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Submission + - Facebook allows flat-Earthers to censor a space history book (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A photographer trying to raise money for a self-published book of historical space artifacts had his Facebook ads repeatedly removed by Facebook because flat-Earthers and Moon hoax conspiracy theorists were offended.

About 24 hours after the ads were approved, he got a notification telling him the ad had been removed. He resubmitted it. It was accepted — and then removed again — 15 or 20 times, he said. The explanation given: He had run “misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback.”

He understood that it was Facebook’s algorithm that rejected the ads, not a person. Getting additional answers proved difficult, a common complaint with advertising on Facebook. The best clues he could find came in the comments under the ads, which he and his colleagues captured in screenshots before they were removed and in responses to other posts about the project: There were phrases such as “The original moon landing was faking” and “It’s all a show,” along with memes mocking space technology. Some comments were hard to gauge, with users insisting that the earth was flat but that they’d buy the book anyway.

To fix the problem he had to hire an outside expert who knew how to get to a human being at Facebook, proving once again that Facebook is a very unethical and corrupt company. It should not have been so hard for Redgrove to get his problem fixed.

Submission + - Man Sued For Using Bogus YouTube Takedowns To Get Address For Swatting (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: YouTube is suing a Nebraska man the company says has blatantly abused its copyright takedown process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers online platforms like YouTube legal protections if they promptly take down content flagged by copyright holders. However, this process can be abused—and boy did defendant Christopher L. Brady abuse it, according to YouTube's legal complaint (pdf). Brady allegedly made fraudulent takedown notices against YouTube videos from at least three well-known Minecraft streamers. In one case, Brady made two false claims against a YouTuber and then sent the user an anonymous message demanding a payment of $150 by PayPal—or $75 in bitcoin.

"If you decide not to pay us, we will file a 3rd strike," the message said. When a YouTube user receives a third copyright strike, the YouTuber's account gets terminated. A second target was ordered to pay $300 by PayPal or $200 in Bitcoin to avoid a third fraudulent copyright strike. A third incident was arguably even more egregious. According to YouTube, Brady filed several fraudulent copyright notices against another YouTuber with whom he was "engaged in some sort of online dispute." The YouTuber responded with a formal counter-notice stating that the content wasn't infringing—a move that allows the content to be reinstated. However, the law requires the person filing the counter-notice to provide his or her real-world name and address—information that's passed along to the person who filed the takedown request. This contact information is supposed to enable a legitimate copyright holder to file an infringement lawsuit in court.
Businesses

Wells Fargo's Computer Kept Charging 'Overdrawn' Fees On Supposedly Closed Accounts (startribune.com) 129

Posted by EditorDavid from the continuing-relationships dept.
The New York Times explains a new issue by describing what happened when Xavier Einaudi tried to close his Wells Fargo checking account. For weeks after the date the bank said the accounts would be closed, it kept some of them active. Payments to his insurer, to Google for online advertising and to a provider of project management software were paid out of the empty accounts in July. Each time, the bank charged Einaudi a $35 overdraft fee... By the middle of July, he owed the bank nearly $1,500. "I don't even know what happened," he said.

Current and former bank employees said Einaudi was charged because of the way Wells Fargo's computer system handles closed accounts: An account the customer believes to be closed can stay open if it has a balance, even one below zero. And each time a transaction is processed for an overdrawn account, Wells Fargo tacks on a fee. The problem has gone unaddressed by the bank despite complaints from customers and employees, including one in the bank's debt-collection department who grew concerned after taking in an estimated $100,000 in overdraft fees over eight months...

Most banks program their systems to stop honoring transactions on the specified date, but Wells Fargo allows accounts to remain open for two more months, according to current and former employees. Customers usually learn what happened only after their overdrawn accounts are sent to Wells Fargo's collections department. If the customers do not pay the overdraft fees, they are reported to a national database like Early Warning Services, which compiles names of delinquent bank customers. That often means a customer cannot open a new bank account anywhere, and getting removed from the lists can take hours' worth of phone calls.
Businesses

Tech Companies Challenge 'Open Office' Trend With Pods (nbcnewyork.com) 112

Posted by EditorDavid from the private-box dept.
Open floor plans create "a minefield of distractions," writes CNBC. But now they're being countered by a new trend that one office interior company's owner says "started with tech companies and the need for privacy."

They're called "office pods..." They provide a quiet space for employees to conduct important phone calls, focus on their work or take a quick break. "We are seeing a large trend, a shift to having independent, self-contained enclosures," said Caitlin Turner, a designer at the global design and urban planning firm HoK. She said the growing demand for pods is a direct result of employees expressing their need for privacy...

Prices can range anywhere from $3,495 for a single-user pod from ROOM to $15,995 for an executive suite from ZenBooth. Pod manufacturers are expanding rapidly. In addition to Zenbooth and ROOM, there are TalkBox, PoppinPod, Spaceworx and Framery. Pod sizes also vary to include individual booths designed for a single user, medium-sized pods for small gatherings of two to three people and larger executive spaces that could host up to four to six people.

Sam Johnson, the founder of Zenbooth, said the idea for pods came from his experience working in the tech industry, where he quickly became disillusioned by the open floor plan. It was an "unsolved problem" that prompted him to quit his job and found ZenBooth, a pod company based in the Bay Area, in 2016. He said the company is a "privacy solutions provider" that offers "psychological safety" via a peaceful space to work and think. "We've had customers say to us that we literally couldn't do our job without your product," Johnson said.

The company now counts Samsung, Intel, Capital One and Pandora, among others, as clients, as it works in tech hubs including Boston, the Bay Area, New York and Seattle. Its biggest customer, Lyft, has 35 to 40 booths at its facilities.
"In 2014, 70% of companies had an open floor plan, according to the International Facility Management Association," the article points out -- though one Queensland University of Technology study found 90% of employees in open floor plan offices actually experienced more stress and conflict, along with higher blood pressure and increased turnover.
United States

A New Species of Leech Is Discovered Near Washington, D.C. (smithsonianmag.com) 80

Posted by BeauHD from the lost-and-found dept.
schwit1 shares a report from Smithsonian: In the summer of 2015, when Smithsonian research zoologist Anna Phillips and other scientists were standing in slow-moving swamp water, letting leeches latch onto their bare legs or gathering them up in nets from muddy pond bottoms, they didn't realize that some of the bloodsuckers they'd collected belonged to an entirely new species. But in a just-published paper in the Journal of Parasitology, Phillips and her colleagues from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Royal Ontario Museum report that a previously unknown leech species, Macrobdella mimicus, is the first to be discovered on the continent in more than 40 years.

Parasitologists typically rely on the arrangement of pores on the bottom of leeches' bodies to help distinguish species. With a close inspection, the researchers noticed a subtle difference in the spacing of the leeches' accessory pores. (While leeches are hermaphrodites, they mate with other leeches, and accessory pores secrete mucus that allows the mating leeches to stick together.) M. decora had four accessory pores grouped in two rows of two, just like the outlier group, but the new species had a set of pores located several millimeters farther back on their body. The similar pore pattern, however, led Phillips and the other scientists to name the new species Macrobdella mimicus, after the Greek word for "imitator" or "actor." The new species is olive-green with orange spots, about as long as a cigarette and as wide as two. It has three jaws, each containing 56 to 59 teeth (fewer than M. decora), which it can use to bite and siphon blood from humans. Leeches like this species can suck two to five times their body weight in blood thanks to expandable pockets in their intestines, explains Phillips.

Comment Perfect place to start (Score 1) 102

This shouldn't be a surprise. It's out in the middle of nowhere, weather is consistent, and traveling the same roads between transit points. This is, literally, self-driving t-ball.

Everyone thinks self-driving vehicles have to be better than humans in every circumstance that can arise on the road. The next surprise will be trucks making this trip remotely monitored rather than having a safety spotter in the cab. Or one spotter at the lead of a convoy.

This is really bad news for truck drivers.
Iphone

Apple Is Locking Batteries To Specific iPhones, a Nightmare for DIY Repair (vice.com) 281

Posted by msmash from the my-way-or-highway dept.
A longtime nightmare scenario for independent iPhone repair companies has come true: Apple has tied batteries to specific iPhones, meaning that only it has the ability to perform an authorized battery replacement on the newest versions of iPhones, two independent experiments have found. From a report: Battery replacements are among the most common repairs done by Apple and by independent repair companies. This is because lithium ion batteries eventually lose their ability to hold a charge, which will eventually make the phone unusable. Replacing the battery greatly extends the life of the phone: Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged earlier this year that battery replacements are resulting in fewer people buying new iPhones, which has affected Apple's bottom line. It's concerning on many levels, then, that on the iPhone XS, XS Plus, and XR, that any battery swap not performed by Apple will result in the phone's settings saying that the new battery needs "Service." An iPhone will still turn on and function with an aftermarket battery, but several important features are unavailable, and the iPhone warns users that they should seek service, presumably from an Apple Store.
Facebook

Facebook Insists No Security 'Backdoor' Is Planned for WhatsApp (medium.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the fwiw dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Billions of people use the messaging tool WhatsApp, which added end-to-end encryption for every form of communication available on its platform back in 2016. This ensures that conversations between users and their contacts -- whether they occur via text or voice calls -- are private, inaccessible even to the company itself. But several recent posts published to Forbes' blogging platform call WhatsApp's future security into question. The posts, which were written by contributor Kalev Leetaru, allege that Facebook, WhatsApp's parent company, plans to detect abuse by implementing a feature to scan messages directly on people's phones before they are encrypted. The posts gained significant attention: A blog post by technologist Bruce Schneier rehashing one of the Forbes posts has the headline "Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp." It is a claim Facebook unequivocally denies.

"We haven't added a backdoor to WhatsApp," Will Cathcart, WhatsApp's vice president of product management, wrote in a statement. "To be crystal clear, we have not done this, have zero plans to do so, and if we ever did, it would be quite obvious and detectable that we had done it. We understand the serious concerns this type of approach would raise, which is why we are opposed to it."
UPDATE: Later Friday technologist Bruce Schneier wrote that after reviewing responses from WhatsApp, he's concluded that reports of a pre-encryption backdoor are a false alarm. He also says he got an equally strong confirmation from WhatsApp's Privacy Policy Manager Nate Cardozo, who Facebook hired last December from EFF. "He basically leveraged his historical reputation to assure me that WhatsApp, and Facebook in general, would never do something like this."

Comment We the unwilling (Score 1) 196

The poll shows that consumers are willing to pay much more for their cable TV package than they are for streaming,

I take issue with the word "willing" in that sentence. Consumers don't have any real competition in that space. I'm willing to bet that if you gave people the option to get local channels over the air, there would be many more unwilling to pay for a cable TV package.
The Internet

Ajit Pai's New Gift To Cable Companies Would Kill Local Fees and Rules (arstechnica.com) 96

Posted by BeauHD from the Christmas-in-July dept.
Ajit Pai is proposing a plan that would stop cities and towns from using their authority over cable TV networks to regulate internet access. His proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 1st, "would also limit the fees that municipalities can charge cable companies," reports Ars Technica. "Cable industry lobbyists have urged the FCC to stop cities and towns from assessing fees on the revenue cable companies make from broadband." From the report: If approved, Pai's proposal would "Prohibit LFAs [local franchising authorities] from using their video franchising authority to regulate most non-cable services, including broadband Internet service, offered over cable systems by incumbent cable operators." Pai's proposal complains that "some states and localities are purporting to assert authority" to collect fees and impose requirements that aren't explicitly allowed by Title VI, the cable-regulation section that Congress added to communications law with the Cable Act of 1984.

Despite the Oregon Supreme Court ruling against Comcast, Pai's plan says "the majority of courts... have interpreted section 622(b) to prohibit states and localities from charging fees that exceed those expressly permitted by Title VI." Section 622 prevents local authorities from collecting more than 5 percent of a cable operator's gross revenue in any 12-month period. Pai's proposal also declares that "in-kind" contributions required by local franchising authorities must count toward that 5 percent cap, "with limited exceptions, including an exemption for certain capital costs related to public, educational, and governmental access (PEG) channels." But does the FCC have the power to preempt these local fees and requirements? "Having classified broadband as an information service (as part of its repeal of net neutrality rules), the Commission has determined that it is an unregulated service that it lacks regulatory authority over," consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge wrote in a November 2018 filing that urged the FCC to drop the plan. The FCC cannot regulate or preempt local regulation of "any service that does not fall within its Title II jurisdiction over common carrier services or its Title I jurisdiction over matters 'incidental' to communication by wire," the group said.
Music

Spotify Shuts Down Direct Music Uploading For Independent Artists (altpress.com) 136

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
In a blog post on Monday, Spotify announced that it will prohibit individual musicians from directly uploading their songs to the streaming service. The new move requires a third party to be involved in the business of uploads. From a report: The company announced the change on Monday, saying it will close the beta program and stop accepting direct uploads by the end of July. "The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community," Spotify said in a statement on its blog. "Over the past year, we've vastly improved our work with distribution partners to ensure metadata quality, protect artists from infringement, provide their users with instant access to Spotify for Artists, and more."

"The best way for us to serve artists and labels is to focus our resources on developing tools in areas where Spotify can uniquely benefit them -- like Spotify for Artists (which more than 300,000 creators use to gain new insight into their audience) and our playlist submission tool (which more than 36,000 artists have used to get playlisted for the very first time since it launched a year ago). We have a lot more planned here in the coming months," the post continued.

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