Ana Diaz writes via Polygon: Jack Morrison logs on to stream, he doesn't boot up Twitch, Streamlabs OBS, or speak into a fancy microphone. Instead, he grabs a basic circular mirror and sets it in front of his desktop monitor, facing the screen. Then he sits in front of his monitor, as usual, and plays the game, propping up his cell phone to face him and setting his camera live. When he boots up Apex Legends, viewers see the gameplay reflected in the mirror as they watch him play. This makeshift setup might have been surprising just a year ago, in an industry that seems to be more and more concerned with having the latest streaming technology. But it's become a rather common practice on TikTok, where video game streaming has picked up in the past few months. In September, the company said that one billion people in total use the app each month, and jokes and sounds riffing on video games have long proliferated widely across TikTok. Now, Morrison (JackMorrisonTV on TikTok) and other streamers with similarly crude setups have taken over the app's "LIVE" section, capturing as many as 2,400 viewers at a time.

These streamers are using low-key setups, in comparison to the complex (and expensive) setups that dominate Twitch, where a DSLR camera and the capture card to use it can cost over $800. The exact build of each TikToker's setup varies, but nearly all of them capture video via an external camera that's focused on a screen, or in Morrison's case, a reflection of a screen. A brief scroll through the gaming section of TikTok's live content shows these streamers' ingenuity; some will stream videos of tablets or phones as they play mobile games, while others will just put the camera in front of a screen. The games also vary widely, with people playing games like Snake, Minecraft, and Wordscapes in addition to shooters like Valorant.

The number of live streams is much smaller than the wave of short-form videos being pushed out every single day on the app, making them stand out more. It also feels like a more accessible platform, especially for people who are just getting started with streaming. TikTok streamers are using more basic technology, such as mirrors, cell phone stands, and the like. It's also less competitive than Twitch, which has over seven million unique streamers go live each month. [...] TikTok is also testing monetization features that might make it more appealing for streamers to use. [...] For now, streams seem like a quick and easy way to take advantage of TikTok's massive audience. Whether or not bona fide TikTok streaming stars will emerge on the platform or find a sustainable home there remains to be seen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Janus Rose: During a tech demo in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described VR as "the next major computing platform" -- a space where all our social interactions will play out with new levels of physical presence thanks to headsets and motion-controllers. As I wrote at the time, this could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to build virtual environments where all human behavior can be recorded, predicted, and monetized. At the time, the company told me it had "no current plans" to use physical motion data like head and eye movements as a means of predicting behavior and serving ads. Since then, it has made logging into Facebook a mandatory requirement for users of its Oculus headset -- a requirement it was recently pressured to remove. And earlier this year, the company announced its inevitable entry into VR-based advertising, inspiring enough backlash to cause one Oculus developer to abandon its plans for VR ads altogether.

While the bait-and-switch is a familiar and unsurprising move for The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, the announcement of Meta proves that there is no stopping Zuckerberg's plans to mine every human interaction in the world for data that can then be monetized. The brand shift notably comes at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny for its role in spreading disinformation and violence around the world, reinvigorated by revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugin. With Meta, it's safe to assume the predictive algorithms at work will be functionally the same as its predecessor. Data is collected about human behavior, which is then used to build profiles on users and automatically prioritize content they are more likely to interact with. Facebook itself proved the effectiveness of this manipulation with an "emotional contagion" experiment it secretly conducted on users in 2012, which showed that changing a user's feed to show positive or negative content altered the types of content they were likely to post.

This type of algorithmic manipulation forms the core business model of Facebook and countless other apps and social platforms. [...] Researchers have found that this algorithmic "nudging" is possible in embodied virtual spaces too, where the collection of intimate data about physical body movements provides new ways to influence human behavior on a large scale. Companies like RealEyes and Affectiva have marketed AI that they say can predict human emotions by analyzing body language and facial expressions -- a claim that is fiercely contested by AI experts but being widely deployed anyway. In one notable study, researchers determined that AI-controlled digital avatars can be used in virtual spaces to push people into accepting certain political views. In other words, Meta represents a massive investment into the very kind of algorithmic manipulation for which Facebook has been repeatedly maligned.

"New Android malware can root infected devices to take complete control and silently tweak system settings, as well as evade detection using code abstraction and anti-emulation checks," reports BleepingComputer.

Cybersecurity company Lookout said on its blog that they'd spotted the malware on Google Play "and prominent third-party stores such as the Amazon Appstore and the Samsung Galaxy Store.... To protect Android users, Google promptly removed the app as soon as we notified them of the malware." We named the malware "AbstractEmu" after its use of code abstraction and anti-emulation checks to avoid running while under analysis. A total of 19 related applications were uncovered, seven of which contain rooting functionality, including one on Play that had more than 10,000 downloads...

This is a significant discovery because widely-distributed malware with root capabilities have become rare over the past five years. As the Android ecosystem matures there are fewer exploits that affect a large number of devices, making them less useful for threat actors... By using the rooting process to gain privileged access to the Android operating system, the threat actor can silently grant themselves dangerous permissions or install additional malware — steps that would normally require user interaction. Elevated privileges also give the malware access to other apps' sensitive data, something not possible under normal circumstances...

AbstractEmu does not have any sophisticated zero-click remote exploit functionality used in advanced APT-style threats, it is activated simply by the user having opened the app. As the malware is disguised as functional apps, most users will likely interact with them shortly after downloading... By rooting the device, the malware is able to silently modify the device in ways that would otherwise require user interaction and access data of other apps on the device.
"Apps bundling the malware included password managers and tools like data savers and app launchers," reports BleepingComputer, "all of them providing the functionality they promised to avoid raising suspicions..."

Lookout's blog post said they'd spotted people affected by the malware in 17 different countries.

A Microsoft software engineer working on open-source technologies recently wrote that "you can find an open-source implementation for (almost) anything.

"But the mobile landscape is a notable exception." While there are some open-source success stories, Android being a massive one, only a handful of major companies rule hardware and software innovation for the devices we carry in our pockets. Together, Apple and Samsung hold over 50 percent of the world's market share for mobile devices, a figure that underscores just how few dominant players exist in the space. Numbers like these might leave you feeling somber about the overall viability of mobile open source. But a growing demand for better security and privacy, among other factors, may be turning the tides, and a host of inspectable, open-source solutions with transparent life cycle processes are emerging as promising alternatives....

Along with the open-source messaging app Telegram, Signal has garnered attention as a more privacy-focused alternative to apps like Facebook Messenger. The browser Chromium and the mobile game 2048 are other noteworthy examples, as well as proof that although open-source apps aren't the norm, they can be widely adopted and popular. For example, over 65 percent of mobile traffic flows through Chromium-based browsers...

Despite the many open-source technologies available to help build mobile apps, there's plenty of room to grow in the user-facing space — especially as more people recognize the value of having open-source and open-governance applications that can better safeguard their personal information. That growth isn't likely to extend to the hardware space, where the cost of building open-source implementations isn't as rewarding for developers or users — though we may start to see more devices that allow people to choose individual hardware modules from a variety of providers.
The article does cite the open source mobile hardware company Purism. And there's plenty of interesting open source software for mobile app developers, including frameworks like Apache Cordova (which lets developers use CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript) and a whole ecosystem of open source libraries. But it all does raise the question...

Why aren't there more open source solutions for mobile devices?

It's estimated there are 10.9 million digital nomads just in the U.S. — and two digital nomads writing for The Next Web point out they're just part of a larger trend. "As of 2021, there are over 35 million digital nomads

Are they also about to start changing the world? Digital nomads' growing numbers and financial clout have caused dozens of tourist-starved countries to update their travel policies for borderless workers. In Summer 2020, a handful of nations launched visa programs to attract digital nomads, starting with Estonia in June, then Barbados, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Anguilla, Antigua, and later, most of Eastern Europe. Now, 30+ nations offer some form of incentive for traveling remote workers. Sweetheart deals like income tax breaks, subsidized housing, and free multiple entry have become as popular as employee work benefits. The opportunities are so numerous, solutions exist just to help you "amenity shop" the perfect country Airbnb style...

Some ambitious nomads, like activist and author Lauren Razavi, have also started to advocate for their rights as global citizens and the future of borderless work... Remote workers like Lauren (and us) want to completely redefine the role governments play in digital nomads' movement and regulation. How? By laying the foundation for the next generation of travel and work, an internet country called Plumia... Plumia wants to build the alternative using decentralized technologies, while also working with countries and institutions on policies that achieve common goals... Begun in 2020 as an independent project by remote-first travel insurance company, SafetyWing, Plumia's plan is to combine the infrastructure for living anywhere with the functions of a geographic country...

Blockchain enthusiasts are also testing an approach that begs the question: are traditional countries still necessary? Bitnation advocates for decentralizing authority by empowering voluntary participation and peer-to-peer agreements. They've âhosted the world's first blockchain marriage, birth certificate, refugee emergency ID, and more as proof of concept... Currently in development, Plumia is focusing on developing member-focused services and content... Verifying a digital identity, maintaining a 'permanent address' whilst on the move, switching service providers and jurisdictions on the fly, complying with complicated tax and labor laws — these are all thorny issues to solve. Initiatives like Plumia are jumping into quite an active ring, however.

In addition to countries competing to serve and attract digital nomads, a number of well-financed startups such as Jobbatical, Remote, and Oyster are creating private-sector solutions to issues posed by people and companies going remote.

"License plate readers are rapidly reshaping private security in American neighborhoods," reports the Washington Post, as aggressively-marketed $2,500-a-year "safety-as-a-service" packages "spread to cover practically everywhere anyone chooses to live in the United States" and "bringing police surveillance tools to the masses with an automated watchdog that records 24 hours a day." Flock Safety, the industry leader, says its systems have been installed in 1,400 cities across 40 states and now capture data from more than a billion cars and trucks every month. "This is not just for million-dollar homes," Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, said. "This is America at its core..."

Its solar-powered, motion-sensing camera can snap a dozen photos of a single plate in less than a second — even in the dark, in the rain, of a car driving 100 mph up to 75 feet away, as Flock's marketing materials say. Piped into a neighborhood's private Flock database, the photos are made available for the homeowners to search, filter or peruse. Machine-learning software categorizes each vehicle based on two dozen attributes, including its color, make and model; what state its plates came from; and whether it had bumper stickers or a roof rack. Each "vehicle fingerprint" is pinpointed on a map and tracked by how often it had been spotted in the past month. The plates are also run against law enforcement watch lists for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives; if there's a match, the system alerts the nearest police force with details on how to track it down...

Flock's customer base has roughly quadrupled since 2019, with police agencies and homeowners associations in more than 1,400 cities today, and the company has hired sales representatives in 30 states to court customers with promises of a safer, more-monitored life. Company officials have also attended town hall meetings and papered homeowners associations with glossy marketing materials declaring its system "the most user-friendly, least invasive way for communities to stop crime": a network of cameras "that see like a detective," "protect home values" and "automate [the] neighborhood watch ... while you sleep." Along the way, the Atlanta-based company has become an unlikely darling of American tech. The company said in July it had raised $150 million from prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, which said Flock was pursuing "a massive opportunity in shaping the future...."

Flock deletes the footage every 30 days by default and encourages customers to search only when investigating crime. But the company otherwise lets customers set their own rules: In some neighborhoods, all the homeowners can access the images for themselves...

Camera opponents didn't want the neighborhood's leaders to anoint themselves gatekeepers, choosing who does and doesn't belong. And they worried that if someone's car was broken into, but no one knew exactly when, the system could lead to hundreds of drivers, virtually all of them innocent, coming under suspicion for the crime. They also worried about the consequences of the cameras getting it wrong. In San Francisco, police had handcuffed a woman at gunpoint in 2009 after a camera garbled her plate number; another family was similarly detained last year because a thief had swiped their tag before committing a crime. And last year in Aurora, 30 miles from Paradise Hills, police handcuffed a mother and her children at gunpoint after a license plate reader flagged their SUV as stolen. The actual stolen vehicle, a motorcycle, had the same plate number from another state. Police officials have said racial profiling did not play a role, though the drivers in all three cases were Black. (The license plate readers in these cases were not Flock devices, and the company said its systems would have shown more accurate results...)

The Paradise Hills opponents were right to be skeptical about a local crime wave. According to Jefferson County sheriff's records shared with The Post, the only crime reports written up since September 2020 included two damaged mailboxes, a fraudulent unemployment claim and some stuff stolen out of three parked cars, two of which had been left unlocked. "I wouldn't exactly say it's a hot spot," patrol commander Dan Aten told The Post...

The cameras clicked on in August, a board member said. In the weeks since, the neighborhood hasn't seen any reports of crime. The local sheriff's office said it hasn't used the Flock data to crack any cases, nor has it found the need to ask.
Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, nonetheless tells the Washington Post, "There are 17,000 cities in America.

"Until we have them all, we're not done."

One month ago El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender in the country. The Motley Fool looks at how it's playing out: Even before the launch, President Bukele's push for Bitcoin was not popular at home or abroad. The IMF refused to help fund the rollout, warning of "macroeconomic, financial, and legal issues." And Salvadorians took to the streets to protest the Bitcoin project before and after the launch. One Central American University survey showed that 68% of people did not agree with the move.

The first stumbling block in El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment was that the price of Bitcoin fell 11% on the first day, and further in the days that followed. Crypto investors may be familiar with Bitcoin's volatility. But for many El Salvadorians, who'd each been given $30 worth of Bitcoin (about 0.00065 BTC) only to see its value tumble, it was another matter... In the U.S., Bitcoin is widely seen as a store of value — an investment that people hope will appreciate over time. But El Salvador is using it as a currency. And as a currency, Bitcoin's volatility is problematic, especially in a low-income country. According to Bloomberg, 1 in 4 Salvadorians make less than $5.50 per day.

Even in a higher-income country, it would be difficult for a company to accept payments in a currency that might rapidly shrink in value in a matter of weeks. Unless the business could transfer the money immediately into dollars (which is what happens with many crypto payments), it would play havoc with things like payroll, rent, and other obligations. This is exponentially harder to manage for a family with little cash to spare.
El Salvador also experienced technical glitches in both its bitcoin ATMs and the state-run wallet, according to the article. "It is a real shame that the El Salvadorian government rushed into launching Bitcoin as legal tender without first building the technical infrastructure and popular support that would have helped its ambitious scheme.

"Nonetheless, if we check in again in a year's time, there's still a chance we'll see a different story."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Texas' energy grid has problems. Those issues were laid bare this past winter when a storm put the state in a deep freeze, causing blackouts for millions and killing hundreds of people. Sen. Ted Cruz told a cryptocurrency conference in Austin last week that he believes the state's Bitcoin mining boom could repair its floundering energy grid. In a fireside chat at the Texas Blockchain Summit on Oct. 8, the Republican senator expressed his faith that the mass buildout of crypto mines in the Lone Star State could add additional energy capacity to the state's grid in the event of blackouts or power shortages. "Because of the ability to Bitcoin mining to turn on or off instantaneously, if you have a moment where you have a power shortage or a power crisis, whether it's a freeze or some other natural disaster where power generation capacity goes down, that creates the capacity to instantaneously shift that energy to put it back on the grid," Cruz told conference attendees.

Bitcoin mines, which typically consist of rooms full of specialized computers that churn numbers all day in search of the answer to a puzzle that creates the next block on the blockchain, are notorious for their energy use. Bitcoin mining is well-known to use more energy than many countries and corporations, and it's designed to become more difficult (and thus use more energy) as more miners plug into the network in search of profits as the price of Bitcoin increases. But in the event that the grid is being overburdened, these mines are essentially industrial energy consumers that can shut down instantaneously, freeing up additional grid space for the heating and cooling of homes, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure. Already, some miners in Texas are making a killing by shutting down during such times and selling their contracted power supply back to the grid. Texas is the perfect candidate for this setup, Cruz said, and Bitcoin mining could play "a significant role [in] strengthening and hardening the resilience of the grid." Tim De Chant from Ars Technica says the numbers and potential incentives that Sen. Ted Cruz touts "just don't add up." Here's why he thinks Cruz is wrong: First, large bitcoin-mining operations use hundreds or thousands of powerful computers, which create a demand for power. If power plants can profitably mine bitcoin using the electricity they generate -- and there are examples of that already -- it stands to reason that bitcoin mining could create enough demand that investors would be enticed to build new power plants. Those plants could theoretically be tasked with providing power to the grid in cases of emergency. At first glance, the argument holds up. But if you dig into it, even just a bit, things quickly fall apart.

For one, the blackouts during Texas' February cold snap happened because power companies failed to winterize their generators, whether they were natural gas, coal, nuclear, or wind. Lives were at stake, and yet the companies didn't prepare for the worst. Unlike power plants that serve the grid, bitcoin mining isn't critical infrastructure -- no one dies if a crypto data center shuts down. Plus, bitcoin miners are in the game first and foremost for the money, and they would be loath to spend extra cash to winterize their operations. But let's say the power stays on but demand surges. In that case, bitcoin miners would be unlikely to offer their generating capacity to the grid unless they were sufficiently compensated. Texas already has a system like that in place, offering generators a premium for bringing additional power online during shortages. During the February cold snap, wholesale electricity prices surged to $9,000 per MWh, the maximum allowed by law, leading to electricity bills as high as $10,000 for some people.

One bitcoin currently sells for $57,000, and to crunch the numbers to win that one bitcoin, mining rigs draw just under 0.285 MWh, based on Digiconomist estimates. In other words, for bitcoin miners to be willing to contribute to the grid, wholesale electricity prices would have to hit $206,000 per MWh, or nearly 23 times greater than prices during the February cold snap. Those $10,000 bills would turn into $230,000 bills. [...] At today's prices, the power plants that Ted Cruz is imagining would cost over $50 billion to build. At that price, there are probably more effective ways to stabilize Texas' grid.

In an article for The Conversation, Noah Wardrip-Fruin writes about how Computer Space marked the start of the $175 billion video game industry we have today when it debuted on Oct. 15, 1971 -- and why you probably haven't heard of it. From the report: Computer Space, made by the small company Nutting Associates, seemed to have everything going for it. Its scenario -- flying a rocket ship through space locked in a dogfight with two flying saucers -- seemed perfect for the times. The Apollo Moon missions were in full swing. The game was a good match for people who enjoyed science-fiction movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes" and television shows like "Star Trek" and "Lost in Space," or those who had thrilled to the aerial combat of the movies "The Battle of Britain" and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" There was even prominent placement of a Computer Space cabinet in Charlton Heston's film "The Omega Man." But when Computer Space was unveiled, it didn't generate a flood of orders, and no flood ever arrived. It wasn't until Computer Space's makers left the company, founded Atari and released Pong the next year that the commercial potential of video games became apparent. The company sold 8,000 Pong units by 1974.

Nolan Bushnell, who led the development of both Computer Space and Pong, has recounted Computer Space's inauspicious start many times. He claimed that Computer Space failed to take off because it overestimated the public. Bushnell is widely quoted as saying the game was too complicated for typical bar-goers, and that no one would want to read instructions to play a video game. [...] At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!, The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked. [...] Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form of Space Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.

Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity. The star in Spacewar! produced a gravity well that gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy -- for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star. Why didn't Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games were made using television technology rather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn't do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets. Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn't work. Bushnell's story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employee Jerry Jessop told The New York Times about Computer Space, "The game play was horrible."

On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. Ars Technica's John Timmer talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them. These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count. Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system (in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer). [...] Further out in the future is the follow-on system, Advantage 2, which is expected late next year or the year after. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7,000. But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit.

D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.

The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.

According to fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer, Squid Game features "botched" subtitles that have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking viewers.

For those unaware of Squid Game, it's a Korean-language drama about an alternative world where people in debt compete in deadly games. The plot sees a group of people tempted into a survival game where they have the chance to walk away with 45.6 billion Korean won ($38 million) if they win a series of six games. According to a BBC article, it's currently on track to become Netflix's biggest original series. From the report: "The dialogue was so well written and zero of it was preserved [in the subtitles]," Youngmi said in a Twitter post. In a TikTok video that's had almost nine million views, Youngmi gave several examples of mistranslation. In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: "I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out." But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: "I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study." That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society -- which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite. "Almost everything she says is being botched translation-wise... the writers, all they want you to know about her is that," Youngmi said. "[It] seems so small, but it's the entire character's purpose of being in the show." Youngmi later clarifies that her initial comments were about the automatically generated closed-caption subtitles rather than the English language subtitles, which are "substantially better." But she added: "The misses in the metaphors -- and what the writers were trying to actually say -- are still pretty present."

An anonymous reader writes: This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually). Torvalds took the stage for the event's traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.... And the theme of community seemed to keep coming up — notably about what that community has ultimately taught Linus Torvalds. (For example, while Torvalds said he'd originally planned on naming the operating system Freax, "I am eternally grateful for two other people for having more taste than I did.")

But even then Linux was a project that "I probably would've left behind," Torvalds remembered, "if it was only up to me." Torvalds credits the larger community for its interest (and patches) "that just kept the motivation going. And here we are 30 years later, and it's still what keeps the motivation going. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's been done for 29 of those 30 years, and every single feature ever since has been about things that other people needed or wanted or were interested in."

Torvalds also says "I'm very proud of the fact that there's actually a fair number of people still involved with the kernel that came in in 1991 — I mean, literally 30 years ago.... I think that's a testament to how good the community, on the whole, has been, and how much fun it's been."

And Torvalds says you can see that sense of fun in discussions about writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. "From a technical angle, does that make sense?" Torvalds asked. "Who knows. That's not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it....

"Probably next year, we'll start seeing some first intrepid modules being written in Rust, and maybe being integrated in the mainline kernel."
"I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..." Yet Torvalds also saw Hohndel's analogy that it can be like juggling chainsaws. As a long-time watcher of C, Torvalds knows that C's subtle type interactions "are not always logical" and "are pitfalls for pretty much anybody. And they're easy to overlook, and in the kernel that's not always a good thing." Torvalds called Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution"

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: Some former OnlyFans support staff employees still had access to users' data -- including sensitive financial and personal information -- even after they stopped working for the company used by sex workers to sell nudes and porn videos. According to a former OnlyFans employee who asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation, some ex-employees still had access to Zendesk, a popular customer service software used by many companies including OnlyFans, to track and respond to customer support tickets, long after leaving the company. OnlyFans uses Zendesk to respond to both users who post content and those who just pay to view that content. According to the source and OnlyFans users who spoke to Motherboard, depending on what a user is seeking help with, support tickets may contain their credit card information, drivers' licenses, passports, full names, addresses, bank statements, how much they have earned on OnlyFans or spent, Know Your Customer (KYC) selfies where the creator holds up an ID next to their face for verification, and model release forms. "It's a shame that they have this large company and feel they can play with people's lives like this," the former employee said. "There are already so many things they are in trouble for and privacy should not be one of them. Everyone on that platform, especially sex workers, need to have their information be safe and it isn't."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Facebook has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates. "Why do we care about tweens?" said one document from 2020. "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snap Inc.'s Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work. [...] Over the past five years, Facebook has made what it called "big bets" on designing products that would appeal to preteens across its services, according to a document from earlier this year. In more than a dozen studies over that period, the documents show, Facebook has tried to understand which products might resonate with children and "tweens" (ages 10 through 12), how these young people view competitors' apps and what concerns their parents. "With the ubiquity of tablets and phones, kids are getting on the internet as young as six years old. We can't ignore this and we have a responsibility to figure it out," said a 2018 document labeled confidential. "Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth."

Earlier this year, a senior researcher at Facebook presented to colleagues a new approach to how the company should think about designing products for children. It provided a blueprint for how to introduce the company's products to younger children. Rather than offer just two types of products -- those for users 13 and older, and a messenger app for kids -- Facebook should tailor its features to six age brackets, said a slide titled "where we've been, and where we're going." The age brackets included: adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four. [...] "Our ultimate goal is messaging primacy with U.S. tweens, which may also lead to winning with teens," one of the documents said. Yesterday, Facebook paused its plans to develop a version of Instagram for kids under 13 after facing pressure from lawmakers.

Electric car inquiries are soaring as petrol stations in parts of the UK have started running out of fuel on Friday. The Guardian reports: While scenes of chaos play out at petrol stations across the country amid shortages, for many electric vehicle (EV) dealers the fuel crisis has led to an unexpected surge in inquiries and sales. EVA England, a non-profit representing new and prospective EV drivers, reports a rise in electric car inquiries and in interest at EV dealers, particularly in the last week. Along with existing factors such as the expansion of London's ultra-low emission zone, the fuel crisis has proved to be another trigger point, he said. "People were using it as 'this is the moment where I'm not going to put this off any longer,'" [said Martin Miller, owner of an electric car dealership in Guildford, Surrey].

The EV market is no longer the preserve of innovators and early adopters, he said, with the most popular models the Nissan Leaf, Volkswagen ID 3 and Jaguar I-Pace. Ben Strzalko, the owner of Electric Cars UK in Leyland, Lancashire, said that as a small business it would take a few months to feel the knock-on effect of the fuel crisis on sales. But every time there are problems with petrol or diesel, he said they acted as "one more tick for people making that transition to electric cars." Matt Cleevely, the owner of Cleevely Electric Vehicles in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which specialises in used EVs, had a surge of inquiries over the weekend and on Monday morning from customers citing the fuel crisis as a reason for switching to electric. He expects enthusiasm to continue rising, with petrol shortages adding "fuel to the fire." Further reading: Europe's Energy Crisis Is About To Go Global As Gas Prices Soar (Bloomberg)

The Guardian looks at a billionaire's plan to build a $400 billion "city of the future" in a U.S. desert.

The city — to be named Telosa — "doesn't exist yet, nor is it clear which state will house the experiment, but the architects of the proposed 150,000-acre project are scouting the American south-west." They're already predicting the first residents can move in by 2030. Telosa will eventually house 5 million people, according to its website, and benefit from a halo of utopian promises: avant-garde architecture, drought resistance, minimal environmental impact, communal resources. This hypothetical metropolis promises to take some of the most cutting-edge ideas about sustainability and urban design and make them reality. The plan combines ideas about urban farming (the "beacon" tower of the project will house aeroponic farms) and quality of life (a city where everyone can live and work and play within a 15-minute commute) alongside new green technologies and a model of land ownership proposed, but never executed, by the 19th-century economist Henry George. These are ideas that have remained in the abstract or only attempted on a small scale; now they will have a whole American metropolis to experiment with, brought to life by the creative ambitions of one very rich man.

Telosa certainly is a city of the future, but not in, like, a great way. Yes, it probably will have a very shiny public transportation system, but it seems futuristic more in the sense that, as the world deteriorates, the ultra-rich seem increasingly interested in telling the rest of us how to live. No longer content to just sneer down at us from their private jets, they take over our homes, our towns, our society... As anyone who has an adult relative who rules over their basement miniature train set with an iron fist, or who has spent any time on social media listening to 22-year-old leftists talk about what life will be like after "the revolution", knows, a lot of people have ideas about the way cities, countries and societies should work. We are usually protected from seeing those ideas realized, and dealing with the consequences of their megalomania, simply by preventing any one person from building enough wealth or power. But I have something to tell you about the tax policy of the last couple decades and the way a small number of people have benefited, and you're not going to like it...

The ideas of this fake little town are grand! Green architecture, environmental technology, "transparent governance", innovative urban planning ideas — if this works, it could advance our thinking on how humans can exist in a changing world and live harmonious lives during the coming environmental and economic calamities. But it won't work. It won't work because one guy doesn't get to decide how the world, or even a city, should work. Even if he's collaborating with the greatest "thinkers" and architects and scientists of our time, just a glance through Lore's portfolio will reveal that all of his big ideas and fancy language about the betterment and advancement of society are pretty hollow...

What would make society better? Is it skyscrapers in the desert? Or would it actually benefit the world more if billionaires had less influence over the way society operates?

Epik's massive data breach is already affecting lives. Today the Washington Post describes a real estate agent in Pompano Beach who urged buyers on Facebook to move to "the most beautiful State." His name and personal details "were found on invoices suggesting he had once paid for websites with names such as racisminc.com, whitesencyclopedia.com, christiansagainstisrael.com and theholocaustisfake.com". The real estate brokerage where he worked then dropped him as an agent. The brokerage's owner told the Post they didn't "want to be involved with anyone with thoughts or motives like that."

"Some users appear to have relied on Epik to lead a double life," the Post reports, "with several revelations so far involving people with innocuous day jobs who were purportedly purveyors of hate online." (Alternate URL here.) Epik, based outside Seattle, said in a data-breach notice filed with Maine's attorney general this week that 110,000 people had been affected nationwide by having their financial account and credit card numbers, passwords and security codes exposed.... Heidi Beirich, a veteran researcher of hate and extremism, said she is used to spending weeks or months doing "the detective work" trying to decipher who is behind a single extremist domain. The Epik data set, she said, "is like somebody has just handed you all the detective work — the names, the people behind the accounts..."

Many website owners who trusted Epik to keep their identities hidden were exposed, but some who took additional precautions, such as paying in bitcoin and using fake names, remain anonymous....

Aubrey "Kirtaner" Cottle, a security researcher and co-founder of Anonymous, declined to share information about the hack's origins but said it was fueled by hackers' frustrations over Epik serving as a refuge for far-right extremists. "Everyone is tired of hate," Cottle said. "There hasn't been enough pushback, and these far-right players, they play dirty. Nothing is out of bounds for them. And now ... the tide is turning, and there's a swell moving back in their direction."
Earlier in the week, the Post reported: Since the hack, Epik's security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who've marveled at the site's apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public... The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

Facebook announced a new project on Thursday that will bring broadband service to thousands of households in Virginia this fall, in partnership with a local ISP and utility company. The Verge reports: The project began with fiber networks Facebook was already building to connect its data centers in Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. With that fiber already laid, Facebook partnered with Appalachian Power and GigaBeam Networks to extend the networks to roughly 6,000 households in Grayson County, VA. The homes are projected to have high-speed broadband access by the end of this fall. "These are really complicated problems that we're trying to solve. If they weren't complicated, then we still wouldn't have 19 million people that were unserved or underserved," Michele Kohler, Facebook's network investments team manager, told The Verge in an interview Wednesday. "We're trying to figure out how can we play in the equation, with these complex partnerships, to figure out how we can help people get connected faster."

Kohler also said that Facebook is providing "engineering and technical resources" to the partnering companies. The proposed network would leverage a new law approved by the Virginia legislature last year that allows electric and communications companies to string fiber along existing poles and conduits. Still, the future of these networks is unclear as utility companies like Rappahannock Electric Cooperative have been sued by property owners for infringing on their property rights when they've sought to invoke the new provisions.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to retire the International Space Station by the end of this decade, so the U.S. space agency is turning to private companies to build new space stations in orbit -- and expects to save more than $1 billion annually as a result. CNBC reports: NASA earlier this year unveiled the Commercial LEO Destinations project, with plans to award up to $400 million in total contracts to as many as four companies to begin development on private space stations. In response to NASA's request, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister told CNBC that the agency "received roughly about a dozen proposals" from a variety of companies for contracts under the project. "We got an incredibly strong response from industry to our announcement for proposals for commercial, free fliers that go directly to orbit," McAlister said. "I can't remember the last time we got that many proposals [in response] to a [human spaceflight] contract announcement."

The ISS is more than 20 years old and costs NASA about $4 billion a year to operate. The space station is approved to operate through the end of 2024, with a likely lifespan extension to the end of 2028. But, moving forward, McAlister says that NASA wants "to be just one of many users instead of the primary sponsor and infrastructure supporter" for stations in low Earth orbit. "This strong industry response shows that our plan to retire the International Space Station in the latter part of this decade and transition to commercial space destinations is a viable, strong plan," McAlister said. "We are making tangible progress on developing commercial space destinations where people can work, play, and live," McAlister added. NASA is now evaluating the proposals, and McAlister said the agency hopes to announce the contract winners "before the end of the year," although he is "pushing for earlier." NASA "will not need anything near as big and as capable" as the ISS moving forward, said McAlister. He said the private space stations "could be very large, but NASA will only be paying for the part that we need."

An anonymous reader shares a report (paywalled): Gas made up the largest share of the UK's energy mix in 2020, at 34%; followed by wind on a quarter; nuclear at 17%; biomass at 6.5% and solar at 4.4%. Despite the progress of renewables, detractors note the problems arise when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Until reliable battery storage for renewable energy is developed, these sources can only ever be intermittent, critics argue, and some infrastructure will continue to use oil for back-up generation. It is a case made by the nuclear industry, which says that it is uniquely placed to provide the zero-emissions baseload the grid requires. Runaway gas prices are already sparking concern across the energy sector, with fears that consumers are facing a "bill shock" this winter. Personal finance expert Martin Lewis warned his readers last week: "This autumn's signature noise will be a deep thud... the sound of jaws hitting the floor as people finally see the practical evidence of the energy bill catastrophe laid bare."

UK gas prices reached 130p per therm last week, compared to 30p a year ago. In an unusual inversion, gas prices are trading above the equivalent price of Brent, the benchmark for crude oil. Both supply and demand factors are at play. The reopening of economies after Covid lockdowns has pushed up demand for gas. Countries are also trying to cut their use of coal, and switching to less polluting gas as a result. Europe is thus competing with Asia for shipments of liquid natural gas (LNG), a more mobile form of gas that is increasingly popular. Supply is also tight: a particularly cold winter meant Europe used up more reserves than usual and these have not been replenished. A spate of outages at gas production plants in different parts of the world have compounded the problem. To make matters worse, the UK has relatively low levels of gas storage. The country has eight gas storage sites that can hold an estimated 12 days of supply. Storage capacity was drastically reduced when the Rough site under the North Sea was closed in 2017 for safety and economic reasons. Rough, a disused oil field, could hold around 70% of UK gas reserves. "The market hasn't been able to fill up storage as we move into this winter. And hence we are very exposed, especially if it is another cold winter like last year," said James Huckstepp, analyst at S&P Platts. "Consumers are starting to recognise that their energy bills are going to be much higher this winter."