Strudelkugel shares an op-ed: What was We thinking? That's the only question worth asking now about the clowncar start-up known as The We Company, the money-burning, co-working behemoth whose best-known brand is WeWork. What's a WeWork? What WeWork works on is work. The We Company takes out long-term leases on in-demand office buildings in more than 100 cities across the globe (lately, it's even been buying its own buildings). [...] I've been hung up on how all this happened: How did so many people put so much money into something so many were warning would end up so badly? What was We thinking? And then it hit me: We wasn't thinking. WeWork? Not really. WeCan't! We'reTooDistracted! Much will be written in the coming weeks about how WeWork failed investors and employees. But I want to spotlight another constituency. WeWork's fundamental business idea -- to cram as many people as possible into swank, high-dollar office space, and then shower them with snacks and foosball-type perks so they overlook the distraction-carnival of their desks -- fails office workers, too. The model fails you even if you don't work at a WeWork, because WeWork's underlying idea has been an inspiration for a range of workplaces, possibly even your own. As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space. As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals, I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I've been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times' headquarters in New York -- where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches -- I cannot for the life of me get anything done. But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it's not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren't designed for deep work.

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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.

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A new movement of teenage climate activists -- most of whom are girls -- are getting dragged, doxed, hacked, and harassed online. Zahra Hirji, reporting for BuzzFeed News: On the morning of August 25, 11-year-old Lilly Platt tweeted a video clip of a Brazilian Amazon tribe speaking out against deforestation. Awareness of the Amazon wildfires was already at a fever pitch, and the tweet exploded. Then, within an hour, a swarm of troll accounts started flooding her mentions with porn. Shortly after the attack, her mom, Eleanor Platt, made an online plea for help: "Dear Friends of Lilly, this is Lillys mum she is being targeted by revolting trolls who are spamming her feed with pornography. There is only so much i can do to block this. Please if you see these posts report them." Over the course of the day, some of Lilly's nearly 10,000 followers did just that. Young girls like Lilly, who has been striking in her hometown of Utrecht, Netherlands, every Friday for the last year, are overwhelmingly leading a growing global movement to draw attention to the climate crisis. They spurred an estimated 4 million people across seven continents to walk out of work and school on September 20 -- and they are getting attacked for it. They have faced a barrage of daily insults, seemingly coordinated attacks (like the one that targeted Lilly), creepy DMs, doxing, hacked accounts, and death threats. This is the new normal for young climate leaders online, according to BuzzFeed News interviews with nearly a dozen of the kids and their parents. Personal attacks have always been a part of the climate denial playbook, even as fossil fuel companies secretly funded campaigns and researchers to question the scientific consensus on climate change. The most famous incident, 2009's Climategate, involved scientists getting their emails hacked and then facing death threats. And as the politics of climate change begins to mirror the broader dark trends of global politics, weaponized social media -- in the form of intimidation, memes, and disinformation -- has emerged as the dominant vehicle for climate denial. But the rise of a new climate movement means there's now a much more visible -- and especially vulnerable -- target: kids.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new movement of teenage climate activists -- most of whom are girls -- are getting dragged, doxed, hacked, and harassed online. Zahra Hirji, reporting for BuzzFeed News: On the morning of August 25, 11-year-old Lilly Platt tweeted a video clip of a Brazilian Amazon tribe speaking out against deforestation. Awareness of the Amazon wildfires was already at a fever pitch, and the tweet exploded. Then, within an hour, a swarm of troll accounts started flooding her mentions with porn. Shortly after the attack, her mom, Eleanor Platt, made an online plea for help: "Dear Friends of Lilly, this is Lillys mum she is being targeted by revolting trolls who are spamming her feed with pornography. There is only so much i can do to block this. Please if you see these posts report them." Over the course of the day, some of Lilly's nearly 10,000 followers did just that. Young girls like Lilly, who has been striking in her hometown of Utrecht, Netherlands, every Friday for the last year, are overwhelmingly leading a growing global movement to draw attention to the climate crisis. They spurred an estimated 4 million people across seven continents to walk out of work and school on September 20 -- and they are getting attacked for it. They have faced a barrage of daily insults, seemingly coordinated attacks (like the one that targeted Lilly), creepy DMs, doxing, hacked accounts, and death threats. This is the new normal for young climate leaders online, according to BuzzFeed News interviews with nearly a dozen of the kids and their parents. Personal attacks have always been a part of the climate denial playbook, even as fossil fuel companies secretly funded campaigns and researchers to question the scientific consensus on climate change. The most famous incident, 2009's Climategate, involved scientists getting their emails hacked and then facing death threats. And as the politics of climate change begins to mirror the broader dark trends of global politics, weaponized social media -- in the form of intimidation, memes, and disinformation -- has emerged as the dominant vehicle for climate denial. But the rise of a new climate movement means there's now a much more visible -- and especially vulnerable -- target: kids.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Rouhani warns world leaders 'a single blunder can fuel a big fire' as threat of war grips the Middle East.

Protesters say the legislations will weaken anti-corruption efforts as well as affect sex, abortion and gay rights.

tearmeapart writes (edited to add more details): Cloudflare is opening up its security and speed-focused mobile VPN service called WARP and WARP Plus to the general public. WARP is a mobile app for Android and Apple to establish a VPN to CloudFlare's huge global network. Cloudflare is promising:1. No user-identifiable log data to disk;2. No selling browsing data;3. No need to provide any personal information4. Regularly get audited. This is the second time Cloudflare is launching Warp. The VPN builds on Cloudflare's existing mobile app 1.1.1.1, which encrypts domain name system connections. But Warp goes beyond this protection to encrypt the whole journey from your device to a web server and back -- even if the website itself still isn't offering HTTPS web encryption. And all of this happens quickly, without draining your battery, and without complicated setup. In an interview with Wired, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said: Yeah, what we thought was going to be easy back in April turned out to be a lot harder than we expected. We had been testing this primarily in San Francisco and Austin and London, which is where the teams that were working on this are based. But as soon as users started to get anywhere that didn't have a fairly reliable internet connection, just all hell broke loose. The report adds: In describing the hurdles Cloudflare faced getting Warp off the ground, John Graham-Cumming, the company's chief technology officer, and Dane Knecht, its head of product strategy, note that many of the challenges came from dealing with interoperability issues between mobile device models, operating system versions, and different mobile network and Wi-Fi configurations around the world. For example, Warp is built on a newer secure communication protocol for VPNs known as WireGuard, which isn't ubiquitous yet and therefore isn't always natively supported by devices. The team also faced challenges dealing with web protocols and standards that are implemented inconsistently across different wireless carriers and internet service providers around the world. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 focuses on encrypting DNS connections specifically, but Warp aims to encompass everything in one protected tunnel. Keeping everything together as data traverses the labyrinth of servers that make up the internet, including Cloudflare's own massive network, was tough. Warp is free to use without any bandwidth caps or limitations. But Warp Plus, which is being offered through a monthly subscription fee, offers a "faster version of Warp that you can optionally pay for. The fee for Warp Plus varies by region and is designed to approximate what a McDonald's Big Mac would cost in the region. On iOS, the Warp Plus pricing as of the publication of this post is still being adjusted on a regional basis, but that should settle out in the next couple days. Warp Plus uses Cloudflare's virtual private backbone, known as Argo, to achieve higher speeds and ensure your connection is encrypted across the long haul of the Internet. We charge for it because it costs us more to provide," the company said in the blog post.

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Le tweet du jour: Some of the stupidest criminals in the world are working right here in America. I've always been proud of that.

An anonymous reader writes: Drone attacks, including the recent swarm strike in Saudi Arabia, are increasing, and so is the Pentagon's interest in killing them. This week, the Pentagon notified Congress of its purchase of a microwave weapon system designed to knock down swarms of enemy drones with pulses of energy. The purchase comes with an intent to deploy the PHASER system overseas for a year-long assessment, making it the first directed energy defense weapon to ever be fielded. The U.S. Air Force spent $16.28 million for one prototype PHASER high power microwave system for a "field assessment for purposes of experimentation" in an unspecified location outside the U.S. The test is "expected to be completed by Dec. 20, 2020," making the overseas deployment "against real-world or simulated hostile vignettes" imminent. There are several directed energy weapons that the Air Force is buying to test their effectiveness in the field, and officials say some will be on the frontlines in tense areas of the globe where enemy drones are becoming a threat, includes North Korea, Africa, the Ukraine and -- most recently -- the Middle East. "At the moment we have awarded multiple DE systems for use in our field assessment overseas and are working to support multiple bases and areas of responsibility," says Michael Jirjis, who is lead on the PHASER experiment, told Popular Mechanics. "We can't say which specific locations at this time."

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The international community has to take action on the 100,000 people who have been forcibly disappeared in Syria.

The international community has to take action on the 100,000 people who have been forcibly disappeared in Syria.

The international community has to take action on the 100,000 people who have been forcibly disappeared in Syria.

Poland's ruling party is chasing the votes of miners in a country that relies heavily on coal.

Poland's ruling party is chasing the votes of miners in a country that relies heavily on coal.

Poland's ruling party is chasing the votes of miners in a country that relies heavily on coal.