Comment Re:Spot on (Score 1) 98
Nitter is a free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance.
https://nitter.net/about
Comment Re:Not exactly (Score 1) 224
Then, when you scan it, and it's expired, (assuming they don't adjust the date down OR up on the QR coode), you get to throw the rest away.
The cloud-linked scanning app will use your GPS location to suggest nearby partner stores where you can buy some fresh milk. Act now for a special offer, save even more when you sign up for a milk subscription. Well select the right plan for you based on how much milk you have used over the last 3 months. Hurry to the store for a limited time offer on the brand of salad dressing that the camera picked up in the last 4 scans. Based on the other barcodes we have seen, we think you'll love these other offers from our selected partners.
Comment Re:Nature of his problems... (Score 1) 106
Is it out of warranty? If so, I think the dealer has every right to tell a problem customer to get lost. He still had options...he just didn't like them.
Did he? I highly doubt that JD turns off all their DRM when the warranty expires. With the software locks in place, all being out of the warranty period means is that the farmer now pays the authorized dealer whatever price the dealer chooses, instead of JD paying a reduced price.
Comment What's the problem? (Score 1) 39
I don't know why France is complaining. The Pegasus software is only sold to governments on the condition that they will only be surveilling targets of "national security interest". The political plans and strategies of the president of France is unquestionably of national security interest to Morocco.
That's what is so convenient about "national security interest". It can be anything that helps to keep the current administration running, especially if the current administration gets to define what what will keep it running. And no, we don't need to publicly justify how those conclusions were reached since that would jeopardize national security. This sound bad, but we have legal opinions that say it's entirely fine that we don't have to inform the public. Those opinions? Sorry those are classified, you know, national security.
Comment Re:This will not end well (Score 1) 103
Only if Jack Dorsey actually registered the copyright and transferred it's ownership to the person that bought the NFT. An entirely separate step that has nothing to do with the crypto side of things. Anyone buying these "Moments" has no ownership whatsoever in the underlying intellectual property. You can own a physical baseball card and still own nothing about the picture or the text that was printed on it. The most you can do is sell your one copy under the 'first sale' doctrine. With this NBA scam you might have some restriction on that too, based on whatever TOS is required to go through their sales portal. And it it's anything like a trading exchange, you don't even have the keys to the NFT so they can do whatever they want, including shutting down the server in a year after the early insiders have all sold off.
Richard Stallman Discusses Privacy Risks of Bitcoin, Suggests 'Something Much Better' (cointelegraph.com) 168
Richard Stallman gave a new interview to the site Cointelegraph, which asked him his feelings about cryptocurrencies. "I'm not against them," Stallman answers "I'm not campaigning to eliminate them, I just don't particularly want to use them."
Cointelegraph then asks Stallman how he feels about tests underway for the Chinese government's own central bank digital currency: Richard Stallman: "Digital payment systems are fundamentally dangerous if they are not engineered to ensure privacy. China is the enemy of privacy. China shows what totalitarian surveillance is like. I consider that hell on earth. That's part of why I haven't used cryptocurrencies that are issued by the community. If the cryptocurrency is issued by a government, it would surveille people just the way credit cards do and PayPal does, and all those other systems meaning completely unacceptable."
Stallman later says "I don't do any kind of digital payments, and the reason is the systems that exist do not respect the user's privacy, and that includes Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin transaction is published." But when Cointelegraph asks about various Bitcoin modifications designed for privacy, Stallman answers "I am not convinced about them." Richard Stallman: In any case, the GNU project has developed something much better, which is GNU Taler. GNU Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It is not a currency at all. It is a payment system designed to be used for anonymous payments to businesses to buy something. It is anonymous through a blind signature for the payer. However, the payee has to identify itself for every purchase in order to get money out of the system. So the idea is you can use your bank account to get Taler Tokens, and you can spend them and the payee won't be able to tell who you are.
It won't be able to tell that you got the token from a particular bank account at a particular time, even though you did so. To convert your payment into money in its own bank, the store (the payee) will have to identify itself. So this gives privacy in a much more reliable way than cryptocurrencies do, and it blocks the idea of using this system to enable tax evasion.
GNU Taler recently had an exciting milestone. A few months ago the eurozone banking system became interested in supporting Taler payments, and just recently they succeeded using a test setup in obtaining Taler tokens with one bank account and paying them to another bank account through the Taler system. Now, it's not something that anybody can use but it will be, and that will be really exciting.
And in response to a question about Facebook's "Libra" digital currency project, Stallman says he hasn't study the details "because the most important thing about it I already know. It's connected with Facebook, and Facebook means surveillance.
"I urge people to join me in absolutely refusing to use Facebook or rather be used by Facebook. Because Facebook doesn't have users. Facebook has used. So don't be a sucker, don't be used by Facebook."
Cointelegraph then asks Stallman how he feels about tests underway for the Chinese government's own central bank digital currency: Richard Stallman: "Digital payment systems are fundamentally dangerous if they are not engineered to ensure privacy. China is the enemy of privacy. China shows what totalitarian surveillance is like. I consider that hell on earth. That's part of why I haven't used cryptocurrencies that are issued by the community. If the cryptocurrency is issued by a government, it would surveille people just the way credit cards do and PayPal does, and all those other systems meaning completely unacceptable."
Stallman later says "I don't do any kind of digital payments, and the reason is the systems that exist do not respect the user's privacy, and that includes Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin transaction is published." But when Cointelegraph asks about various Bitcoin modifications designed for privacy, Stallman answers "I am not convinced about them." Richard Stallman: In any case, the GNU project has developed something much better, which is GNU Taler. GNU Taler is not a cryptocurrency. It is not a currency at all. It is a payment system designed to be used for anonymous payments to businesses to buy something. It is anonymous through a blind signature for the payer. However, the payee has to identify itself for every purchase in order to get money out of the system. So the idea is you can use your bank account to get Taler Tokens, and you can spend them and the payee won't be able to tell who you are.
It won't be able to tell that you got the token from a particular bank account at a particular time, even though you did so. To convert your payment into money in its own bank, the store (the payee) will have to identify itself. So this gives privacy in a much more reliable way than cryptocurrencies do, and it blocks the idea of using this system to enable tax evasion.
GNU Taler recently had an exciting milestone. A few months ago the eurozone banking system became interested in supporting Taler payments, and just recently they succeeded using a test setup in obtaining Taler tokens with one bank account and paying them to another bank account through the Taler system. Now, it's not something that anybody can use but it will be, and that will be really exciting.
And in response to a question about Facebook's "Libra" digital currency project, Stallman says he hasn't study the details "because the most important thing about it I already know. It's connected with Facebook, and Facebook means surveillance.
"I urge people to join me in absolutely refusing to use Facebook or rather be used by Facebook. Because Facebook doesn't have users. Facebook has used. So don't be a sucker, don't be used by Facebook."
Nvidia in Advanced Talks To Buy Chip Giant Arm (bloomberg.com) 66
Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Arm, the chip designer that SoftBank Group bought for $32 billion four years ago, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The two parties aim to reach a deal in the next few weeks, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Nvidia is the only suitor in concrete discussions with SoftBank, according to the people. A deal for Arm could be the largest ever in the semiconductor industry, which has been consolidating in recent years as companies seek to diversify and add scale. Cambridge, England-based Arm's technology underpins chips in products including Apple Inc. devices and connected appliances. Financial Times, which has also independently reported about the deal talks today, adds: Buying Arm would further consolidate Nvidia's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry, at just the moment when the British chip designer's technology is finding broader applications beyond mobile devices, in data centres and personal computers including Apple's Macs. Arm would transform Nvidia's product line-up, which until now has largely focused on the high end of the chips market. Its powerful graphics processors -- which are designed to handle focused, data-intensive tasks -- are typically sold to PC gamers, scientific researchers and developers of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, as well as cryptocurrency miners. The deal could alarm Arm's other big licensees, including Apple, Broadcom and Qualcomm, which may fear a unique asset being taken over by a potential competitor such as Nvidia.
A sale would mark a stunning reversal for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who declared that Arm would be the linchpin for the future of the technology investment conglomerate. The company has failed to thrive under SoftBank, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud, noted that Arm's annual revenues had risen from $1.2bn to $1.9bn since SoftBank bought it in 2016, while Nvidia's have roughly tripled in the same timeframe.
A sale would mark a stunning reversal for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who declared that Arm would be the linchpin for the future of the technology investment conglomerate. The company has failed to thrive under SoftBank, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud, noted that Arm's annual revenues had risen from $1.2bn to $1.9bn since SoftBank bought it in 2016, while Nvidia's have roughly tripled in the same timeframe.
The Gig Economy Is Failing. Say Hello to the Hustle Economy. (medium.com) 109
An anonymous reader shares a report: "We have nothing to sell besides physical touch." The thought jarred Amber Briggle awake some nights. It kept her from eating in the first week of the Covid-19 shutdown when she lost six pounds fretting over the sudden collapse of the business she'd built up her "entire adult life." For seven years, Briggle has owned a massage studio called Soma in Denton, Texas. She grew the operation from a pop-up in her house to a mini-empire with a wall of local "best of" awards. But when Texas Governor Greg Abbott closed businesses statewide on March 21, Briggle realized in an instant it could all be over. Her bills totaled more than $3,000 per month, and it wasn't as if she could give massages from home. "I had nothing, literally nothing," Briggle said. "And this is my life's work. I spent the entire first week crying. What else could I do about it?" Then, in the second week of the shutdown, during a pro-bono consultation with a local business advisor, she was asked if she'd ever considered a Patreon.
As the consultant explained, the digital-subscription platform -- once home mainly to YouTubers and podcast hosts -- had also become an ad hoc safety net for thousands of teachers, cashiers, line cooks, and hairstylists who lost work with the onset of stay-at-home orders. It wasn't just Patreon, either, which added more than 100,000 new users between mid-March and July. OnlyFans reported daily six-figure sign-ups on its popular cam site. Etsy logged 115,000 new sellers in the first three months of the year, more than double the past two years' user growth. Teachable, which lets people make and sell online courses, signed on 14,000 new creators between March and July, and in July reported its first quarterly revenue over $10 million.
As the consultant explained, the digital-subscription platform -- once home mainly to YouTubers and podcast hosts -- had also become an ad hoc safety net for thousands of teachers, cashiers, line cooks, and hairstylists who lost work with the onset of stay-at-home orders. It wasn't just Patreon, either, which added more than 100,000 new users between mid-March and July. OnlyFans reported daily six-figure sign-ups on its popular cam site. Etsy logged 115,000 new sellers in the first three months of the year, more than double the past two years' user growth. Teachable, which lets people make and sell online courses, signed on 14,000 new creators between March and July, and in July reported its first quarterly revenue over $10 million.
GOP Congressman Turns Antitrust Hearing Into Personal Tech Support Session (vice.com) 136
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: We all have trouble with our email sometimes. We don't typically get to harangue the CEO of Google about why, say, Dad's Gmail is acting up, though. You have to be a member of Congress to pull that. Rep. Greg Steube, Republican from Florida, went there during Wednesday's high-profile congressional hearing about tech giants' market dominance and anti-competitive behavior. Handed the chance to throw any question at some of the most powerful people in the world, Steube pressed Google CEO Sundar Pichai to troubleshoot his parents' recent email issues. Specifically, they weren't getting his campaign emails, which Steube seemed to think was because of an anti-conservative bias among Silicon Valley titans. Pichai responded by implying that Steube and his dad don't understand how Gmail tabs work.
"Suddenly, I get elected to Congress, and I'm now up here in Washington, D.C., and my parents, who have a Gmail account, aren't getting my campaign emails," Steube said. "Why is this only happening to Republicans?" Pichai responded by talking about how Gmail automatically sorts emails by their source, breaking out messages from personal contacts into a folder separate from those sent by self-promoting groups like a congressional campaign. "We have a tabbed organization," Pichai said, veering into tech-support mode. "The primary tab has emails from friends and family, and the secondary tab has other notifications, and so on." Steube interrupted to point out that it was his dad who complained that the campaign emails weren't showing up. And that meant Pichai's statement that the Primary tab should feature all emails from family members didn't make any sense to him. "Clearly, that familial thing that you're talking about didn't apply to my emails," Steube said, glossing over the fact that the emails were coming from his campaign, not from his personal account. "Our systems, probably, are not able to understand that it's your father," Pichai deadpanned.
"Suddenly, I get elected to Congress, and I'm now up here in Washington, D.C., and my parents, who have a Gmail account, aren't getting my campaign emails," Steube said. "Why is this only happening to Republicans?" Pichai responded by talking about how Gmail automatically sorts emails by their source, breaking out messages from personal contacts into a folder separate from those sent by self-promoting groups like a congressional campaign. "We have a tabbed organization," Pichai said, veering into tech-support mode. "The primary tab has emails from friends and family, and the secondary tab has other notifications, and so on." Steube interrupted to point out that it was his dad who complained that the campaign emails weren't showing up. And that meant Pichai's statement that the Primary tab should feature all emails from family members didn't make any sense to him. "Clearly, that familial thing that you're talking about didn't apply to my emails," Steube said, glossing over the fact that the emails were coming from his campaign, not from his personal account. "Our systems, probably, are not able to understand that it's your father," Pichai deadpanned.
Hong Kong Government Tells Schools To Remove Books Breaching Security Law (nst.com.my) 108
Hong Kong's government on Monday ordered schools to review and remove any books that might breach a sweeping new security law that Beijing imposed last week on the restless city. From a report: "In accordance with the four types of offences clearly stipulated in the law, the school management and teachers should review teaching and learning materials in a timely manner, including books," the Education Bureau said. "If they find outdated content or content that may concern the four aforementioned offences, they should remove them," the bureau added. Last week China enacted a security law outlawing four national security crimes: subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces. Authorities promptly declared political views espousing independence or self-autonomy would be viewed as illegal under the new law.
Rights groups and legal analysts have warned the broad wording of the law, which was kept secret until it was passed, would have a chilling effect of political freedoms in the semi-autonomous hub. The order for schools to review and remove any contraband books comes two days after Hong Kong's libraries said they were also pulling titles deemed to breach the law for a review. Among those withdrawn from shelves was one by prominent activist Joshua Wong, another by pro-democracy lawmaker Tanya Chan and multiple other titles written by Chin Wan, a scholar who is seen as the godfather of a "localist" movement advocating greater self-determination for the city. Hong Kong has some of Asia's best universities and a campus culture where topics that would be taboo on the mainland are still discussed and written about.
Rights groups and legal analysts have warned the broad wording of the law, which was kept secret until it was passed, would have a chilling effect of political freedoms in the semi-autonomous hub. The order for schools to review and remove any contraband books comes two days after Hong Kong's libraries said they were also pulling titles deemed to breach the law for a review. Among those withdrawn from shelves was one by prominent activist Joshua Wong, another by pro-democracy lawmaker Tanya Chan and multiple other titles written by Chin Wan, a scholar who is seen as the godfather of a "localist" movement advocating greater self-determination for the city. Hong Kong has some of Asia's best universities and a campus culture where topics that would be taboo on the mainland are still discussed and written about.
Construction Begins On World's Biggest Liquid Air Battery (theguardian.com) 117
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Construction is beginning on the world's largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid. The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. The Highview battery will store 250MWh of energy, almost double the amount stored by the biggest chemical battery, built by Tesla in South Australia. The new project is sited at the Trafford Energy Park, also home to the Carrington gas-powered energy plant and a closed coal power station. The plant's lifetime is expected to be 30-40 years.
GitHub, Android, Python, Go: More Software Adopts Race-Neutral Terminology (zdnet.com) 413
"The terms 'allowlist' and 'blocklist' describe their purpose, while the other words use metaphors to describe their purpose," reads a change description on the source code for Android -- from over a year ago. 9to5Mac calls it "a shortened version of Google's (internal-only) explanation" for terminology changes which are now becoming more widespread.
And Thursday GitHub's CEO said they were also "already working on" renaming the default branches of code from "master" to a more neutral term like "main," reports ZDNet: GitHub lending its backing to this movement effectively ensures the term will be removed across millions of projects, and effectively legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that started this month.
But, in reality, these efforts started years ago, in 2014, when the Drupal project first moved in to replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica." Drupal's move was followed by the Python programming language, Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems... The PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements. Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries.
A recent change description for the Go programming language says "There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate." It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.
Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost.
That change was merged on June 9th -- but 9to5Mac reports it's just one of many places these changes are happening. "The Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.' Google's Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.'" And ZDNet reports more open source projects are working on changing the name of their default Git repo from "master" to alternatives like main, default, primary, root, or another, including the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.
And Thursday GitHub's CEO said they were also "already working on" renaming the default branches of code from "master" to a more neutral term like "main," reports ZDNet: GitHub lending its backing to this movement effectively ensures the term will be removed across millions of projects, and effectively legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that started this month.
But, in reality, these efforts started years ago, in 2014, when the Drupal project first moved in to replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica." Drupal's move was followed by the Python programming language, Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems... The PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements. Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries.
A recent change description for the Go programming language says "There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate." It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.
Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost.
That change was merged on June 9th -- but 9to5Mac reports it's just one of many places these changes are happening. "The Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.' Google's Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.'" And ZDNet reports more open source projects are working on changing the name of their default Git repo from "master" to alternatives like main, default, primary, root, or another, including the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.
The 50 Years of Crowd Control Research Police Are Ignoring (fivethirtyeight.com) 524
Thelasko shares an excerpt from FiveThirtyEight: Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave -- and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force -- wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters -- it doesn't work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?
There's 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force -- using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want -- those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate "abrasive policing tactics" and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police. Experts say the following decades of research have turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.
Anne Nassauer, a professor of sociology at Freie Universitat in Berlin, has studied how the Berlin Police Department handles protests and soccer matches. She found that one key element is transparent communication -- something Nassauer said helps increase trust and diffuse potentially tense moments. The Berlin police employs people specifically to make announcements in these situations, using different speakers, with local accents or different languages, for things like information about what police are doing, and another speaker for commands. Either way, the messages are delivered in a calm, measured voice. Communication is also a cornerstone of what police know as "the Madison Model," created by former Madison, Wisconsin, chief of police David Couper. His strategy for dealing with protesters was to send officers out to talk with demonstrators, engage, ask them why protests are made, listen to their concerns and, above all, empathize. The report notes that many police departments in the U.S. did try different strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, but they ultimately ended up responding with force anyway.
"The 'negotiated management' model of protest policing called for officers to meet with protesters in advance to plan events together to specify the times, locations and activities that would happen, even when that included mass arrests," reports FiveThirtyEight. "But the era of negotiated management basically fell apart after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters blocked streets, broke windows and successfully shut down the WTO meeting and stalled trade talks. When protesters violated the negotiated terms, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and took away the wrong lessons, [said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University]. 'What a lot of people took from that in policing is, we can't trust these people. We need to be smarter and overwhelm them to nip these things in the bud," he said. 'We sort of went backwards.'"
There's 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force -- using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want -- those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate "abrasive policing tactics" and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police. Experts say the following decades of research have turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.
Anne Nassauer, a professor of sociology at Freie Universitat in Berlin, has studied how the Berlin Police Department handles protests and soccer matches. She found that one key element is transparent communication -- something Nassauer said helps increase trust and diffuse potentially tense moments. The Berlin police employs people specifically to make announcements in these situations, using different speakers, with local accents or different languages, for things like information about what police are doing, and another speaker for commands. Either way, the messages are delivered in a calm, measured voice. Communication is also a cornerstone of what police know as "the Madison Model," created by former Madison, Wisconsin, chief of police David Couper. His strategy for dealing with protesters was to send officers out to talk with demonstrators, engage, ask them why protests are made, listen to their concerns and, above all, empathize. The report notes that many police departments in the U.S. did try different strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, but they ultimately ended up responding with force anyway.
"The 'negotiated management' model of protest policing called for officers to meet with protesters in advance to plan events together to specify the times, locations and activities that would happen, even when that included mass arrests," reports FiveThirtyEight. "But the era of negotiated management basically fell apart after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters blocked streets, broke windows and successfully shut down the WTO meeting and stalled trade talks. When protesters violated the negotiated terms, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and took away the wrong lessons, [said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University]. 'What a lot of people took from that in policing is, we can't trust these people. We need to be smarter and overwhelm them to nip these things in the bud," he said. 'We sort of went backwards.'"
ESRB Introduces a New Label To Indicate That a Game Has Loot Boxes (theverge.com) 67
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), which is the organization that rates the content of video games, announced a new label today to indicate that a game will offer in-game purchases of loot boxes or similar types of items that provide a player with randomized rewards. The Verge reports: "This new Interactive Element, In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items), will be assigned to any game that contains in-game offers to purchase digital goods or premiums with real world currency (or with virtual coins or other forms of in-game currency that can be purchased with real world currency) for which the player doesn't know prior to purchase the specific digital goods or premiums they will be receiving (e.g., loot boxes, item packs, mystery awards)," according to the ESRB. The label will be applied to "loot boxes, gacha games, item or card packs, prize wheels, treasure chests, and more," the organization said.
The new label will sit below the game's content rating, as seen in the photo above. The ESRB originally introduced the "in-game purchases" label in February 2018, but that label was broad enough that it could be applied to any game that offered any sort of buyable digital good, including non-randomized items like subscriptions, season passes, or upgrades to disable ads.
The new label will sit below the game's content rating, as seen in the photo above. The ESRB originally introduced the "in-game purchases" label in February 2018, but that label was broad enough that it could be applied to any game that offered any sort of buyable digital good, including non-randomized items like subscriptions, season passes, or upgrades to disable ads.
Medical Company Threatens To Sue Volunteers That 3D-Printed Valves for Life-Saving Coronavirus Treatments (theverge.com) 367
A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. From a report: The valve typically costs about $11,000 from the medical device manufacturer, but the volunteers were able to print replicas for about $1. A hospital in Italy was in need of the valves after running out while treating patients for COVID-19. The hospital's usual supplier said they could not make the valves in time to treat the patients. That launched a search for a way to 3D print a replica part, and Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Ramaioli, who work at Italian startup Isinnova, offered their company's printer for the job. However, when the pair asked the manufacturer of the valves for blueprints they could use to print replicas, the company declined and threatened to sue for patent infringement. Fracassi and Ramaioli moved ahead anyway by measuring the valves and 3D printing three different versions of them.
