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Comment The WWF (and Tim) had already "sold out" (Score 4, Informative) 28

by jbernardo (#64836169) Attached to: World Wide Web Foundation is Shutting Down

In 2017, ignoring all criticism and all ongoing negotiations, Tim and the WWF pushed an HTML5 standard with DRM, with zero protections or safeties.

That betrayal of all the principles of the open web, that sellout to the mafiAAAs might have been what killed the WWF, with today just being the closing of the mausoleum.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eff.org%2Fdeeplinks%2F2017%2F07%2Famid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web

Comment Oh, the irony (Score 1) 31

The irony when someone who was accused of being a Microsoft mole for a long time before assuming a public relationship with them, with this work relationship seen by many as a reward for his role in creating dissent in the open source/Linux community, is now referred in /. as "famed software engineer".

Of course, slashvertisements aren't new.

Submission + - Greenland Lost 586 Billions Tons of Ice In 2019 (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than four feet (1.25 meters) of water, a new study said. After two years when summer ice melt had been minimal, last summer shattered all records with 586 billion tons (532 billion metric tons) of ice melting, according to satellite measurements reported in a study Thursday. That’s more than 140 trillion gallons (532 trillion liters) of water. That’s far more than the yearly average loss of 259 billion tons (235 billion metric tons) since 2003 and easily surpasses the old record of 511 billion tons (464 billion metric tons) in 2012, said a study in Communications Earth & Environment. The study showed that in the 20th century, there were many years when Greenland gained ice.

“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Last year’s Greenland melt added 0.06 inches (1.5 millimeters) to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount but “in our world it’s huge, that’s astounding,” said study co-author Alex Gardner, a NASA ice scientist. Add in more water from melting in other ice sheets and glaciers, along with an ocean that expands as it warms — and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems, he said.

Submission + - Facebook's "independent" fact checks face quiet political, financial pressures (fastcompany.com) 1

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label "opinion" content if it crosses the line into falsehood.

What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.

In one case—a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU—Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes.

Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."

In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.

Comment Re:Cow farts are bad ? (Score 1) 113

by jbernardo (#59812480) Attached to: Could Cows Actually Help Solve the Climate Crisis?
The 14% figure is a "lifecycle" value. It has the 5% directly attributable to cattle, and adds transport, storage, etc. You can read a longer explanation by the authors of the FAO study here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cgiar.org%2Fnews-events%2Fnews%2Ffao-common-flawed-comparisons-greenhouse-gas-emissions-livestock-transport%2F

Comment Why insist on the 14% lie? (Score 1) 113

by jbernardo (#59812368) Attached to: Could Cows Actually Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

Why is the wrong 14.5% value still being repeated? Cattle is responsible for 5% GHG emissions! The 14.5% is a completely irrelevant and distracting "lifecycle" value, that the authors of FAO's study have already explained is not comparable to anything and should not be compared to anything.

You can read the explanation here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cgiar.org%2Fnews-events%2Fnews%2Ffao-common-flawed-comparisons-greenhouse-gas-emissions-livestock-transport%2F

Submission + - SPAM: Police Tracked a Terror Suspect—Until His Phone Went Dark After a FB Warn

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect’s phone went dark.

WhatsApp, Facebook Inc. ’s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users—among them the suspected terrorist—that their phones had been hacked by an “advanced cyber actor.” An elite surveillance team was using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company, to track the suspect, according to a law-enforcement official overseeing the investigation.

On the day WhatsApp sent its alert, the official overseeing the terror investigation in Western Europe said, he was stuck in traffic on his way to work when a call came in from Israel. “Have you seen the news? We’ve got a problem,” he said he was told. WhatsApp was notifying suspects whom his team was tracking that their phones had been hacked. “No, that can’t be right. Why would they do that?” the official said he asked his contact, thinking it a joke.The official said counterparts in other

Western European countries told him more than 10 of their investigations may have been compromised by the WhatsApp alert. “I talked about it with my colleagues,” the official said. “They also couldn’t believe this was happening. It affected them more because they used this WhatsApp tool more than we did.” The former security official, from a different nation in Western Europe, said several countries there rely on NSO spyware in counterterrorism investigations.

Facebook and other U.S. technology companies often inform users when a government agency is legally requesting their data, unless prohibited by law or if the company believes there are “exceptional circumstances, such as child-exploitation cases,” Facebook says on its website.

NSO’s technology bypasses the traditional legal request process, however, according to Facebook, Citizen Lab and others.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - T-Mobile/Sprint Deal Is Good Actually, Feds Tell Court In States' Lawsuit (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Federal regulators that want to let T-Mobile complete its acquisition of rival wireless carrier Sprint are pushing back on a collective effort by some states to block the deal. The $26 billion transaction was subject to federal approval by both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. The agencies both blessed the deal, with the DOJ reaching a settlement in July and the FCC granting a green light in October. The deal also requires approval by regulators in several states, however. While about a dozen have in some way approved the deal or signaled support for the federal settlements, attorneys general representing 13 states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block the merger.

The FCC and DOJ on Friday submitted a filing [400-page PDF] in that case arguing that the deal is in the best interest of the U.S., and any nationwide injunction holding up the merger would block "substantial, long-term, and procompetitive benefits for American consumers." The argument, in large part, boils down to: trust us, we're the experts. "Both the Antitrust Division and the FCC have significant experience and expertise in analyzing these types of transactions and do so from a nationwide perspective," the agencies write. "Thus, their conclusions that the merger as remedied is in the public interest deserve appropriate weight in this remedy inquiry by this honorable court."

Submission + - SPAM: Code.org Boasts It's 'Served' an Hour of Code to 910+ Million Students 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had jumped to 910,905,104 served, presumably due to counter updates that were deferred during this year's event. "It has been a HUGE year-and decade!-for computer science education," tweeted tech-backed Code.org. All over the world, more than 910 MILLION students have started an #HourOfCode since we began this journey in 2013. Thank YOU for being part of this global movement!" In 2015, Code.org explained, "We're switching our counter to a McDonald's format — because the Hour of Code counter is both double-counting and under-counting participation." Speaking of possible over-counting, the Hour of Code Leaderboards consistently suggest the city in the world with the greatest Hour of Code participation is tiny Boardman, OR (population 4,490), perhaps because of the Amazon data centers that an AWS Case Study notes power Code.org.

Submission + - Linux 5.4 released

Submitted by diegocg
diegocg writes: Linux 5.3 has been released, featuring the new kernel lockdown mode, intended to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel; virtio-fs, a high-performance virtio driver which allows a virtualized guest to mount a directory that has been exported on the host; fs-verity, for detecting file tampering, like dm-verity, but works on files rather than block devices; dm-clone, which allows live cloning of dm targets; two new madvise() flags for improved app memory management on Android, support for new Intel/AMD GPUs, support for the exfat file system and removing the experimental status of the erofs file system; a new haltpoll cpuidle driver and governor that greatly improves performance for virtualized guests wanting to do guest-side polling in the idle loop; and blk-iocost, a new cgroup controller that attempts to calculate more accurately the cost of IO. As always, many other new drivers and improvements can be found in the changelog.

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