According to Dish, the company says it now covers 70 percent of the U.S. population and has "also satisfied all other June 14, 2023 FCC commitments." The Verge reports: In meeting this FCC milestone, Dish says it has deployed over 15,000 5G cell sites and would like to remind us that it's still the first wireless provider in the country to launch voice calling over 5G, known as VoNR -- Voice over New Radio. This is all well and good, but Dish's wireless service still doesn't look quite the same as AT&T's or Verizon's. The network itself is very much still in beta testing under its Project Genesis program, which requires you to purchase a new phone specially equipped to use new network features like three-carrier aggregation. The network is available to Boost customers in supported markets, but they need to use a phone that supports band 70 to access Dish's 5G -- and those are still uncommon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Moderators of many Reddit communities are pledging to keep their subreddits private or restricted indefinitely. For the vast majority of subreddits, the blackout to protest Reddit's expensive API pricing changes was expected to last from Monday until Wednesday. But in response to a Tuesday post on the r/ModCoord subreddit, users are chiming in to say that their subreddits will remain dark past that 48-hour window. "Reddit has budged microscopically," u/SpicyThunder335, a moderator for r/ModCoord, wrote in the post. They say that despite an announcement that access to a popular data-archiving tool for moderators would be restored, "our core concerns still aren't satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began." SpicyThunder335 also bolded a line from a Monday memo from CEO Steve Huffman obtained by The Verge -- "like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well" -- and said that "more is needed for Reddit to act."

Ahead of the Tuesday post, more than 300 subreddits had committed to staying dark indefinitely, SpicyThunder335 said. The list included some hugely popular subreddits, like r/aww (more than 34 million subscribers), r/music (more than 32 million subscribers), and r/videos (more than 26 million subscribers). Even r/nba committed to an indefinite timeframe at arguably the most important time of the NBA season. But SpicyThunder335 invited moderators to share pledges to keep the protests going, and the commitments are rolling in. SpicyThunder335 notes that not everyone will be able to go dark indefinitely for valid reasons. "For example, r/stopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns," SpicyThunder335 wrote. As an alternative, SpicyThunder335 recommended implementing a "weekly gesture of support on 'Touch-Grass-Tuesdays,'" which would be left up to the discretion of individual communities. SpicyThunder335 also acknowledged that some subreddits would need to poll their users to make sure they're on board. As of this writing, more than 8,400 subreddits have gone private or into a restricted mode. The blackouts caused Reddit to briefly crash on Monday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT News: Amid what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Tuesday warning about social media's impact on developing young brains. "Through the last two and a half years I've been in office, I've been hearing concerns from kids and parents," Murthy told STAT. "Parents are asking 'Is social media safe for my kids?' Based on our review of the data, there isn't enough evidence that it is safe for our kids."

The advisory calls on policymakers and technology companies to take steps to minimize the risks of social media. "This is not going to be an issue that we solve with one sector alone," Murthy said. Policymakers, according to the report, need to develop age restrictions and safety standards for social media -- much like the regulations that the U.S. has in place for everything from cars to medicine. Specifically, Murthy would like to see policymakers require a higher standard of data privacy for children to protect them from potential harms like exploitation and abuse. Technology companies, meanwhile, need to be more transparent about the data they share, according to Murthy. He calls on companies to assess the potential risks of online interactions and take active steps to prevent potential misuse. He also suggests the establishment of scientific advisory committees to inform approaches and policies aimed at creating safe online environments for children.

The advisory also suggests families attempt to protect young people's mental health by developing a family media plan aimed at establishing healthy technology boundaries at home, such as creating "tech-free zones" that restrict phone use during certain hours or family mealtime. But Murthy noted that parents are already at the end of their rope in trying to manage how their children are exposed to and using this rapidly evolving technology. That responsibility has fallen entirely on them up to this point. "We've got to move quickly," he said. "None of us should be satisfied until we have clear evidence that these platforms are safe." The surgeon general's report comes two weeks after the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory on teens and social media use. The group noted the increased risk of anxiety and depression among adolescents who are exposed to discrimination and bullying online. "Other research has shown that adolescents ages 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media face a heightened risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes compared to those who spent less time online," adds STAT News.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Department of Justice, Mandiant, and Microsoft stumbled upon the SolarWinds breach six months earlier than previously reported, WIRED has learned, but were unaware of the significance of what they had found. The breach, publicly announced in December 2020, involved Russian hackers compromising the software maker SolarWinds and inserting a backdoor into software served to about 18,000 of its customers. That tainted software went on to infect at least nine US federal agencies, among them the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms including Microsoft, Mandiant, Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks. The hackers had been in these various networks for between four and nine months before the campaign was exposed by Mandiant.

WIRED can now confirm that the operation was actually discovered by the DOJ six months earlier, in late May 2020 -- but the scale and significance of the breach wasn't immediately apparent. Suspicions were triggered when the department detected unusual traffic emanating from one of its servers that was running a trial version of the Orion software suite made by SolarWinds, according to sources familiar with the incident. The software, used by system administrators to manage and configure networks, was communicating externally with an unfamiliar system on the internet. The DOJ asked the security firm Mandiant to help determine whether the server had been hacked. It also engaged Microsoft, though it's not clear why the software maker was also brought onto the investigation.

It's not known what division of the DOJ experienced the breach, but representatives from the Justice Management Division and the US Trustee Program participated in discussions about the incident. The Trustee Program oversees the administration of bankruptcy cases and private trustees. The Management Division advises DOJ managers on budget and personnel management, ethics, procurement, and security. Investigators suspected the hackers had breached the DOJ server directly, possibly by exploiting a vulnerability in the Orion software. They reached out to SolarWinds to assist with the inquiry, but the company's engineers were unable to find a vulnerability in their code. In July 2020, with the mystery still unresolved, communication between investigators and SolarWinds stopped. A month later, the DOJ purchased the Orion system, suggesting that the department was satisfied that there was no further threat posed by the Orion suite, the sources say. According to WIRED, the DOJ said it "notified the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) about the breach at the time it occurred -- though a US National Security Agency spokesperson expressed frustration that the agency was not also notified."

"But in December 2020, when the public learned that a number of federal agencies were compromised in the SolarWinds campaign -- the DOJ among them -- neither the DOJ nor CISA revealed to the public that the operation had unknowingly been found months earlier. The DOJ initially said its chief information officer had discovered the breach on December 24."

ChatGPT's maker said Friday that the artificial intelligence chatbot is available again in Italy after the company met the demands of regulators who temporarily blocked it over privacy concerns. From a report: OpenAI said it fulfilled a raft of conditions that the Italian data protection authority wanted satisfied by an April 30 deadline to have the ban on the AI software lifted. "ChatGPT is available again to our users in Italy," San Francisco-based OpenAI said by email. "We are excited to welcome them back, and we remain dedicated to protecting their privacy."

Last month, Italian watchdog, known as Garante, ordered OpenAI to temporarily stop processing Italian users' personal information while it investigated a possible data breach. The authority said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but emphasized the importance of following the European Union's strict data privacy rules. OpenAI said it "addressed or clarified the issues" raised by the watchdog. The measures include adding information on its website about how it collects and uses data used to train the algorithms that power ChatGPT, giving European Union users a new form they can use to object to having their data used for training, and adding a tool to verify users' ages when signing up.

The billionaire hedge fund manager that runs a major Google investor isn't satisfied with the record 12,000 redundancies the US tech giant is making, and wants to see thousands more forced out of the organization. From a report: Estimated to be worth around $8 billion, Sir Christopher Hohn reportedly paid himself $1.8 million a day last year and is the boss of The Children's Investment Fund. He had already agitated for change in November when he implored Google execs to cut costs by reducing headcount, paying staff less, and killing off profitless business.

Whether Google listened to TCI Fund or not is a moot point, but Sundar Pichai last week confirmed that 12,000 of its employees were to be booted because it hired heavily during the pandemic for a "different economic reality to the one we face today." Yesterday, he told a town hall meeting of Googlers that not hiring risked losing business. Google's workforce went from 120,000 in 2020 to nearly 187,000 at the end of September, and it is now under pressure due to slowing sales and shrinking profits. Hohn at TCI now wants to see even more dramatic action taken by senior management. "Over the last five years, [Google parent] Alphabet has more than doubled its headcount, adding over 100,000 employees, of which over 30,000 were added in the first nine months of 2022 alone," he said in the latest letter to Pichai. Hohn adds, "The decision to cut 12,000 jobs is a step in the right direction, but it does not even reverse the very strong headcount growth of 2022. Ultimately management will need to go further. [...] Importantly, management should also take the opporunity to address excessive employee compensation. The media salary at Alphabet in 2021 amounted to nearly $300,000, and the average salary is much higher. "

America's Transportation Security Administration "has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles," reports the Washington Post.

Their article adds that the agency "hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year." Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers' IDs to make sure they're not impostors.... You step up to the travel document checker kiosk and stick your ID into a machine. Then you look into a camera for up to five seconds and the machine compares your live photo to the one it sees on your ID. They call this a "one to one" verification system, comparing one face to one ID. Even though the software is judging if you're an impostor, there's still a human agent there to make the final call (at least for now).

So how accurate is it? The TSA says it's been better at verifying IDs than the manual process. "This technology is definitely a security enhancement," said [TSA program manager Jason] Lim. "We are so far very satisfied with the performance of the machine's ability to conduct facial recognition accurately...." But the TSA hasn't actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches. Some of that might come to light next year when the TSA has to make its case to the Department of Homeland Security to convert airports all over the United States into facial recognition systems....

The TSA says it doesn't use facial recognition for law-enforcement purposes. It also says it minimizes holding on to our face data, so it isn't using the scans to build out a new national database of face IDs. "The scanning and match is made and immediately overwritten at the Travel Document Checker podium. We keep neither the live photo nor the photo of the ID," said Lim. But the TSA did acknowledge there are cases in which it holds on to the data for up to 24 months so its science and technology office can evaluate the system's effectiveness....

"None of this facial recognition technology is mandated," said Lim. "Those who do not feel comfortable will still have to present their ID — but they can tell the officer that they do not want their photo taken, and the officer will turn off the live camera." There are also supposed to be signs around informing you of your rights.
Here's the TSA's web page about the program. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

A report from the Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce found that Bachelor's degree holders generally earn 84% more than those with just a high school diploma, reports CNBC.

"Still, 44% of all job seekers with college degrees regret their field of study." Journalism, sociology, communications and education all topped the list of most-regretted college majors, according to ZipRecruiter's survey of more than 1,500 college graduates who were looking for a job. "When you are barely managing to pay your bills, your paycheck might become more important." Of graduates who regretted their major, most said that, if they could go back, they would now choose computer science or business administration instead.

All in, the top-paying college majors earn $3.4 million more than the lowest-paying majors over a lifetime.

Graduates entering the workforce with good career prospects and high starting salaries are the most satisfied with their field of study, job site ZipRecruiter also found. Computer science majors, with an average annual starting salary of almost $100,000, were the happiest overall, according to ZipRecruiter. Students who majored in criminology, engineering, nursing, business and finance also felt very good about their choices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Low-code and no-code development is often seen as the realm of citizen developers, but the segment of the enterprise where low-code and no-code has gained significant traction is among professional developers themselves. And, importantly, it's making their jobs better in two ways: providing tools for faster software development and deployment, as well as elevating their roles in enterprises to that of teachers and facilitators for potential citizen developers.

A recent survey of 860 developers by OutSystems finds a majority of low-code users -- most of whom also use traditional coding languages alongside low-code -- report that they are "very satisfied" with their team productivity (59%), compared to 41% of traditional developers. Most low-coders, 57%, are also very satisfied with the quality of tools at their disposal to complete their work, compared to 36% of their traditional coding counterparts. In addition, 71% of low-code users said they were able to stick to the typical 40-hour work week, compared to only 44% of traditional developers. Additionally, 63% of low-code developers indicate they are happy with their salary and benefits compared to 40% of traditional developers.

Not only is low-code and no-code making things easier, it is also elevating the roles of technology professionals within their enterprises, to facilitator, educators, and consultants. Industry observers agree. "The professional's role is now to customize and connect the low-code solution to the organization's resources," relates Moses Guttmann, CEO and co-founder of ClearML. Their roles "shift towards mainly automation and orchestration, taking a low-code process and helping the low-code infrastructure gain access to different resources within the organization. Think of it as abstracting the databases and providing access to the orchestration -- such as cloud infrastructure to execute the low-code application." This can only mean more Agile development for the next generation of applications, with business-savvy developers and tech-savvy business users working side by side. "Citizen developers are typically growth-minded, innovative problem solvers with an active understanding of the business' overarching goals," says Aaron White, CTO and co-founder of Vendr. "In tandem with overseeing the work completed in a low-code or no-code environment, professional developers -- especially those leading teams -- should strive to recognize these employees' talents, actively enabling them to contribute to the development process." "It takes away a lot of the day-to-day implementation-related tasks and allows developers to focus on more architectural and strategic concerns," says Om Vyas, co-founder and chief product officer for oak9. "It puts them in a position to have a greater business impact. But also, with low-code and no-code approaches, when the one-size-fits-all pattern does not work for you, it will create work for these professionals to amend or customize to add their own implementations."

In many cases, "a low-code/no-code approach may operate as a complete solution. That said, IT and engineering may need to step in from time to time, to fine-tune the details," White adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On June 8, 2020, an individual claiming to be billionaire film producer and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel contacted brokerage Charles Schwab by phone and stated that he had uploaded a wire disbursement form using the service's secure email service. The only problem was the call apparently came from prison. Still, the caller made reference to a transfer verification inquiry earlier that day by his wife -- a role said to have been played by a female co-conspirator. The individual allegedly posing as Kimmel had contacted a Schwab customer service representative three days earlier -- on June 5, 2020 -- about opening a checking account, and was told that a form of identification and a utility bill would be required. On June 6, a co-conspirator is alleged to have provided a picture of Kimmel's driver's license and a Los Angeles Water and Power utility bill. According to court documents [PDF] filed by the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Georgia, the uploaded documents consisted of a request for funds to be wired to an external bank and a forged letter of authorization -- both of which appeared to be signed by Kimmel.

On June 9, satisfied that Kimmel had been adequately authenticated, the brokerage sent $11 million from Kimmel's Schwab account to a Zions Bank account for Money Metal Exchange, LLC, an Eagle, Idaho-based seller of gold coins and other precious metals. The real Kimmel had no knowledge of the transaction, which resulted in the purchase of 6,106 American Eagle gold coins. The individual who orchestrated the fraudulent purchase of the coins is alleged to have hired a private security firm on June 13, 2020 to transport the coins from Boise, Idaho to Atlanta, Georgia on a chartered plane. An associate of the fraudster allegedly took possession of the coins three days later. All the while the alleged mastermind, Arthur Lee Cofield Jr, was incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Butts County, Georgia, according to the government. Cofield is serving a 14-year sentence for armed robbery and is also under indictment in Fulton County, Georgia for attempted murder.

The day after the coins were purchased, prison staff are said to have searched Cofield's cell and recovered a blue Samsung cellphone hidden under his arm. The prison forensic unit apparently determined that Cofield had been using an account on free voice and messaging service TextNow and matched the phone number with calls made to Money Metals Exchange. On December 8, 2020, a federal grand jury indicted Cofield and two co-conspirators for conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering. Cofield's attorney, Steven Sadow, subsequently sought to suppress the cellphone evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, arguing that the warrantless search of the device by prison officials was unrelated to the legitimate function of prison security and maintenance. The government said otherwise, insisting that Cofield does not have standing to contest the search, having no "legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of a contraband cell phone." The judge overseeing the case sided with the government [PDF] and certified the case to proceed to trial.

Ten years of data from a nationwide survey of physicians confirm another trend that's worsened through the pandemic: Burnout rates among doctors in the United States, which were already high a decade ago, have risen to alarming levels. From a report: Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63 percent of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44 percent in 2017 and 46 percent in 2011. Only 30 percent felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43 percent five years earlier. "This is the biggest increase of emotional exhaustion that I've ever seen, anywhere in the literature," said Bryan Sexton, the director of Duke University's Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, who was not involved in the survey efforts. The most recent numbers also compare starkly with data from 2020, when the survey was run during the early stages of the pandemic. Then, 38 percent of doctors surveyed reported one or more symptoms of burnout while 46 percent were satisfied with their work-life balance.

Ahead of its Connect conference in October, Cloudflare this week announced an ambitious new project called Turnstile, which seeks to do away with the CAPTCHAs used throughout the web to verify people are who they say they are. From a report: Available to site owners at no charge, Cloudflare customers or no, Turnstile chooses from a rotating suite of "browser challenges" to check that visitors to a webpage aren't, in fact, bots. CAPTCHAs, the challenge-response tests most of us have encountered when filling out forms, have been around for decades, and they've been relatively successfully at keeping bot traffic at bay. But the rise of cheap labor, bugs in various CAPTCHA flavors and automated solvers have begun to poke holes in the system. Several websites offer human- and AI-backed CAPTCHA-solving services for as low as $0.50 per thousand solved CAPTCHAs, and some researchers claim AI-based attacks can successfully solve CAPTCHAs used by the world's most popular websites.

Cloudflare itself was once a CAPTCHA user. But according to CTO John Graham-Cumming, the company was never quite satisfied with it -- if Cloudflare's public rallying cries hadn't made that clear. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Graham-Cumming listed what he sees as the many downsides of CAPTCHA technology, including poor accessibility (visual disabilities can make it impossible to solve a CAPTCHA), cultural bias (CAPTCHAs assume familiarity with objects like U.S. taxis) and the strains that CAPTCHAs place on mobile data plans. [...] Turnstile automatically chooses a browser challenge based on "telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session," Cloudflare says, rather than factors like login cookies. After running non-interactive JavaScript challenges to gather signals about the visitor and browser environment and using AI models to detect features and visitors who've passed a challenge before, Turnstile fine-tunes the difficulty of the challenge to the specific request -- avoiding having users solve a puzzle.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been just over five years since Google announced at Google I/O 2017 that it would make Kotlin, the statically typed language for the Java Virtual Machine first developed by JetBrains, a first-class language for writing Android apps. Since then, Google took this a step further by making Kotlin its preferred language for writing Android apps in 2019 -- and while plenty of developers still use Java, Kotlin is quickly becoming the default way to build apps for Google's mobile operating system. Back in 2018, Google and JetBrains also teamed up to launch the Kotlin Foundation.

Earlier this week, I sat down with Google's James Ward, the company's product manager for Kotlin, to talk about the language's role in the Android ecosystem and beyond, as well as the company's future plans for it. It's no surprise that Google's hope is that over time, all Android developers will switch over to Kotlin. "There is still quite a bit of Java still happening on Android," Ward said. "We know that developers are generally more satisfied with Kotlin than with Java. We know that they're more productive, the quality of applications is higher and so getting more of those people to move more of their code over has been a focus for us. The interoperability of Kotlin ... with Java has made it that people can kind of progressively move code bases over and it would be great to get to the point down the road, where just everything is all Kotlin."

An innocent tweet about a wildly popular online multiplayer game led to a terrifying real-life campaign of doxxing and death threats against employees of game company Bungie. The Record reports: Two employees of Bungie, the American company behind "Destiny 2" -- a first-person shooter with 40 million users -- recently convinced an Ontario judge to order Waterloo-based TextNow to name its customers who made "racist and serious physical threats" against them. TextNow offers users anonymous phone service. [...] The two employees sought an "urgent and confidential" court order requiring TextNow to name the customers who made the threats. The judge agreed on June 15 but waited a month before releasing his reasons due to "the serious nature of the allegations of danger." TextNow collects information about each user, including email address, phone number, IP address, credit card number and logs of calls and texts.

The judge said the employees don't plan to sue the users in Ontario. "Whether they sue in the U.S. or just give the name to the police, I am satisfied that the exceptional equitable remedy ought to be available to identify people who harass others, with base racism, who dox, abuse personal information, and make overt threats of physical harm and death," he said. "Our mission is to provide everyone with an affordable way to communicate, and we place a high value on the safety and privacy of our users," a TextNow spokesperson said in an email to The Record. "From time to time, we receive lawful requests for information. We comply with all valid requests as required by law."

Snap announced plans to "substantially reduce" hiring and shake up its strategy as it posted bleak second-quarter results, blaming tough macroeconomic conditions but also stating it was "not satisfied with the resultsâ... regardless of the current headwinds." From a report: The social media company lost about a quarter of its value on Thursday after posting the results, which chief executive Evan Spiegel said "do not reflect our ambition." Revenues at the Los Angeles-based social media company increased 13 per cent to $1.11bn in the three months to the end of June, just shy of analysts' consensus of $1.13bn. Net losses stood at $422mn, a drop of 178 per cent year-on-year and far greater than analyst estimates of losses of $340mn, according to data compiled by S&P Capital IQ.

[...] Spiegel said that Snap planned to focus on product innovation, diversifying revenue and investment in its direct response advertising business in order to address the slowdown. In a letter to investors on Thursday, Snap said that brands were slashing digital advertising budgets due to the wider economic slowdown and inflationary pressures, as well as privacy changes by Apple that have made it harder to target advertising and measure the success of campaigns. It also said business had been hurt by increased competition, as new entrants such as Chinese-owned TikTok take market share.

jd writes: NIST has announced winners of its post-quantum cryptography battle of the giants.

CRYSTALS-Kyber has been chosen for standard encryption, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, Falcon, and SPHINCS+ were chosen for digital signatures. Falcon is recommended by NIST as a backup for Dilithium where shorter keys are needed, and SPHINCS+ uses a different mathematical technique than all of the other submissions, so if it is found that there's a flaw in the maths for the others, then there's something to fall back on.

There is still a final round for public key encryption algorithms. The remaining candidates are BIKE, Classic McEliece, HQC, and SIKE.

The mailing list members probably wish that they could use Slashdot's moderation system about now, as some of the discussions have been extremely heated. This was especially true for the signature system Rainbow, which is used by the ABC Mint crypto-currency, which was rejected after what was claimed to be a catastrophic flaw was reported, with allegations that it could be broken over a weekend on a laptop, followed by counter-allegations that many of the other algorithms had significant flaws in them also. (This is likely why SPHINCS+ is a backup.)

Another area that was hotly debated was CPU design flaws, particularly HertzBleed, which got the well-known crypto maestro Bernstein rather annoyed. As SIKE is a final round candidate, NIST seem to be satisfied with his explanation for why CPU design flaws should not be considered. It is to be seen how this debate progresses.

This week New York's attorney general announced they're officially "launching investigations into the social media companies that the Buffalo shooter used to plan, promote, and stream his terror attack." Slashdot reader echo123 points out that Discord confirmed that roughly 30 minutes before the attack a "small group" was invited to join the shooter's server. "None of the people he invited to review his writings appeared to have alerted law enforcement," reports the New York Times., "and the massacre played out much as envisioned."

But meanwhile, another Times article tells a tangentially-related story from 2019 about what ultimately happened to "a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand." For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to "Share THIS...." Online writings apparently connected to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman's tactics were so easy to emulate.

In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman's 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to the Times' review. Three of the videos had been uploaded to Facebook as far back as the day of the killings, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted as recently as this week. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments banded together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and violent extremist content online. Yet even as Facebook expunged 4.5 million pieces of content related to the Christchurch attack within six months of the killings, what the Times found this week shows that a mass killer's video has an enduring — and potentially everlasting — afterlife on the internet.

"It is clear some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a kind of world where these videos will never be scrubbed completely from the internet," said Brian Fishman, a former director of counterterrorism at Facebook who helped lead the effort to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the site in 2019....

Facebook, which is owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only an estimated five were of terrorism-related material. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violated their rules and they were continuing to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment
For what it's worth, this week CNN also republished an email they'd received in 2016 from 4chan's current owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. The gist of the email? "If I liked censorship, I would have already done that."

But Slashdot reader Bruce66423 also shares an interesting observation from The Guardian's senior tech reporter about the major tech platforms. "According to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren't financially motivated to invest resources into developing it." Farid's work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded...

Farid: It's not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe... The core technology to stop redistribution is called "hashing" or "robust hashing" or "perceptual hashing". The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it's illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it's called.... That's actually pretty easy to do. We've been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly.

So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we've identified a terror attack that's being live-streamed. We're going to grab that video. We're going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution.

It's a problem of collaboration across the industry and it's a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I'd understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It's not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology's going to be perfect. It's battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks.... This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint.
"These are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively," Farid points out later. "How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

According to a survey of 501 people conducted by insurance company Progressive, most people prefer the process of buying a car online than at dealerships. Autoblog reports: Based on the 251 people who completed a transaction entirely online or through a dealer web site, and the 250 who did solely face-to-face business, there are two big takeaways. The first is that online shopping, still a small percentage of overall car sales, is growing rapidly in acceptance and actual transactions. [...] The second takeaway is that millennials are a major part of the online sales growth.

Overall, though, online shoppers expressed more joy with the process than showroom floor shoppers. Compared to 78% of buyers highly satisfied with buying a car online, only 58% of in-person shoppers registered the same pleasure. That carried through to trade-ins and financing as well. Eighty percent of online shoppers were highly satisfied with the trade-in process, versus 57% of dealership visitors; 70% of online shoppers gave the highest marks to the financing process as opposed to 53% of guests asked to "Step into the office" and wait while the salesperson conferred with the finance manager.

"Enabling developer productivity has become a key vector in every organization's success," writes Matt Asay at InfoWorld — not a nice-to-have feature but a must-have.

"Which is why, perhaps ironically, the best way to set your developers free may actually be to fetter their freedom." The more developers mattered, the more everyone wanted to cater to their needs with new software tools, new open source projects, new cloud services, etc. This meant lots of new developer choice and associated freedom, but that wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good. As RedMonk analyst Steven O'Grady noted in 2017, "The good news is that this developer-driven fragmentation has yielded an incredible array of open source software. The bad news is that, even for developers, managing this fragmentation is challenging."

Can one have too much choice? Yep.

It's long been known in consumer retail, for example, that when there is too much choice, "consumers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they do buy, they are less satisfied with their selection." Turns out this isn't just a matter of breakfast cereals or clothing. It also applies to developers building enterprise software. InfoWorld's Scott Carey writes that "complexity is killing software developers." He's right. But what can be done?

In a conversation with Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson, he related how self-service development platforms are reemerging to help developers make sense of all that open source and cloud choice. By giving developers "a standard, pre-approved environment in which the effort to create an app from an idea is minimal," he explained, it allows them to "focus on innovation not plumbing."
"Done right, a little bit of constraint goes a long way..." Asay argues, touting the benefits of PaaS (platform as a service) self-service development platforms. ("Enterprises that want to give their developers the freedom the cloud affords can couple it with just enough constraint to make that freedom useful....")

Asay argues that "However you approach it, the point is to stop thinking about freedom and control as impossibly opposed. Smart enterprises are figuring out ways to enable their developers using self-service platforms. Maybe you should, too."

Google announced on Wednesday that it would test letting Android developers use their own billing systems in their apps, the first step in what could lead to a dramatic reshaping of the app economy. However, Epic Games, which has been a strong proponent for opening app marketplaces and sued Google after the search giant removed Fortnite from Google Play for including direct payments, still isn't happy. From a report: It plans to continue advocating for an app ecosystem that offers more choices, according to a statement the company shared with The Verge. "Apple and Google continue to abuse their market power with policies that stifle innovation, inflate prices and reduce consumer choice," Corie Wright, Epic's VP of public policy, said in the statement. "One deal does not change the anticompetitive status quo. We will continue to fight for fair and open platforms for all developers and consumers and work with policymakers and regulators to hold these gatekeepers accountable for their anticompetitive conduct."