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Submission + - Spouse of Ring Exec Among Lawmakers Trying To Weaken California Privacy Law (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The California legislature worked through the summer to finalize the text of the state's landmark data privacy law before time to make amendments ran out on Friday. In the Assembly (California's lower house), Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin has been a key voice and vote backing motions that would weaken the law, and a new report says her reasoning may be very, very close to home. A review of state ethics documents conducted by Politico found that Ms. Irwin is married to Jon Irwin, the chief operating officer of Amazon's controversial Ring home surveillance business. That company stands to benefit if the California law is weakened in certain key ways before it can take effect.

One proposal put forth by Assemblywoman Irwin would expand what kind of data would be exempt from CCPA provisions, and this drew the ire of consumer protection groups, Politico reports. Irwin also initially proposed striking out "a provision requiring companies to disclose or delete data associated with 'households' upon request," a regulation that will likely affect companies like Ring. She also voted against an amendment that would have required smart speaker systems, like Amazon's Alexa or Google Home, to obtain user consent to sell recorded conversations, and "used store security-camera footage as an example of data that would be burdensome and risky for businesses to be required to link to consumers in response to data-deletion requests." Assemblywoman Irwin told Politico she found questions about her spouse to be offensive, given her own personal background as a systems engineer. "My role in the privacy debate in the Legislature is focused on bringing people together and solving the practical issues posed to us as policy makers and is independent of any job or role my husband may have," she said.

Submission + - Apple Takes On EU's Vestager In Record $14 Billion Tax Fight (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple fights the world’s biggest tax case in a quiet courtroom this week, trying to rein in the European Union’s powerful antitrust chief ahead of a potential new crackdown on internet giants. The iPhone maker can tell the EU General Court in Luxembourg that it’s the world’s biggest taxpayer. But that’s not enough for EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager who said in a 2016 ruling that Apple’s tax deals with Ireland allowed the company to pay far less than other businesses. The court must now weigh whether regulators were right to levy a record 13 billion-euro ($14.4 billion) tax bill.

A court ruling, likely to take months, could empower or halt Vestager’s tax probes, which are now centering on fiscal deals done by Amazon.com and Alphabet. She’s also been tasked with coming up with a “fair European tax” by the end of 2020 if global efforts to reform digital taxation don’t make progress. Vestager showed her determination to fight the tax cases to the end by opening new probes into 39 companies’ tax deals with Belgium on Monday. The move addresses criticism by the same court handling the Apple challenge. A February judgment threw out her 2016 order for them to pay back about 800 million euros. At the same time she’s pushing for “fair international tax rules so that digitization doesn’t allow companies to avoid paying their fair share of tax,” according to a speech to German ambassadors last month. She urged them to use “our influence to build an international environment that helps us reach our goals” in talks on a new global agreement to tax technology firms.

Submission + - Alex Wellerstein on NUKEMAP VR

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: It is no exaggeration to claim that, since it first went online in 2012, Alex Wellerstein’s original NUKEMAP tool has enabled millions of people all over the world to fathom the effects of a nuclear explosion. Now, together with fellow collaborators at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Wellerstein is working on a new project that combines the information base of NUKEMAP with the immersive first-person experience of virtual reality (VR). "Our aim is to translate some of the goals and even code of the NUKEMAP project into a virtual reality experience, in order to help people visualize and personalize the effects of a nuclear weapon...If anything, playing with some of these simulations shows that some of our cultural imaginations of nuclear weapons are sort of larger than the realities. The realities are terrible, but they’re not “the whole world goes away with one nuclear weapon going off."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What lightweight alternative to Chrome / Firefox do you use?

Submitted by thegarbz
thegarbz writes: It seems not a day goes by without yet another story reflecting poorly on major browsers. Not uncommon are stories that are mixed with a degree of bloat, either discussing rarely used features or directly criticising memory consumption of major browsers. Unfortunately memory consumption is quite often the result of complete feature implementation of technologies used on the web, including DRM for streaming services and WebRTC. Other times it's the result of security measures, feature creep, or poor coding.

So in 2019 for those of us with slower tablets, what browser do you use as an alternative to the big two? How well does it work with the modern HTML5 internet? Are websites frequently broken does the simplicity of other browsers largely go unnoticed?

Submission + - SPAM: Under Fire for Excluding Boys, Are All-Girls STEM Camps Helpful?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The LA Times recently reported that the U.S. Dept. of Education has opened more than two dozen investigations into universities across the nation that offer female-only scholarships, awards, professional development workshops and even science and engineering camps for middle and high school girls, prompting Forbes contributor Kim Elsesser to question if all-girls STEM camps are even helpful for girls. "Sex discrimination in educational programs is banned under Title IX, a federal law that applies to all schools, both public and private, that receive federal funding," the Times noted. "UC Berkeley, under federal review for running a Girls in Engineering summer camp for middle school students, said the program was open to all genders [UCTV promo for "Berkeley's Girls-Only Engineering Camp"]." Back in 2014, Fortune reported that iD Tech Camps spun off a girls-only chain of tech camps called Alexa Cafe (hosted at UC Berkeley and other universities) at the urging of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki ("the concept was mapped out in the offices of Google") and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. So, is it necessary to separate boys from girls in STEM education programs in the quest for STEM equity? Or is single-sex education, as the ACLU argued, based on junk science and disturbing gender stereotypes?

Submission + - Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system (fastcompany.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Think of it as a digital Stasi. Your neighbor catches you smoking in a non-smoking area, and reports on you with his phone. The state telecom notices you’re spending too much time playing online videogames. Your latest social media post gets too many downvotes. Or maybe someone at work you’re having problems with just makes something up. It could be almost anything, but once your social credit score turns negative, your life can become a living hell, and with no legal recourse. You’ll have to become a conspicuously good little Communist to turn your credit positive again.

Or as the government itself says, “Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful.”

Silicon Valley says: “Hold my soy latte.”

An increasing number of societal “privileges” related to transportation, accommodations, communications, and the rates we pay for services (like insurance) are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services. And Silicon Valley’s rules for being allowed to use their services are getting stricter.

If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy.

In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.

Submission + - Dr Tim Ball Defeats Michael Mann's Climate Lawsuit! (principia-scientific.org) 2

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Supreme Court of British Columbia dismisses Dr Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit versus Canadian skeptic climatologist, Dr Tim Ball. Full legal costs are awarded to Dr Ball, the defendant in the case.

The Canadian court issued it’s final ruling in favor of the Dismissal motion that was filed in May 2019 by Dr Tim Ball’s libel lawyers.

Not only did the court grant Ball’s application for dismissal of the nine-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit, it also took the additional step of awarding full legal costs to Ball. A detailed public statement from the world-renowned skeptical climatologist is expected in due course.

This extraordinary outcome is expected to trigger severe legal repercussions for Dr Mann in the U.S. and may prove fatal to climate science claims that modern temperatures are “unprecedented.”

Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph (shown below).

Submission + - Founder of Overstock.com resigns, admits his role in FBI surveillance (americanthinker.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: In a pair of jaw-dropping interviews yesterday following his resignation from the company that he founded twenty years ago, Patrick Byrne revealed his collaboration with the FBI as an informant, including involvement in surveillance of the presidential campaigns including multiple Republicans and of the Hillary Clinton campaign, too. In both interviews he fingered Peter Strzok as the person responsible for sending the “men in black” from the FBI who visited him, but in the second, he stated that higher ups, whom he would only identify as “X, Y, and Z” – people whose names you would know, directed the program.

Submission + - Executive Order: Unleashing HSAs For Direct Primary Care (townhall.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Treasury, to the extent consistent with law, shall propose regulations to treat expenses related to certain types of arrangements, potentially including direct primary care arrangements and healthcare sharing ministries, as eligible medical expenses under section 213(d) of title 26, United States Code.”

This passage made direct primary care doctors literally jump with excitement. So, what does it mean?

DPC doctors are a little-known category of physicians who have risked their professional careers on a novel, cost-effective, and patient-centered approach to medical care. They’ve cut out the insurance middlemen and put patients back in charge of their care. For a low monthly rate, usually between $39 and $99, patients get all their primary care visits with no copayment or additional charges. DPC physicians usually schedule in 30-minute to one-hour blocks, in contrast to the rushed visits of insurance-based practices. More than half of all medical care occurs within primary care offices, and with the extended time DPC doctors give patients, they can likely treat an even broader array of medical conditions. They even help patients find cheaper prices on medications, labs, and imaging, such as MRIs. Pairing a DPC subscription with catastrophic health insurance provides a much cheaper, and much better, alternative to the bureaucracy of traditional insurance plans.

And since this executive order helps direct primary care doctors, their bold risk is paying off for everyone. The EO will remove a needless obstacle to excellent affordable care, allowing patients to pay DPC doctors with funds they have saved in HSAs.

Submission + - Why the Space Corps needs to use naval rank (thespacereview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Regardless of whether the Senate or the House wins on whether it will be called the Space Force or the Space Corps (hereafter referred to as the Space Corps), the sixth military branch of the armed services will be organized like the US Marine Corps (USMC): it will be the junior partner in a military department that manages two services. Like the USMC in the Department of the Navy, the US Space Corps under the Department of the Air Force will need a strong, proud, and fiercely independent sense of identity if it is to succeed in creating a successful military space culture that the President, Congress, and defense leaders demand. Civilian leadership, whether by Congressional or Presidential action, can perform one last great service to the newly-independent military space culture: direct the Space Corps to adopt naval officer rank immediately upon establishment.

And because “Colonel James T. Kirk” is just wrong

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Suicide among tech workers 1

Submitted by tripleevenfall
tripleevenfall writes: At numerous points during my career in the tech industry, my workplaces have been affected by the suicide of an employee. Usually beginning with the receipt of a vague email that management has been 'saddened' that someone had 'passed away' recently, the truth soon becomes known and the questions begin circulating again. Why does suicide seem to be more common among tech workers? Is it due to lifestyle choices commonly associated with tech workers that lead to isolation? Are the personality types that choose tech work more prone to mental illnesses?

Submission + - Lawsuit claims that Intel Managers discriminate aganst Non-Indians (mercurynews.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Hoseong Ryu’s trouble at Intel started even before he began working there, he claimed in a lawsuit filed this week.

Ryu, 45, applied in 2014 for a software engineering job at Intel, and was interviewed by a three-man panel, according to his lawsuit filed in Northern California U.S. District Court. One interviewer at the Santa Clara semiconductor giant was originally from India, and he had a question for Ryu, the suit claimed.

“I see you are from Korea,” the man allegedly said. “I know a Korean man named Sung Won Bin. Do you happen to know him?”

After the meeting, the man told a fellow interviewer that Intel shouldn’t hire Ryu because he was “Korean, married, and had a child,” and added, “It would be easier to hire a younger, unmarried Indian man,” the suit alleged.

Ryu’s suit claimed that Intel’s system integration team management also favored Indians in granting vacation.

“Most employees who are not Indian or south-Asian receive only two to three weeks of vacation or leave per year. But employees who are originally from India or of Indian descent typically receive additional leave time and sometimes receive as much as five or six weeks of leave per year,” the suit claimed.

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.

Submission + - A New Study Uses Camera Footage To Track the Frequency of Bystander Intervention (citylab.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene. Psychologists dubbed this non-response as the “bystander effect”—a phenomenon which has been replicated in scores of subsequent psychological studies. The “bystander effect” holds that the reason people don’t intervene is because we look to one another. The presence of many bystanders diffuses our own sense of personal responsibility, leading people to essentially do nothing and wait for someone else to jump in.

Past studies have used police reports to estimate the effect, but results ranged from 11 percent to 74 percent of incidents being interventions. Now, widespread surveillance cameras allow for a new method to assess real-life human interactions. A new study published this year in the American Psychologist finds that this well-established bystander effect may largely be a myth. The study uses footage of more than 200 incidents from surveillance cameras in Amsterdam; Cape Town; and Lancaster, England. The study finds that in nine out of 10 incidents, at least one bystander intervened, with an average of 3.8 interveners. There was also no significant difference across the three countries and cities, even though they differ greatly in levels of crime and violence.

Submission + - A Feud Between Japan, South Korea Is Threatening Global Supplies of Memory Chips (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: South Korea has warned that an escalating trade dispute with Japan could hurt the global tech industry. President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that Japan's decision to restrict exports to South Korea of materials used in memory chips are a "blow to the economy" and threaten to disrupt global supplies. Japan announced earlier this month that companies would need a government license to export three materials to South Korea. The materials — fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride — are used to make memory chips and smartphones.

The export controls are a massive headache for South Korean firms Samsung and SK Hynix, who between them control over 63% of the global memory chip market, according to the latest figures from the Korea International Trade Association. South Korean firms sourced 94% of fluorinated polyamides, 92% of photoresists and about 44% of hydrogen fluoride from Japan In the first quarter of this year, data from the association showed. Samsung, the world's biggest seller of smartphones, said in a statement to CNN Business that it was "assessing the current situation and reviewing a number of measures to minimize the impact on our production."

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