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Submission + - How the government's hospital protection racket drives up costs (nypost.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Politicians have for decades intervened in markets to protect hospitals from competition, in the hope that helping facilities overcharge privately insured patients would allow them to fund substantial charity care without risk of closure. In 2014, 43% of hospital revenues came from privately insured patients, but these accounted for only 28% of inpatient and emergency department costs.

This arrangement has also led hospitals to upgrade costly high-tech capabilities, yielding widespread overcapacity and ever-increasing prices.

This widespread excess capacity isn’t the product of free-market forces but results from years of state interventions intended to support hospital revenues. Early Blue Cross health insurance plans were developed by the American Hospital Association to accommodate rather than to constrain the growth of hospital costs, and the AHA secured tax and regulatory policies to foster their expansion.

But voters treasure local hospitals, regardless of their inefficiency. As insurers sought to drive down prices, by threatening to leave expensive hospitals out of their networks, legislators imposed regulations that restrict their ability to do so. They have also enacted “certificate of need” laws to prevent specialty hospitals from emerging to undercut them on price. Community hospitals have also been given lucrative exemptions from taxes, and 91% receive special add-ons to Medicare rates.

Submission + - Revealed: The Secret Scripts Amazon Give to Cops to Promote Ring Surveillance Ca (vice.com)

Submitted by popcornfan679
popcornfan679 writes: Motherboard has obtained documents from the Topeka, KS police department showing that Ring, Amazon's home surveillance company, made a spreadsheet with 46 standardized comments that cops can post on social media. A Ring spokesperson told Motherboard that the spreadsheet is intended to be reference material for police interacting with residents on Neighbors. The sample police comments encourage users to share camera footage with police, call and email police officers, and encourage friends to download Neighbors.

Submission + - Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has helped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and countless other internet companies flourish.

But Section 230’s legal protection has also extended to fringe sites hosting hate speech, anti-Semitic content and racist tropes like 8chan, the internet message board where the suspect in the El Paso shooting massacre posted his manifesto.

The law shields websites from liability for content created by their users, while permitting internet companies to moderate their sites without being on the hook legally for everything they host. It does not provide blanket protection from legal responsibility for some criminal acts, like posting child pornography or violations of intellectual property.

Now, as scrutiny of big technology companies has intensified in Washington over a wide variety of issues, including how they handle the spread of disinformation or police hate speech, lawmakers are questioning whether Section 230 should be changed.

While there is growing political will to do something about Section 230, finding a middle ground on potential changes is a challenge.

“When I got here just a few months ago, everybody said 230 was totally off the table, but now there are folks coming forward saying this isn’t working the way it was supposed to work,” said Mr. Hawley, who took office in January. “The world in 2019 is very different from the world of the 1990s, especially in this space, and we need to keep pace.”

Submission + - Porn Purveyors' Use of Copyright Lawsuits Has Judges Seeing Red (bloombergquint.com) 2

Submitted by pgmrdlm
pgmrdlm writes: Bloomberg) — Pornography producers and sellers account for the lion’s share of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the U.S. — and judges may have seen enough. The courts are cracking down on porn vendors that file thousands of lawsuits against people for downloading and trading racy films on home computers, using tactics a judge called a “high tech shakedown.” In one case, two men were jailed in a scheme that netted $6 million in settlements.

The pornography companies have “a business model that seeks to profit from litigation and threats of litigation rather than profiting from creative works,” said Mitch Stoltz, a senior attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that has waged a campaign against companies it thinks abuse the copyright system.

Two companies that make and sell porn are responsible for almost half of the 3,404 copyright lawsuits filed in the U.S. in the first seven months of this year, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law’s Tommy Shen. Malibu Media LLC, which distributes such titles as “Stunning Sexy Shower,” has filed some 8,000 lawsuits nationwide since 2012. Strike 3 Holdings LLC, operator of such sites as “Tushy” and “Vixen,” has filed about 3,500 lawsuits in just the past two years, according to Bloomberg Law dockets.

Submission + - Two new serious vulnerabilities have been unearthed in the WPA3 standard (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen have recently disclosed two new additional bugs impacting WPA3. The security researched duo found the new bugs in the security recommendations the WiFi Alliance created for equipment vendors in order to mitigate the initial Dragonblood attacks. Just like the original Dragonblood vulnerabilities from April, these two new ones allow attackers to leak information from WPA3 cryptographic operations and brute-force a WiFi network's password.

On their webpage the researchers lamented that, "once again, it shows that privately creating security recommendations and standards is at best irresponsible and at worst inept".

Submission + - Georgia Department of Public Safety hit by ransomware attack.

Submitted by McFortner
McFortner writes: On July 27th the Georgia Department of Public Safety announced that they got hit by a ransomware attack. When I went in to get a copy of an accident report this Friday, the officer at the Henry County, GA, police department told me that at least 7 counties in the Atlanta area were hit at the same time and they had no way of knowing when their computers would be back up. They suggest to anybody needing a report to call them first to see if by any chance the system is back up and the report is finished and can be picked up.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Would you rather buy a product or a service? SaaS is always bad? (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Concrete example: Product version of Microsoft Office 2013 versus the Service version called Microsoft Office 365.

SaaS is basically immortal and the permanent winner is the corporate cancer that sells it. But maybe SaaS is the natural result of producing terrible software? Microsoft "products" have been permanently broken for a LONG time. New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!

Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach, and several other corporate cancers are now eclipsing Microsoft, but I think Microsoft was the first major "success story" of the approach.

(Well, actually I do see at least one alternative, but there's no way to get there from here.)

Submission + - 114 private jets for elite to talk 'global warming' with GOOGLE (pagesix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The world’s rich and famous have flocked to a posh Italian resort to talk about saving Mother Earth — but they sure are punishing her in the process.

The billionaire creators of Google have invited a who’s who of A-list names— including former President Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry — to the Sicilian seaside for a mega-party they’ve dubbed Google Camp.

The Post crunched the numbers and found that 114 flights from Los Angeles to Palermo, Italy, where Camp guests landed, would spew an estimated 100,000 kilograms of CO2 into the air.

Submission + - Celebrities take yachts and private jets to Climate change conference (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: Google Camp is hosting the likes of former President Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Katy Perry in Sicily, Italy, to discuss climate change.

Italian press reports allege that the Google Campers would show up in 114 private jets, and 40 had arrived by Sunday.

Furstenberg and Diller reportedly arrived via their $200 million yacht Eos; Dreamworks founder David Geffen is said to have given Perry and Bloom a lift to the event on his $400 million yacht, Rising Sun.

Submission + - Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits Coming to Regular People Under Proposed Bill (eff.org)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to vote on the CASE Act, legislation that would create a brand new quasi-court for copyright infringement claims. We have expressed numerous concerns with the legislation, and serious problems inherent with the bill have not been remedied by Congress before moving it forward. In short, the bill would supercharge a “copyright troll” industry dedicated to filing as many “small claims” on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill’s statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that’s everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill.

Making it so easy to sue Internet users for allegedly infringing a copyrighted work that an infringement claim comes to resemble a traffic ticket is a terrible idea. This bill creates a situation where Internet users could easily be on the hook for multiple $5,000 copyright infringement judgments without many of the traditional legal safeguards or rights of appeal our justice system provides.

Proponents of the legislation argue that the bill’s cap on statutory damages in a new “small claims” tribunal will protect accused infringers. But the limits imposed by the CASE Act of $15,000 per work are far higher than the damages caps in most state small claims courts—and they don’t require any proof of harm or illicit profit. The Register of Copyrights would be free to raise that cap at any time. And the CASE Act would also remove a vital rule that protects Internet users – the registration precondition on statutory damages.

Today, someone who is going to sue a person for copyright infringement has to register their work with the Copyright Office before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication, in order to be entitled to statutory damages. Without a timely registration, violating someone’s copyright would only put an infringer on the hook for what the violation actually cost the copyright holder (called “actual damages”), or the infringer’s profits. This is a key protection for the public because copyright is ubiquitous: it automatically covers nearly every creative work from the moment it’s set down in tangible form. But not every scribble, snapshot, or notepad is eligible for statutory damages—only the ones that U.S. authors make a small effort to protect up front by filing for registration. But if Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil.

For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law. That is what happens when you eliminate the processes that tend to ensure only a truly motivated copyright holder can obtain statutory damages.

Submission + - Historic Computer Science Boolean Sensitivity Conjecture Solved (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Faizdog
Faizdog writes: The “sensitivity” conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

“This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science,” wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. “The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who’s who of discrete math and theoretical computer science,” he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them “the bricks and mortar of whatever you’re doing in computer science,” said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

“People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress,” said Ryan O’Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. “It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl,” wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview.

Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.

It can even be described in a single tweet!

Submission + - Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings (theguardian.com)

Submitted by beckett
beckett writes: "Accidental activations led to the receipt of the most sensitive data that was sent to Apple. Although Siri is included on most Apple devices, the contractor highlighted the Apple Watch and the company’s HomePod smart speaker as the most frequent sources of mistaken recordings. “The regularity of accidental triggers on the watch is incredibly high,” they said. “The watch can record some snippets that will be 30 seconds – not that long but you can gather a good idea of what’s going on.”

Sometimes, “you can definitely hear a doctor and patient, talking about the medical history of the patient. Or you’d hear someone, maybe with car engine background noise – you can’t say definitely, but it’s a drug deal you can definitely hear it happening. And you’d hear, like, people engaging in sexual acts that are accidentally recorded on the pod or the watch.”

The contractor said staff were encouraged to report accidental activations “but only as a technical problem”, with no specific procedures to deal with sensitive recordings. “We’re encouraged to hit targets, and get through work as fast as possible. The only function for reporting what you’re listening to seems to be for technical problems. There’s nothing about reporting the content.”

As well as the discomfort they felt listening to such private information, the contractor said they were motivated to go public about their job because of their fears that such information could be misused. “There’s not much vetting of who works there, and the amount of data that we’re free to look through seems quite broad. It wouldn’t be difficult to identify the person that you’re listening to, especially with accidental triggers – addresses, names and so on."

Submission + - Japan Approves First Human-Animal Embryo Experiments (nature.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people.

Until March, Japan explicitly forbid the growth of animal embryos containing human cells beyond 14 days or the transplant of such embryos into a surrogate uterus. That month Japan’s education and science ministry issued new guidelines allowing the creation of human-animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term. Nakauchi’s experiments are the first to be approved under Japan’s new rules, by a committee of experts in the science ministry. Final approval from the ministry is expected next month.

Submission + - Nearly 1 Million Californians Registered to Vote Are Ineligible (theepochtimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa) stated in a release on July 8 (pdf) that if voter problems are not promptly addressed by state officials, fraudulent election activities may continue to haunt the state.

Using the state’s own data on active and inactive status registrants, the organization found that eight counties have not cleaned up their inactive registrant lists, despite a 2018 legal settlement that requires California counties to properly maintain their voter rolls and remove inactive voters according to federal law.

Submission + - Finnish Paper: Most Climate Science Models Overestimate Human Climate Impact (arxiv.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A paper out of Finnland and verified in Japan has found nearly all models being used to study climate change grossly overestimate human impact by discounting the profound influence of cloudcover. Or per their conclusion:

We have proven that the GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 cannot compute correctly the natural component included in the observed global temperature. The reason is that the models fail to derive the influences of low cloud cover fraction on the global temperature. A too small natural component results in a too large portion for the contribution of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. That is why IPCC represents the climate sensitivity more than one order of magnitude larger than our sensitivity 0.24C. Because the anthropogenic portion in the increased CO 2 is less than 10 %, we have practically no anthropogenic climate change. The low clouds control mainly the global temperature.

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