aircraft are developed, Skyborg also will serve as the test case of a radical change in acquisition philosophy, with ecosystems of collaborative software coders and aircraft manufacturers replacing the traditional approach with a supply chain defined by a single prime contractor...

At the core of the Skyborg program is the software; specifically, the military aviation equivalent of the algorithm-fed convolutional neural networks that help driverless cars navigate on city streets... The autonomy mission system core — as integrated by Leidos from a combination of industry and government sources — will be inserted into multiple low-cost UAS designed by different companies, with each configured to perform a different mission or set of missions...

"Even though we call Skyborg an attritable aircraft, I think we'll think of them more like reusable weapons," says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.... "I expect that the pilots, depending on the mission, [will] decide: Does the Skyborg return and land with them and then go to fight another day, or is it the end of its life and it's going to go on a one-way mission?" Roper explains. In some cases, the pilot may decide a target is important enough that it is worth the loss of a Skyborg, even if its service life has not been used up, he adds.
"The Air Force's goal is to build up a large fleet of armed, sort-of disposable jets that don't need conventional runways to take off and land," reports Popular Mechanics: Skyborg will be available with both subsonic and supersonic engines, indicating both attack and fighter jet versions. The basic design (or designs) will likely be stealthy, carrying guided bombs, air defense suppression missiles, and air-to-air missiles inside internal weapons bays. Interesting, according to AvWeek, the Air Force is considering Skyborg as a replacement not only for the MQ-9 Reaper attack drone but early versions of the F-16 manned fighter....

Unmanned jets like Skyborg promise to remake the U.S. Air Force and other air forces. Manned aircraft have become increasingly large, difficult to develop, and expensive. This in turn means the Pentagon can afford fewer jets, ultimately leading to a smaller Air Force. Unmanned jets, on the other hand, are smaller, easier to develop, and cheap — allowing the Air Force to buy lots of them... The drone will grow the fighting arm of the U.S. Air Force, move air power away from air fields, fly alongside fighter jets, and escort traditionally undefended assets like the E-3 Sentry.

And it promises to do it all affordably. If the Air Force really can get Skyborg into the game by 2023 it will dramatically change the shape of aerial warfare.

Asraa Mustufa and David Eads, reporting for Chicago Reporter: With Chicago reeling this week from a bloody July 4 weekend that saw more than 80 shootings claim the lives of at least 17 people, including young children, police Superintendent David Brown doubled down on his approach to stemming the violence at a press conference Monday. "We must keep violent offenders in jail longer," Brown said, arguing that arrestees are getting released too quickly and that the electronic monitoring program is "clearly not working" and needs to be revamped. Mayor Lori Lightfoot agreed on the need to keep violent offenders locked up in order to reduce crime. Brown had deployed an additional 1,200 officers on the streets ahead of the holiday weekend to break up "drug corners," in a strategy not unlike that of police chiefs before him. His plan was criticized by civil rights advocates and criminologists, WBEZ reported. "Our endgame is arrests for the precursors to violence," Brown said. "But when we clear the corner, we're pleading with the court systems: Keep them in jail through the weekend."

Brown's remarks raise many questions. How did officers carry out this policing strategy? Did they make arrests for violent crimes or other charges? How long were arrestees in police custody? Do these defendants quickly bond out or remain detained? Do these kinds of arrests really keep violent offenders off the street and effectively prevent more violence? Queries like these are key to digging into Brown's claims and gauging how effective CPD's tactics are. But it's now substantially more difficult to check CPD's claims and details about arrests. That's because the department recently shut down its arrest API used by journalists and researchers. A data API, or application programming interface, provides access to structured information in a way machines can read, akin to the difference between getting data in a spreadsheet file versus copying it by hand into a spreadsheet. CPD's API provided access to comprehensive and timely data about arrests going back to 2014 in ways that can be processed and analyzed by software engineers and reporters.

The Chicago Reporter used the API last month to analyze police tactics during local mass protests following the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. CPD had released figures stating that the majority of arrests made on the weekend of May 29 were for criminal conduct related to looting, not protesting. But by using CPD's own data from the arrest API, we found the opposite to be true: the majority of civil unrest-related arrests made that weekend had been for offenses related to protesting. [...] Within a day of our publishing this analysis, CPD removed access to the API for all users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: At midnight on Tuesday, the Great Firewall of China, the vast apparatus that limits the country's internet, appeared to descend on Hong Kong. Unveiling expanded police powers as part of a contentious new national security law, the Hong Kong government enabled police to censor online speech and force internet service providers to hand over user information and shut down platforms. Many residents, already anxious since the law took effect last week, rushed to erase their digital footprint of any signs of dissent or support for the last year of protests. Charles Mok, a pro-democracy lawmaker who represents the technology sector, tweeted: "We are already behind the de facto firewall."

"The law seems to be building up the Great Firewall locally in Hong Kong. Personal freedom on the internet will be eliminated," said Charles Low, the chairman of the Hong Kong chapter of the Internet Society. "If you say something wrong they can request the service provider to give your IP address or mobile number so they can grab you." Experts point out that China's Great Firewall -- which allows the government to inspect data as well as block IP addresses and domain names -- could not be immediately replicated in Hong Kong, home to several private internet service providers and internet exchanges. "It will take at least a few years to build up the wall," said Low, adding that what is more likely is a partial blackout, cutting off access to certain sites such as LIHKG or Telegram. "People are indeed kind of panicked and trying to install VPNs and have no idea what it can and cannot help," said Low, noting that volunteers have been holding workshops to teach residents how to use such tools and how to better protect themselves. "I have faith in Hong Kong people. They will not forget about the freedom we once had." "[T]he measures could go even further than in mainland China," adds The Guardian. "The law covers not only permanent residents and foreigners within Hong Kong, but anyone seen as violating the law, regardless of where they are in the world. The security law may also add to the Balkanisation of the internet, with countries having their own fenced-off versions, and major international tech companies will be under pressure not to contribute to that."

A confrontation between venture capitalists and journalists has been slowly playing out on Twitter — and in an incendiary article on VICE US.

It started when...

• A luggage startup's co-CEO complained on Instagram about young reporters who "forgo their personal ethics."

• A New York Times reporter called the posts "incoherent" and "disappointing."

• Angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasan (also the former CTO of Coinbase) later said the reporter "attacked" the co-CEO, who he then needed to defend — calling the reporter a sociopath in a multi-tweet thread.

• The New York Times reporter tweeted that investor had "been ranting about me by name for months now."

The reporter and the angel investor both finally ended up on Clubhouse, an elite invitation-only audio social network popular with venture capitalists, but the reporter left early. Later Vice published leaked audio of the subsequent conversation, which included Srinivasan and several other Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalists, in which Vice says participants "spent at least an hour talking about how journalists have too much power to 'cancel' people and wondering what they, the titans of Silicon Valley, could do about it."

Then things got really ugly...

Nicholas Carr authored The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains back in 2010. This week he offered an up-to-date assessment in his newest interview with Vox co-founder Ezra Klein.

"The point of this conversation is not that the internet is bad, nor that it is good," Klein writes. "It's that it is changing us, just as every medium before it has. We need to see those changes clearly in order to take control of them ourselves..."

But the conversation soon turns to neuroplasticity, the brain's special ability to physically adapt to changes happening in its environment: Nicholas Carr: When we adapt to a new medium — whether printed page or television or, more recently, the internet and social media and so forth — more and more neurons get recruited to the particular brain processes that you're using more often thanks to the different information technologies. But ways of thinking that aren't encouraged by the technology — we begin to lose those abilities... I think it was quite clear even back then [in 2010] that we were making this big tradeoff between getting lots and lots of information very, very quickly and developing a rich base of knowledge. What was lost was not only the ability to engage in deep reading and attentive thought and contemplation, but also when we come across new information, the ability to bring it into our mind and put it into a broader context. That takes time. That takes attention. That takes focus.

The fundamental argument of The Shallows was that we were making this tradeoff. What I worried about then, and what I still worry about, is whether that tradeoff is worth it — are we losing more than we ultimately gain? What's happened since then? On one level, I think it's magnified all of my concerns. Over the last 10 years, the smartphone took over as the dominant form of the computer. Unlike a laptop, the smartphone is always on. It's always with us. We can access it almost instantaneously. People walk around with it in their hands. So this constant distraction that I documented with laptops and desktops is now much more dominant. It goes on all the time.

Also social media exploded and became one of, if not the main, things people do with computers. And the way social media distributes information, the way it gives particular value or particular emphasis to very emotional information and simplified, kind of strong messages, I think all of this has made the problems I tried to delineate more intense in kind of [a] deeper set within society. What has also become clearer and clearer in the last 10 years is that now there's also a big social effect of the technology. On the one hand, all the distractions that we had 10 years ago have proliferated, but also the way we make sense of things socially has changed dramatically as social media has essentially taken over media.

A 20-year-old man was killed and two others injured when two suspects opened fire outside an Amazon warehouse in Jacksonville. From a report: According to JSO, the man who was killed was targeted by the shooters who fled from the scene in a silver car. JSO is now searching for three suspects, including the driver of the getaway car. The 20-year-old victim was standing in line for job applications with about six others outside of the facility when the suspects began firing, JSO said. JSO believes the suspects knew the victim.

"We're trying to determine what the motive was why they were after this victim. We have about 10 eyewitnesses that were both inside and outside of the facility," said JSO Assistant Chief Brian Kee. "This does not appear to be a workplace violent incident that you would normally associate with workplace violence or mass shootings." A 29-year-old man was grazed in the arm and a 22-year-old man was grazed in the foot during the shooting. Both were treated and did not require hospitalization, JSO said. People claiming to be family members of Amazon employees at the facility said on social media that employees were placed on lockdown inside. A woman who said she witnessed the shooting and asked not to be identified said she was just feet away from the man who was killed. "As I started to go back inside the Amazon doors, I turned my head slightly to the right, I saw the gunman standing right there with a gun in his hand and next thing you know he just started shooting," she said. "He just let off about five or six rounds. I stood there in complete shock because I couldn't believe what was actually happening in front of my face."

Developing...

Founded by Instagram and finance alums, Karat wants to be the black card in every influencer's wallet. From a report: Spencer Donnelly, who goes by TheRussianBadger on YouTube, has cultivated an audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers for his gaming videos. For years, business has been rosy. YouTube shares a percentage of the ad revenue on each of his videos, and the money is good enough that playing videogames on camera has become a full-time job. A few years ago, he even incorporated The Russian Badger, legitimizing his YouTubing business. The only problem: No bank would give him a serious credit card. "Imagine that you're making $2 or $3 million a year and they're capping you at $20,000 a month," says Donnelly, which was the best he could get from a traditional bank. Donnelly, like many of the creators who make their living on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, has long felt shunned by institutions that don't understand that his lifestyle is also his business. That makes him the target market for Karat, a new startup offering financial services to the influencer set.

Karat's first product is the Karat Black Card, designed specifically for influencers, with credit lines starting at $50,000. Its perks can be customized (gamers get cash back on streaming services; beauty influencers get perks for product purchases), and the credit limits are determined by an influencer's social metrics, revenue streams, and cash in hand. To issue the cards, Karat has partnered with the payments company Stripe, which launched its own corporate card late last year. For now, Karat wants to be the flashy card in every influencer's wallet. But eventually, the startup could become a one-stop shop for a creator's business needs. Before its official launch, Karat piloted the black card with a small group of successful creators like Donnelly, many with similar stories of financial frustration.

Analyst Benedict Evans writes: There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon's building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well.

There's lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be 'video' and then it will disappear inside. An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don't necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don't need an application either, especially on the desktop -- you just click on a link in your calendar and the call opens in the browser. Indeed, the calendar is often the aggregation layer -- you don't need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone's contact list- effectively it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation -- it has no graph of its own.

Incidentally, one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a 'room', where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on 'people', where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it's a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) -- Apple's FaceTime is only people (no URLs). Taking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either. It grew by removing defensibility.