Some Facebook employees recently told their managers that they were concerned about answering difficult questions about their workplace from friends and family over the holidays. What if Mom or Dad accused the social network of destroying democracy? Or what if they said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, was collecting their online data at the expense of privacy? So just before Thanksgiving, Facebook rolled out something to help its workers: a chatbot that would teach them official company answers for dealing with such thorny questions. From a report: If a relative asked how Facebook handled hate speech, for example, the chatbot -- which is a simple piece of software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation -- would instruct the employee to answer with these points: Facebook consults with experts on the matter. It has hired more moderators to police its content. It is working on A.I. to spot hate speech. Regulation is important for addressing the issue.

It would also suggest citing statistics from a Facebook report about how the company enforces its standards. The answers were put together by Facebook's public relations department, parroting what company executives have publicly said. And the chatbot has a name: the "Liam Bot." (The provenance of the name is unclear.)

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is officially launching his plan to "fix" the internet. From a report: The World Wide Web Foundation, a non-profit campaign group set up by Berners-Lee, has secured the backing of tech giants Facebook, Google and Microsoft for the scheme, dubbed the "contract for the web." The British computer scientist first outlined his vision to overhaul organizations' approach to the internet at the Web Summit event last year. At the time, he said the web was "at a tipping point." The contract calls on companies to respect consumers' data privacy and urges governments to ensure everyone has access to the internet. "Never before has the web's power for good been more under threat," Adrian Lovett, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation, told CNBC in an interview Friday. He added that the rise of hateful content and fake news being propagated online meant something had to change. "We're launching the contract for the web for the world's first-ever global action plan to protect the web as a force for good, bringing together companies, governments and citizens from around the world to say these are the things that need to be done to put things back on the right track."

Other organizations backing the contract include DuckDuckGo, Reddit, GitHub and Reporters Without Borders. One major component of the pledge is the requirement that the web remains an accessible tool for all users. Lovett said that, "despite the progress we've seen in getting the world connected, half the world doesn't have access." He said the contract comes with nine core principles, while underneath them is a total of 76 clauses. "Not every organization has to abide by all of them," he insisted. "A good number of those 76 will be relevant." Berners-Lee will deliver a speech in Berlin, Germany, on Monday where he is due to say the contract will serve as a blueprint for governments, companies and citizens to safeguard the web as a force for good. The World Wide Web Foundation says it is working with partners to develop tools that can measure progress on the contract's various clauses.

Google announced today that it is willing to dish out bug bounty cash rewards of up to $1.5 million if security researchers find and report bugs in the Android operating system that can also compromise its new Titan M security chip. From a report: Launched last year, the Titan M chip is currently part of Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 devices. It's a separate chip that's included in both phones and is dedicated solely to processing sensitive data and processes, like Verified Boot, on-device disk encryption, lock screen protections, secure transactions, and more. Google says that if researchers manage to find "a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence" that also compromises data protected by Titan M, they are willing to pay up to $1 million to the bug hunter who finds it. If the exploit chain works against a preview version of the Android OS, the reward can go up to $1.5 million.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In years past, Microsoft's wildly popular Minecraft-themed Hour of Code tutorials were browser-based, pretty much allowing schoolchildren to participate regardless of whether their schools used PCs, Macs or Chromebooks. "Computer science is a foundation for every student," Microsoft explained on a web page about the Hour of Code, adding that "a quality computer science education should be available to every child, not just a lucky few."

But that was then, and this is now.

"The new Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial," explains a new announcement at Microsoft-sponsored Code.org, "is now available in Minecraft: Education Edition for Windows, Mac, and iPad." So, when will the Chromebook version be available? Silly Rabbit, the 2019 Minecraft Hour of Code is for Windows and Apple kids! From the Minecraft 2019 Hour of Code Lesson FAQ:

Q. Does the Hour of Code Lesson work on Chromebooks?

A. The Hour of Code Lesson is not compatible with Chromebooks. If your class has Chromebooks and would like to do a Minecraft Hour of Code lesson, we recommend using one of the [old] Minecraft tutorials on Code.org."

Yes, but that means schoolkids with Chromebooks won't be exposed to the teased AI for Good concepts introduced in the 2019 Minecraft tutorial, which seems at odds with Microsoft's professed focus on democratizing AI and putting AI developer tools in the hands of "every public sector organization around the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Google is getting rid of one of its best-known workplace features: TGIF, its weekly all-hands meeting. The company confirmed to CNBC that it will instead hold monthly all-hands meetings that will be focused on business and strategy while holding separate town halls for "workplace issues." An email announcing the change was previously reported by The Verge.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started TGIFs in 1999 as a forum where employees could regularly express concerns and discuss topics open and freely with management. At that time, the company was small enough to fit in a meeting room, but the all-hands continued to grow as the employee base grew -- until recently, that is. Page and Brin stopped attending regularly in 2019. A company spokesperson said that the meetings had recently become a bi-weekly instead of weekly occurrence. The new model comes as the company cracks down on the open work culture that's long been part of its identity of holding free discussion. Employees have increasingly voiced their concerns about everything from the handling of sexual harassment to government hires and contracts. In recent months, employees have leaked meeting notes to the media, which have shown growing tension between executives and workers. "In other places -- like TGIF -- our scale is challenging us to evolve," Pichai said in a memo to employees this week. "TGIF has traditionally provided a place to come together, share progress, and ask questions, but it's not working in its current form."

"We're unfortunately seeing a coordinated effort to share our conversations outside of the company after every TGIF," the note reportedly states. "I know this is new information to many of you, and it has affected our ability to use TGIF as a forum for candid conversations on important topics."

New Jersey's labor department says Uber owes the state about $650 million in unemployment and disability insurance taxes because the rideshare company has been misclassifying drivers as independent contractors. Bloomberg Law News reports: Uber and subsidiary Rasier LLC were assessed $523 million in past-due taxes over the last four years, the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development said in a pair of letters to the companies. The rideshare businesses also are on the hook for as much as $119 million in interest and penalties on the unpaid amounts, according to other internal department documents. The New Jersey labor department has been after Uber for unpaid employment taxes for at least four years, according to the documents, which Bloomberg Law obtained through an open public records request.

The state's determination is limited to unemployment and disability insurance, but it could also mean that Uber is required to pay drivers minimum wages and overtime under state law. Uber's costs per driver, and those of Lyft, could jump by more than 20% if they are forced to reclassify workers as employees, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. [...] New Jersey informed Uber in 2015 that it had obtained a court judgment ordering the company to pay about $54 million in overdue unemployment and temporary disability insurance contributions. It is not clear whether the company ever paid any of that bill. "We are challenging this preliminary but incorrect determination, because drivers are independent contractors in New Jersey and elsewhere," Uber spokeswoman Alix Anfang told Bloomberg Law.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings "erode public trust," critics said. From a report: Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills. But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence. If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits. "The certainty of evidence for these risk reductions was low to very low," said Bradley Johnston, an epidemiologist at Dalhousie University in Canada and leader of the group publishing the new research in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The new analyses are among the largest such evaluations ever attempted and may influence future dietary recommendations. In many ways, they raise uncomfortable questions about dietary advice and nutritional research, and what sort of standards these studies should be held to. Already they have been met with fierce criticism by public health researchers. The American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other groups have savaged the findings and the journal that published them.

New submitter xack shares a report: Microsoft has annoyed some of its 900 million Windows 10 device users after apparently removing the 'Use offline account' as part of its effort to herd users towards its cloud-based Microsoft Account. The offline local account is specific to one device, while the Microsoft Account can be used to log in to multiple devices and comes with the benefit of Microsoft's recent work on passwordless authentication with Windows Hello. The local account doesn't require an internet connection or an email address -- just a username and password that are stored on the PC. But Windows 10 users are annoyed that Microsoft has hidden the local account option when setting up a new PC or reinstalling Windows 10. A user on a popular Reddit thread notes that the local account option is now invisible if the device is connected to the internet. "Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account," Froggyowns suggested as a solution.

"After years of countless reviews, discussions, and code rewrites, Linus Torvalds approved on Saturday a new security feature for the Linux kernel, named 'lockdown'," reports ZDNet: The new feature will ship as a LSM (Linux Security Module) in the soon-to-be-released Linux kernel 5.4 branch, where it will be turned off by default; usage being optional due to the risk of breaking existing systems. The new feature's primary function will be to strengthen the divide between userland processes and kernel code by preventing even the root account from interacting with kernel code -- something that it's been able to do, by design, until now.

When enabled, the new "lockdown" feature will restrict some kernel functionality, even for the root user, making it harder for compromised root accounts to compromise the rest of the OS... "When enabled, various pieces of kernel functionality are restricted," said Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator, and the one who put the final stamp of approval on the module yesterday. This includes restricting access to kernel features that may allow arbitrary code execution via code supplied by userland processes; blocking processes from writing or reading /dev/mem and /dev/kmem memory; block access to opening /dev/port to prevent raw port access; enforcing kernel module signatures; and many more others, detailed here.

Amazon.com unveiled a pair of wearable gadgets equipped with the Alexa digital assistant: glasses and a ring. From a report: The company indicated that the devices aren't meant to be mass-market consumer products and were inventions "left on the cutting-room floor," according to Dave Limp, head of Amazon's devices and services business. The smart glasses look like a normal pair of spectacles and support prescription lenses -- but include microphones for Alexa access. They aren't augmented-reality glasses and lack displays and cameras. At its annual new-device event in Seattle on Wednesday, Amazon also showed off the Echo Loop, a titanium ring with Alexa microphones. Both of the products will be sold by invitation only, in limited quantities, Amazon said. The glasses will cost $180 and the ring will be priced at $130.

California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a yearslong debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure. From a report: The bill passed in a 29 to 11 vote in the State Senate and will apply to app-based companies, despite their efforts to negotiate an exemption. California's governor, Gavin Newsom, endorsed the bill this month and is expected to sign it after it goes through the State Assembly, in what is expected to be a formality. Under the measure, which would go into effect Jan. 1, workers must be designated as employees instead of contractors if a company exerts control over how they perform their tasks or if their work is part of a company's regular business.

The bill may influence other states. A coalition of labor groups is pushing similar legislation in New York, and bills in Washington State and Oregon that were similar to California's but failed to advance could see renewed momentum. New York City passed a minimum wage for ride-hailing drivers last year but did not try to classify them as employees. In California, the legislation will affect at least one million workers who have been on the receiving end of a decades-long trend of outsourcing and franchising work, making employer-worker relationships more arm's-length. Many people have been pushed into contractor status with no access to basic protections like a minimum wage and unemployment insurance. Ride-hailing drivers, food-delivery couriers, janitors, nail salon workers, construction workers and franchise owners could now all be reclassified as employees.

Internet hate forum 8chan has gone dark after web services company Voxility banned the site -- and also banned 8chan's new host Epik, which had been leasing web space from it. From a report: Epik began working with 8chan over the weekend after web services giant Cloudflare cut off service, following the latest of at least three mass shootings linked to 8chan. But Stanford researcher Alex Stamos noted that Epik seemed to lease servers from Voxility, and when Voxility discovered the content, it cut ties with Epik almost immediately. "As soon as we were notified of the content that Epik was hosting, we made the decision to totally ban them," Voxility business development VP Maria Sirbu told The Verge. Sirbu said it was unlikely that Voxility would work with Epik again. "This is the second situation we've had with the reseller and this is not tolerable," she said.

"Ninety-four million people in parts of 23 states remain under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories on Sunday as one last day of scorching temperatures hits the Midwest and East Coast," reports ABC News.

"Sunday is the last day of oppressive heat, with many places in the Upper Midwest already feeling cooler Sunday morning after heat indices of 115 to 120 on Friday and Saturday... New York City and Boston are just two of many cities that set or tied record-high minimum temperatures, with temperatures failing to drop below 80 degrees."

The high temperatures eventually caused power outages, reports the New York Daily News: Scorching heat slammed the city's power grid Sunday evening, putting more than 50,000 Con Ed customers in the dark, mostly in Brooklyn, the company said... As heat stressed the grid, Con Ed tried to keep the blackout from spreading by deliberately cutting power to 33,000 customers in Brooklyn, mostly in in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach. "The reason we did that was to prevent any further outages and also to protect the integrity of the energy system in that area," said Con Ed spokesman Sidney Alvarez.
And the weather also affected power supplies in the midwest, according to local news reports: According to DTE Energy, about 375,000 customers are without power as a result of the thunderstorms that rumbled through the region Friday and Saturday nights. The storms were marked by flashes of lightning, high winds and even in a few cases, hail...

Meanwhile Consumers Energy says the storms brought down more than 1,500 power lines. Jackson, Michigan-based Consumers said today that over 212,000 customers were affected by the storms.
ABC News reports that winds gusting 70 to 80 mph "brought down numerous tree limbs, and thousands of power lines from South Dakota to Minnesota, and in Wisconsin and Michigan."

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes the CBC: Weather watchers are focused on the world's most northerly community, which is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. "It's really quite spectacular," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's chief climatologist. "This is unprecedented." The weather agency confirmed that Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record of 21 C [69.8 F] on Sunday. On Monday, the military listening post on the top of Ellesmere Island had reached 20 C [68 F] by noon and inched slightly higher later in the day.
A government report in April found that Canada was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and this new article points out that recently records have been beaten "not by fractions, but by large margins." For example, the Alert station's average temperature had been a cool 44.6 F, and Environment Canada's chief climatologist says a deviation of this magnitude is like the city of Toronto reaching a high of 107.6 F.

"It's nothing that you would have ever seen."

Last week, the California Senate's Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee held a hearing and passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which promises to make it harder for companies to claim workers are independent contractors and increase the operating expenses of Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand companies that already find themselves unable to turn a profit. Motherboard reports: Written by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzelez (D-San Diego), AB5 codifies the California Supreme Court's unanimous May 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles where an "ABC test" was introduced to determine whether a worker was an employee or an independent contractor. Individuals with sufficient control over how and when they did their work are independent contractors, while workers without much control are employees. While AB5 easily passed in the Assembly this May, 53-11, it has a long and ugly fight ahead of as it must pass multiple votes in the Senate then be signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. Each step of the way is an opportunity for companies like Uber and Lyft to intervene and extract concessions.

Uber has never made a profit and has actually lost over $14 billion in the last four years alone. In the prospectus, Uber insists that these five major metropolitan markets are essential to its path to profitability. In reality, what Uber actually relies on is the $20 billion in funding raised over the past decade and the $8 billion in new investments after going public in May. This investor welfare covers the cost of low prices that render each rideshare trip unprofitable, of driver incentives to combat the high turnover rate of drivers, and of promotions used to drive up demand. Equity research analysts at Barclays project Uber is on track to lose $3.9 billion in 2019 and if AB5 were passed, it would cost the company upwards of an additional $500 million. A drop in the bucket. But if AB5 were to become law and other states follow California's example and pass similar laws, it could constrict these companies' already narrow paths to profitability.