hackingbear shares a report from The Verge: TikTok released its first transparency report yesterday, showing which countries have submitted requests for content removal as well as access to user data. China is notably absent from the report -- the video sharing app, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, claims it did not receive a single takedown request from Communist Party of China in the first half of 2019. TikTok's report shows that U.S. law enforcement agencies have been working with TikTok to gain access to user data and take down content that violates U.S. laws. In the past year, TikTok received 79 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement agencies, along with six requests for content takedowns. The company complied with 86 percent of the user data requests, and restricted or blocked seven accounts related to the content takedown requests. "TikTok is committed to assisting law enforcement in appropriate circumstances while at the same time respecting the privacy and rights of our users," Eric Ebenstein, TikTok's head of public policy, wrote in a blog post. The U.S. submitted the second highest number of overall requests, beat out only by India, which submitted 107 requests for user data and 11 requests for content takedowns. The report notes that China may not be in the report because TikTok doesn't operate there. The Chinese version of the app, which runs as a separate organization, is called Douyin.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A group of Amazon employees say the company has threatened to fire two workers for speaking out against the company's environmental policies. In a statement posted to Twitter on Thursday, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said that several employees were contacted by legal and human resources representatives, who said they were in violation of the company's external communications policy. Two employees were told their roles would be terminated if they continued to speak out about Amazon's business, a spokesperson for the group told CNBC. Maren Costa, a user experience designer, was one of the employees Amazon threatened to fire. In the statement, Costa said: "This is not the time to shoot the messengers. This is not the time to silence those who are speaking out." Amazon also threatened to terminate Jamie Kowalski, a software development engineer, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the news on Thursday. Kowalski and Costa said they received letters from one of Amazon's lawyers after speaking out publicly in October, the Post reported. The group claims Amazon changed its policy in September and that the updated policy "requires employees to seek prior approval to speak about Amazon in any public forum while identified as an employee." However, Amazon spokesperson Jaci Anderson says the company's communications policy isn't new. "In September, Amazon actually tried to make it easier for employees to speak out by adding a form on an internal website where employees could seek approval; prior to that, they had to get direct approval from a senior vice president," reports CNBC. "She added that employees are 'encouraged to work within their teams' and can suggest 'improvements to how we operate through those internal channels.'"

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A former software analyst and rising opera star has penned a song for the Red Planet.

An anonymous reader shares a report: So-called "smart" security cameras have had some pretty dumb security problems recently, but a recent report regarding a Xiaomi Mijia camera linked to a Google Home is especially disturbing. One Xiaomi Mijia camera owner is getting still images from other random peoples' homes when trying to stream content from his camera to a Google Nest Hub. The images include sills of people sleeping (even an infant in a cradle) inside their own homes. This issue was first reported by user /r/Dio-V on Reddit and affects his Xiaomi Mijia 1080p Smart IP Security Camera, which can be linked to a Google account for use with Google/Nest devices through Xiaomi's Mi Home app/service. It isn't clear when Dio-V's feed first began showing these still images into random homes or how long the camera was connected to his account before this started happening. He does state that both the Nest Hub and the camera were purchased new. The camera was noted as running firmware version 3.5.1_00.66.

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If the NYT covered NYC as they cover FB they would never run a piece like this about the Knicks. What they fail to convey in their reporting, probably because they don't feel it, is that FB is much larger than NYC. And as diverse and interesting.

The Pacific nation of Palau has become the first country to ban sun cream that is harmful to corals and sea life. From a report: From Wednesday, sun cream that includes common ingredients, including oxybenzone, is not allowed to be worn or sold in the country. Palau's President Tommy Remengesau said: "We have to live and respect the environment because the environment is the nest of life." The island nation markets itself as a "pristine paradise" for divers. A lagoon in Palau's Rock Islands is a Unesco World Heritage site. The country has a population of around 20,000 dotted across hundreds of islands. The ban -- which was announced in 2018 - prohibits sun cream containing any of 10 ingredients. The list includes oxybenzone and octinoxate, which absorb ultraviolet light. The International Coral Reef Foundation said the banned chemicals were "known environmental pollutants -- most of them are... incredibly toxic to juvenile stages of many wildlife species."

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Roberts says we take democracy for granted. I think with his Citizens United and Voting Rights Act decisions, he does.

As any seasoned TV watcher will tell you, firework displays don't translate well to television. From a report: In fact, they look terrible. The colors are washed out, the concussive boom of the explosion is dulled into a ridiculous pop, and they have an uncanny knack of looking like CGI. "It's a great torture test of the whole system," says Jeff Yurek of Nanosys, a manufacturer of quantum dot television displays. "There are two problems," explains Tim Brooksbank, a veteran of the audio-visual industry who studies how television displays and transmission work. "The fundamental problem is the dynamic range," says Brooksbank. Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest levels of colour, light and sound -- as well as time -- that recording, transmission and display equipment are expected to attain. Fireworks test all dynamic ranges to their limits. They're bright, colourful, fast, loud explosions on a black background -- which causes havoc with technology. "Fireworks need a large dynamic range that exists in nature and -- within reason -- exists in our eyesight," says Brooksbank. "But the whole system within television isn't designed to cope with that range." Take light, for instance. Until recently, digital stills and video cameras have struggled to take decent night time footage, because you're asking a lens to capture intensely dark and intensely bright images in the same frame. So the source footage struggles to accurately represent the brightness and the full colour of a firework. "They're too colourful, they're very bright, and they're very contrasty," explains Yurek. The chemical compounds most commonly used in fireworks emit wavelengths that aren't within the physical possibility of being seen by many TVs.

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Speaking of Facebook, yesterday I posted something intended to be wistful and introspective that some people took as a cry for help. Funny how that works. I said this: "Honestly I never thought I’d make it to 2020." Now it's 100 percent my fault there was confusion. Going back to the 1960s, when we had duck and cover drills in school, we all thought for sure we'd die in a nuclear holocaust long before 2020. If you had asked me then what were the chances I'd be alive in 2020, I probably would have said "No one will be alive in 2020." But here we are.

Facebook may be today's equivalent of Ma Bell.

I keep thinking today is Sunday.

Dell is trying to make its laptops more attractive to iPhone users. From a report: The Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker said on Thursday it is releasing software that will let users mirror their iPhone's screen on Dell laptops. The feature will roll out in coming months as an update to Dell's Mobile Connect software, which added similar functionality for Android handsets in 2018. The update, will also let Dell users drag photos, videos and other files from their iPhone to their PC. The software requires the download of an iPhone app and works with Dell XPS, Inspiron, Vostro and Alienware laptops running Windows 10.

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Stephen Colbert: Isaac Asimov would have been 100 today. He published in every category of the Dewey Decimal system. After reading him your mind works better. Too many great quotes. Here's one: "Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." Here's another: "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." In 1967, Asimov talked about what life with robots might be like in the future. "I wonder if we will make robots so much like men and men so much like robots that eventually we'll lose the distinction altogether." (A short BBC interview on it.) Asimov's commentary on society: "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." "There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity." "There's no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference -- but how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort."

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Soon we'll be able to write the epitaph of Melo as a basketball player. If I were to write it today it'd go like this. Melo is not LeBron and he's not JR Smith. LeBron is a general, a warrior. JR Smith is a joker, prankster, doper, partier. All three can shoot like nobody's business. Melo is a Black Lab. He's a pet. He should have been teamed up with LeBron or someone like him. He'd make a great #2. But he was miscast as the hero of the Knicks, so the Melo Knicks were losers. But because he's so sweet and he has a great shot, New York loves Melo.

Journalism has some people believing that there's nothing good about online. That they should stay way from Facebook. It's not safe. But it's where people go now. Billions. I'm not happy about that, but it is what it is. Saying online is dangerous is like saying the subway is dangerous. But if you live in New York, you probably want to take the subway. Driving is dangerous. Everything is. Life itself isn't safe. It's a mix. You have to learn to discern. But most people are good, and most people are on Facebook. And it pisses me off that a few of my neighbors won't use Facebook, and when I ask why, they repeat the talking points of the journalists, almost verbatim. We perceive the world of today as being more dangerous than the world we grew up in. In fact, today's world is much safer. Perceptions that come from listening to journalism too much. It seems, knowing this, it would be responsible to temper their promotion of fear. It creates an obstacle we have to overcome. But they keep at it. Stay away little person. Online is dangerous. Better to stay safe.