Microsoft has just announced it will ban players who use the controversial confederate flag in Forza Horizon and Forza Motorsport, which both allow users to personalize their cars with custom designs. The Verge reports: In a statement posted on Twitter last Friday, Microsoft updated its enforcement guidelines to have a zero-tolerance policy for any player using the confederate flag or other symbols that represent "notorious iconography," including Nazi imagery and the rising sun, which can be a symbol of Japanese imperialism. Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.

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BTW can you see now why I want HTML in bash? All those names in the list of apps the server is running should have scripts attached to them.

A 25-minute podcast I did this morning. It was mostly about what's in the gaslighting post below. Expanded, and starting with an observation by Ken Smith, English prof at Indiana University, that students deserve to be shown how to use the power tools of our culture. Teachers should say that to them, out loud. I tried saying it loud and felt the power. Led to a story or two. The title of this podcast is Don't Cry For Me Argentina. Wish I had thought to play that song during the podcast. Next time.

Really interesting discussion going on globally on what objectivity means in journalism, esp in re #BLM. I spent many podcasts with Jay Rosen talking about his idea of the mythical View From Nowhere. You must disclose who you are, and disclaim that your writing comes from who you are. This came up in another discussion yesterday about what integrity is. "A human being has integrity if he or she is what he or she appears to be. That's why integrity commands us to disclose conflicts, so that what we say, and who we appear to be, are in synch. Change the appearance if necessary." It's material if the editors of a publication are predominantly of one race. Until this year, however, as far as I know, the subject had never been raised. Times they are changing.

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: If I told you that my entire computer screen just got taken over by a new app that I'd never installed or asked for -- it just magically appeared on my desktop, my taskbar, and preempted my next website launch -- you'd probably tell me to run a virus scanner and stay away from shady websites, no? But the insanely intrusive app I'm talking about isn't a piece of ransomware. It's Microsoft's new Chromium Edge browser, which the company is now force-feeding users via an automatic update to Windows. Seriously, when I restarted my Windows 10 desktop this week, an app I'd never asked for: 1. Immediately launched itself 2. Tried to convince me to migrate away from Chrome, giving me no discernible way to click away or say no 3. Pinned itself to my desktop and taskbar 4. Ignored my previous browser preference by asking me -- the next time I launched a website -- whether I was sure I wanted to use Chrome instead of Microsoft's oh-so-humble recommendation. 5. Did I mention that, as of this update, you can't uninstall Edge anymore?

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The EU is questioning whether Google's proposed takeover of Fitbit will harm competition, or give it access to too much personal data. From a report: Fitbit makes fitness-tracking watches that monitor the wearer's heart rate and activity levels. A group of 20 consumer groups and privacy advocates have called for Google's takeover to be blocked. Google said it would not use Fitbit data to target advertising and would be "transparent" about the data gathered. It announced it was buying loss-making Fitbit for $2.1bn in November 2019. The move would help Google expand its wearables business and offer its own-brand smart watches to rival the Apple Watch. But some are concerned that Google already has a wealth of personal information about many people who use its products. As part of its campaign opposing the takeover, Privacy International said: "We don't think any company should be allowed to accumulate this much intimate information about you."

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Boeing hasn't told employees, but the company is pulling the plug on its hulking 747 jumbo jet, ending a half-century run for the twin-aisle pioneer. From a report: The last 747-8 will roll out of a Seattle-area factory in about two years, a decision that hasn't been reported but can be teased out from subtle wording changes in financial statements, people familiar with the matter said. It's a moment that aviation enthusiasts long have dreaded, signaling the end of the double-decker, four-engine leviathans that shrank the world. Airbus SE is already preparing to build the last A380 jumbo, after the final convoy of fuselage segments rumbled to its Toulouse, France, plant last month. Yet for all their popularity with travelers, the final version of the 747 and Europe's superjumbo never caught on commercially as airlines turned to twin-engine aircraft for long-range flights. While Boeing's hump-nosed freighters will live on, the fast-disappearing A380 risks going down as an epic dud.

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The world's mountain of discarded flat-screen TVs, cellphones and other electronic goods grew to a record high last year, according to an annual report released Thursday. New submitter Splyncryth writes: The U.N.-backed study estimated the amount of e-waste that piled up globally in 2019 at 53.6 million metric tonnes (59.1 million tons) - almost 2 million metric tons more than the previous year. The authors of the study calculated the combined weight of all dumped devices with a battery or a plug last year was the equivalent of 350 cruise ships the size of the Queen Mary 2. Among all the discarded plastic and silicon were large amounts of copper, gold and other precious metals -- used for example to conduct electricity on circuit boards. While about a sixth of it was recycled, the remainder of those valuable components -- worth about $57 billion -- weren't reclaimed, the study found.

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My web server is an operating system. We're getting there. This has been a goal for a while.

As the ads boycott grows, Mark Zuckerberg shows no sign of backing down. From a report: "My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough" the Facebook chief executive has said. Campaigners accuse the tech firm of being too slow and reluctant to remove some hateful content. But Zuckerberg added: "We're not going to change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue." The comments were made to Facebook staff at a private meeting last Friday, and were subsequently leaked to the Information news site. The social network has confirmed they are accurate and also announced a fresh development: its chief executive is to meet the organisers of the boycott - Stop Hate for Profit. It illustrates the concurrent ways Facebook is dealing with the matter. The first is to be publicly conciliatory: offer smaller changes and hit home its message that hate has no place on the platform. The second is to privately play down the impact of the boycott: reassure advertisers and resist any fundamental changes to Facebook's business model.

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Social media giant Facebook disclosed on Wednesday a new user privacy incident. The company said that it continued sharing user data with approximately 5,000 developers even after their application's access expired. From a report: The incident is related to a security control that Facebook added to its systems following the Cambridge Analytica scandal of early 2018. Responding to criticism that it allowed app developers too much access to user information, Facebook added at the time a new mechanism to its API that prevented apps from accessing a user's data if the user did not use the app for more than 90 days. However, Facebook said that it recently discovered that in some instances, this safety mechanism failed to activate and allowed some apps to continue accessing user information even past the 90-day cutoff date. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, VP of Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said engineers fixed the issue on the same day they found it.

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Reporters can't get it through their heads that someone might want to write publicly to help steer the conversation, not for self-aggrandizement. I know what that's like, I've been a columnist at a big pub. I've had the name of a big university on my business card. This is different. I want to see us survive the virus. I want to survive it myself. Otherwise I don't have any great personal aspirations. I think I can help. That's it. I don't honestly see how, in this moment of crisis in the US, anyone could be worried about getting ahead. Our concern has to be for keeping our system going. It's falling apart, right now, before our eyes. Any idea should be considered, no matter where it comes from. But the gates are really high right now. The keepers are struggling to hold on, and that's exactly what's wrong with discourse.

In one of the biggest password re-use studies of its kind, an analysis of more than one billion leaked credentials has discovered that one out of every 142 passwords is the classic "123456" string. From a report: The study, carried out last month by computer engineering student Ata Hakcil, analyzed username and password combinations that leaked online after data breaches at various companies. These "data dumps" have been around for more than half a decade, and have been piling up as new companies are getting hacked. The data dumps are easily available online, on sites like GitHub or GitLab, or freely distributed via hacking forums and file-sharing portals. Over the years, tech companies have been collecting these data dumps. For example, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, have collected leaked credentials to create in-house alert systems that warn users when they're utilizing a "weak" or "common" password.

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Two days after India blocked 59 apps developed by Chinese firms, Google and Apple have started to comply with New Delhi's order and are preventing users in the world's second largest internet market from accessing those apps. From a report: UC Browser, Shareit, and Club Factory and other apps that India has blocked are no longer listed on Apple's App Store and Google Play Store. In a statement, a Google spokesperson said that the company had "temporarily blocked access to the apps" on Google Play Store as it reviews New Delhi's interim order. Apple, which has taken a similar approach as Google in complying with New Delhi's order, did not respond to a request for comment. Some developers including ByteDance have voluntarily made their apps inaccessible in India, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. India's Department of Telecommunications ordered telecom networks and other internet service providers earlier this week to block access to those 59 apps "effective immediately." Websites of many of these apps have also become inaccessible in India.

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Wastewater analysis could provide localised Covid-19 test results much earlier than at present.