Yesterday, U.S. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Gary Peters (D-MI) introduced the bipartisan ''Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act of 2020'' (S. 4646), which would help protect Americans' First and Fourth Amendment rights by preventing a president from using emergency powers to unilaterally take control over or deny access to the internet and other telecommunications capabilities. Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares an excerpt from the announcement: In a World War II-era amendment to Section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934, Congress gave the Executive sweeping authority to put under direct government control or even shut down "any facility or station for wire communication" should a president "[deem] it necessary in the interest of the national security and defense" following a proclamation "that there exists a state or threat of war involving the United States." Cause for alarm over such power has only increased across the decades with the technological revolution, which has included email, text messages, and the internet, as well as the expansion of television, radio, and telephone networks. The Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act would amend Section 706 to strip out this "Internet Kill Switch" and help shut the door to broader government surveillance or outright control of our communications channels and some of Americans' most sensitive information. The legislation would also reassert a stronger balance of power during a national emergency between the Executive Branch and the people's representatives in Congress. You can read the "Unplug the Internet Kill Switch Act of 2020" here (PDF).

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Plastic face shields are almost totally ineffective at trapping respiratory aerosols, according to modelling in Japan, casting doubt on their effectiveness in preventing the spread of coronavirus. From a report: A simulation using Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer, found that almost 100% of airborne droplets of less than 5 micrometres in size escaped through plastic visors of the kind often used by people working in service industries. One micrometre is one millionth of a metre. In addition, about half of larger droplets measuring 50 micrometres found their way into the air, according to Riken, a government-backed research institute in the western city of Kobe. This week, senior scientists in Britain criticised the government for stressing the importance of hand-washing while placing insufficient emphasis on aerosol transmission and ventilation, factors that Japanese authorities have outlined in public health advice throughout the pandemic. As some countries have attempted to open up their economies, face shields are becoming a common sight in sectors that emphasise contact with the public, such as shops and beauty salons. Makoto Tsubokura, team leader at Riken's centre for computational science, said the simulation combined air flow with the reproduction of tens of thousand of droplets of different sizes, from under 1 micrometre to several hundred micrometres.

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The September 20 deadline for a purported TikTok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok's bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ownership of the app, confusing investors and users. Meanwhile, Beijing's discontent with the TikTok sale is increasingly obvious. From a report: China has no reason to approve the "dirty" and "unfair" deal that allows Oracle and Walmart to effectively take over TikTok based on "bullying and extortion," slammed an editorial published Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The editorial argued that TikTok's success -- a projected revenue of about a billion dollars by the end of 2020 -- "has apparently made Washington feel uneasy" and prompted the U.S. to use "national security as the pretext to ban the short video sharing app." The official message might stir mixed feelings within ByteDance, which has along the way tried to prove its disassociation from the Chinese authority, a precondition for the companies' products to operate freely in Western countries.

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koavf writes: In order to make the desktop experience more readable and less overwhelming to new users, Wikipedia is being redesigned to move page elements, collapse in the sidebar, and decrease the maximum line width. From Diff, the Wikimedia community blog:Forthcoming changes to the desktop include a reconfigured logo, collapsible sidebar, table of contents, and more! You can see the full list of new features on MediaWiki. These changes will happen incrementally over a long period of time, to allow for ample user testing and feedback. If all goes to plan, these improvements will be the default on all wikis by the end of 2021, timed with Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebrations.

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Last year, NASA had said that in four years, it would be landing the first woman ever on the moon, and returning to Earth's only natural satellite for the first time since 1972, through its Artemis programme. Now, in a release on September 22, NASA has shared an update outlining its plan, announcing a whopping $28 billion plan for the return to the lunar surface. From a report: The funds are all going to be used for the development of machinery; one billion dollars of the budget will go directly to the development of a commercial human lunar system that will take humans to the moon's surface. An allotment of $651 million will be used to support the Orion Spacecraft and the rocket that Boeing is building for the moon mission -- called the Space Launch System or SLS, on which NASA has already spent at least $11.9 billion. The mission is named Artemis after the Greek goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo. It's the antithesis to the NASA mission which last landed humans on the moon, Apollo 17. Only 12 humans, all male, have ever walked on the moon and they were all American, according to Bettina Inclan, NASA Communications Director. And with Artemis, they are finally planning to launch women on our satellite too. Currently, there are just 12 active women astronauts, excluding the five other female astronauts who graduated from training earlier this year. The crew for the 2024 mission, however, has not yet been named. According to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, the first woman to walk on the moon would be somebody "who has been proven, somebody who has flown, somebody who has been on the International Space Station already."

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America's most famous spy agency has a major competitor it can't quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley. From a report: The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realized -- and it wants to lead in fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. However, recruiting and retaining the talent capable of building these tools is a challenge on many levels, especially since a spy agency can't match Silicon Valley salaries, reputations, and patents. The agency's solution is CIA Labs, a new skunkworks that will attempt to recruit and retain technical talent by offering incentives to those who work there. Under the new initiative, announced today, CIA officers will be able for the first time to publicly file patents on the intellectual property they work on -- and collect a portion of the the profits. The agency will take the rest of the balance. Dawn Meyerriecks, who heads the agency's science and technology directorate, says the best-case scenario is that the agency's research and development could end up paying for itself. "This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective," says Meyerriecks. "That's really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all."

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Intel today announced the launch of new products tailored to edge computing scenarios like digital signage, interactive kiosks, medical devices, and health care service robots. From a report: The 11th Gen Intel Core Processors, Atom x6000E Series, Pentium, Celeron N, and J Series bring new AI security, functional safety, and real-time capabilities to edge customers, the chipmaker says, laying the groundwork for innovative future applications. Intel expects the edge market to be a $65 billion silicon opportunity by 2024. The company's own revenue in the space grew more than 20% to $9.5 billion in 2018. And according to a 2020 IDC report, up to 70% of all enterprises will process data at the edge within three years. To date, Intel claims to have cultivated an ecosystem of more than 1,200 partners, including Accenture, Bosch, ExxonMobil, Philips, Verizon, and ViewSonic, with over 15,000 end customer deployments across "nearly every industry." The 11th Gen Core processors -- which Intel previewed in early September -- are enhanced for internet of things (IoT) use cases requiring high-speed processing, computer vision, and low-latency deterministic processing, the company says. They bring an up to 23% performance gain in single-threaded workloads, a 19% performance gain in multithreaded workloads, and an up to 2.95 times performance gain in graphics workloads versus the previous generation. New dual video decode boxes allow the processors to ingest up to 40 simultaneous video streams at 1080p up to 30 frames per second and output four channels of 4K or two channels of 8K video. According to Intel, the combination of the 11th Gen's SuperFin process improvements, miscellaneous architectural enhancements, and Intel's OpenVINO software optimizations translates to 50% faster inferences per second compared with the previous 8th Gen processor using CPU mode or up to 90% faster inferences using the processors' GPU-accelerated mode.

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Google has announced that Flutter, its open source UI development kit for building cross-platform software from the same codebase, is finally available for Windows apps in alpha. From a report:For the world's leading desktop operating system with some 1 billion installations of Windows 10 alone, this has been a long time coming. Flutter's alpha incarnation was initially launched at Google's I/O developer conference back in 2017, before arriving in beta less than a year later. In its original guise, Flutter was designed for Android and iOS app development, but it has since expanded to cover the web, MacOS, and Linux, which are currently available in various alpha or beta iterations. Developers have had to consider unique platform-specific factors when designing for the desktop or mobile phones, such as different screen sizes and how people interact with their devices. On smartphones, people typically use touch and swipe-based gestures, while keyboards and mice are commonly used on PCs and laptops. This means Flutter has had to expand its support to cover the additional inputs.

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I asked on Twitter: If you decide to leave Substack can you take your subscriber list with you, or do they own that? And the answer is yes, you can export your subscriber list as a CSV file. So I wonder why people would stay with Substack after they get a certain amount of income. They get 10% for doing something that doesn't cost very much. If they're making say $1000 a year off your mail list, why not take distribution in-house? That's a straight question. I want to understand how the business works. Thanks.

Software engineer Cal Paterson writes: Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That's a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well but those three projects comprise pretty much what I think of as the whole point of Mozilla, so this news is a a big let down. The stated reason for the cuts is falling income. Mozilla largely relies on "royalties" for funding. In return for payment, Mozilla allows big technology companies to choose the default search engine in Firefox - the technology companies are ultimately paying to increase the number of searches Firefox users make with them. Mozilla haven't been particularly transparent about why these royalties are being reduced, except to blame the coronavirus. I'm sure the coronavirus is not a great help but I suspect the bigger problem is that Firefox's market share is now a tiny fraction of its previous size and so the royalties will be smaller too - fewer users, so fewer searches and therefore less money for Mozilla. The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth. Despite their slightly contrived legal structure as a non-profit that owns a for-profit, Mozilla are an NGO just like any other. In this article I want to apply the traditional measures that are applied to other NGOs to Mozilla in order to show what's wrong. These three measures are: overheads, ethics and results.

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America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed. From a report: This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today -- drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America -- are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity's willingness to take action. "I've been labeled an alarmist," said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. "And I think it's a lot harder for people to say that I'm being alarmist now." Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August. Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle? The Times spoke with two dozen climate experts, including scientists, economists, sociologists and policymakers, and their answers were by turns alarming, cynical and hopeful. "It's as if we've been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades" and the world is now feeling the effects, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. But, she said, "we're not dead yet." Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn't seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there's no going back. The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.

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For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city's most prominent and baffling public art projects. Its digital display once told the time in its own unique way, counting the hours, minutes and seconds (and fractions thereof) to and from midnight. But for years observers who did not understand how it worked suggested that it was measuring the acres of rainforest destroyed each year, tracking the world population or even that it had something to do with pi. On Saturday Metronome adopted a new ecologically sensitive mission. From a report: Now, instead of measuring 24-hour cycles, it is measuring what two artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, present as a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible. On Saturday at 3:20 p.m., messages including "The Earth has a deadline" began to appear on the display. Then numbers -- 7:103:15:40:07 -- showed up, representing the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds until that deadline. As a handful of supporters watched, the number -- which the artists said was based on calculations by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin -- began ticking down, second by second. "This is our way to shout that number from the rooftops." Mr. Golan said just before the countdown began. "The world is literally counting on us." The Climate Clock, as the two artists call their project, will be displayed on the 14th Street building, One Union Square South, through Sept. 27, the end of Climate Week. The creators say their aim is to arrange for the clock to be permanently displayed, there or elsewhere. Mr. Golan said he came up with the idea to publicly illustrate the urgency of combating climate change about two years ago, shortly after his daughter was born. He asked Mr. Boyd, an activist from the Lower East Side, to work with him on the project.

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Scientists trace a wobble in the brightness around M87* - the first black hole ever to be imaged.

It's interesting that McConnell is betting on a few things that seem contrary to the worst that we believe about where we're headed.

1. He thinks there's a good chance Repubs will be out of power in January. Either he'll be out of the majority in the Senate or Trump won't be president. Otherwise why rush to get the next judge approved?
2. He thinks the Supreme Court continues to matter after the election. If we're going totally authoritarian, the court doesn't matter, they're puppets. They'll do what they're told to do or off to the concentration camps with them.

But there's the Occam's view of this that maybe makes more sense.

McConnell is 78, an old man, and he's got maybe one more term in him, maybe not even that. He's playing a game for the sake of the game, the same way a compulsive crossword puzzler has to finish the Sunday NYT puzzle.

He set out to do one thing in his life, turn the court Republican. It may not matter at that point, in any real sense, but he wants to win the game, a game that as soon as a few months from now people will have forgotten was ever played.