"The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society," wrote Amazon software developer Max Eliaser (as part of last week's Medium post from "Amazon Employees For Climate Justice.") "The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no balance that can be struck. Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back." Inc. columnist Chris Matyszczyk describes what happened next: Amazon released a new control center for Ring. It instituted a few more privacy-conscious settings. One of its new features involves the ability to "opt out of receiving video request notifications when local police seek information related to an investigation." That, to some eyes, may be a start -- or even a swift reaction to Eliaser's comments. Many might want to believe that an employee's strong words could bring some positive reaction. Sadly, this new control center only gives customers the option to opt out, rather than have the default set the other way around. It does, though, at least inform customers which police departments have joined the Ring Neighbors app and therefore are more likely to make requests. Ring did insist that "this is just the beginning. Future versions of Control Center will provide users the ability to view and control even more privacy and security features." The new control center also lets Ring's users see if two-factor authentication is enabled, add and remove Shared Users, and view and remove all devices and third-party services authorized to log into their account. Amazon's blog post about the changes adds that not only security but also privacy "have always been our top priority."

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CaptainDork spotted CNN's update about best-selling author Stephen King: "I'm quitting Facebook," the author said on Twitter Friday. "Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy...." His Facebook profile has since been deleted. King encouraged his fans to follow him on Twitter. But meanwhile... Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday slammed Twitter and Google for the rise in trolling networks and scams via fake bots on both the platforms.... "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool," Musk reacted to a follower's tweet. "Report as soon as you see it. Troll/bot networks on Twitter are a *dire* problem for adversely affecting public discourse and ripping people off," he continued. He also criticised Google for allowing scammers to flourish. "Trolls/bots just need to be deemphasized relative to probable real people who aren't being paid to push an agenda or scam. Google still shows bs/scam pages, they're just several clicks away," Musk stressed. And elsewhere, criticisms of Facebook and Google continued: in a new interview, venture capitalist and tech critic Roger McNamee specifically singled out Facebook and Google for their roles in spreading disinformation... "[T]hey're the reason we can't fix climate change," McNamee, author of the book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," said this week on the [Yahoo Finance show] Final Round. "They're the reason why we have an epidemic of measles due to the anti-vaxers. They're the reason why white supremacy and gun violence are on the rise because they empower the most disaffected people in society, and they give them a disproportionate political voice.... "If we want to do something about climate change or gun violence or white supremacy or anti-vaxers, we're going to have to fix Facebook and Google."

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"It's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform. But today, it continues to do the exact opposite," reports the Huffington Post: When HuffPost created a new Instagram account and searched for the term "vaccines" on Saturday, almost all of the top results were anti-vax pages... At the very top was a profile with more than 74,000 followers and posts pushing blatant falsehoods about vaccines and the Wuhan coronavirus. As soon as HuffPost followed that account, Instagram recommended dozens more that, just like it, were promoting dangerous medical misinformation amid a global health emergency. With its 1 billion users, the role that Facebook-owned Instagram plays in shaping public discourse is not easily understated.

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We have a lot more data on the problem.

schwit1 quotes Space.com: The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time. Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily small and, therefore, has been challenging to measure. Objects with greater masses and more powerful gravitational fields, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, offer better chances to see this phenomenon... The researchers noted that they used frame dragging to yield insight into the rotating star that caused it. In the future, they said, they can use a similar method to analyze binary neutron stars to learn more about their internal composition, "which, even after more than 50 years of observing them, we do not yet have a handle on," study lead author Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan said. "The density of matter inside a neutron star far exceeds what can be achieved in a lab, so there is a wealth of new physics to be learnt by using this technique to double neutron-star systems." The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday in the journal Science.

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AmiMoJo quotes Mashable: A new study from the University of Alberta, published Tuesday in the medical journal The BMJ, tested smart assistants Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant on their ability to respond helpfully to first aid questions. While Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa way outperformed Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, the results as a whole were underwhelming. The researchers asked all of the smart assistants 123 questions on 39 first aid topics such as heart attacks, poisoning, and nose bleeds. Google Assistant and Alexa recognized the topics over 90 percent of the time, and gave accurate and helpful responses in about half of those instances. Meanwhile, Siri and Cortana's responses were so poor that it "prohibited their analysis."

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BTW, to tech-savvy users who are regulars here. Please pitch in and help test the new release of LO2. As you can see from the thread on GitHub, it's really unfair to put these people through this level of debugging. They aren't up to it. And it's like pulling teeth for me to get the kind of info from them that you would likely provide in the first bug report, because you know how to do bug reports. If you've looked for a way to pitch in, this is where I need the most help. Keep an outline on LO2. When there's a new release try editing it. Do the changes stick when you reload the page? Try creating a new outline. Open an existing one. Log off and log on. Go through the menus and try all the commands. We're looking for breakage, something that used to work but because of changes doesn't work now. A lot of stuff changed in this release. But most of it isn't visible to users. Help me out. This is foundational work. I need LO2 to work for people, smoothly. Thanks.

Quick thoughts on the finale of Bojack. Spoilers follow.

I think they planned the second-to-last episode as the actual final episode. Had they done that I would have said who ever thought a comedy like Bojack Horseman would try something so ambitious, and even better, pull it off.

But they added one more plot twist, it's really hard to parse, and the rest of the final episode is weird and repetitive, and at the end punts the ending.

Still a groundbreaking show that's often LOL funny. I wish all my friends would watch it so we can talk about it. Now I'll take some time and read the other reviews.

Trump is picking a fight with Michael Bloomberg, re his height. Gina Smith points out that Bloomberg is an inch taller than Putin. Heh. And then I read that Bloomberg's spokesperson, Julie Wood (a woman, this is important) said this: "The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan." You know, this is the first time in four years Trump has been in presidential politics, talking about people's bodies and demeanor, that someone has come back at him with this line of attack, which is totally valid. When you're being bullied by someone so obviously vulnerable, give it back to him. It's even worse better when a woman says a man is a liar, bald, fat, and wears makeup. Trust me on that.

Lasrick quotes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Scientists with only the pursuit of truth in mind have proven — through meticulous radio-carbon dating and no tasting at all — that half the bottles of expensive aged Scotch whisky they tested weren't as old and valuable as purported. Researchers from the Radiocarbon Lab at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, Scotland used the amounts of radioactive carbon-14 in various Scotches that they absolutely did not sample to determine whether the whiskies were made before or after large-scale above-ground testing of nuclear devices began in the 1950s and 1960s. LiveScience explains: Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky. Carbon-14 decays at a known rate; by calculating the amount of the isotope in a given whisky batch, scientists can then determine if a bottle's contents were produced after the start of the nuclear age — and if that age matches the date written on the bottle's label.

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20 years ago, 11 different startups spent millions of dollars to run 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, reports the Hustle. Within one year 8 of the 11 companies "had either gone bankrupt or been sold in fire sales." The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet... The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said... Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount... [I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos. Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.

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An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Thai doctors have seen success in treating severe cases of the new coronavirus with combination of medications for flu and HIV, with initial results showing vast improvement 48 hours after applying the treatment, they said on Sunday... "This is not the cure, but the patientâ(TM)s condition has vastly improved. From testing positive for 10 days under our care, after applying this combination of medicine the test result became negative within 48 hours," Dr. Kriangska Atipornwanich, a lung specialist at Rajavithi, told reporters.

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A coronavirus has now infected over 14,380 people worldwide and killed at least 304 people in China, reports the New York Times. But they also note that when the first symptoms appeared in December, Chinese authorities "silenced doctors and others for raising red flags." They played down the dangers to the public, leaving the city's 11 million residents unaware they should protect themselves. They closed a food market where the virus was believed to have started, but didn't broadly curb the wildlife trade. Their reluctance to go public, in part, played to political motivations as local officials prepared for their annual congresses in January. Even as cases climbed, officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections. By not moving aggressively to warn the public and medical professionals, public health experts say, the Chinese government lost one of its best chances to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic. "This was an issue of inaction," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China. "There was no action in Wuhan from the local health department to alert people to the threat." The first case, the details of which are limited and the specific date unknown, was in early December. By the time the authorities galvanized into action on Jan. 20, the disease had grown into a formidable threat. It is now a global health emergency. The Times also reports on the last day of 2019, the police even announced "that they were investigating eight people for spreading rumors about the outbreak." And days later Wuhan's mayor spoke to the Communist Party-run legislatures, promising that his city would soon host a World Health Expo.

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Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy quotes ZDNet: Security experts have published a report Tuesday warning that the new and fast-rising LoRaWAN technology is vulnerable to cyberattacks and misconfigurations, despite claims of improved security rooted in the protocol's use of two layers of encryption. LoRaWAN stands for "Long Range Wide Area Network." It is a radio-based technology that works on top of the proprietary LoRa protocol. LoRaWAN takes the LoRa protocol and allows devices spread across a large geographical area to wirelessly connect to the internet via radio waves... But broadcasting data from devices via radio waves is not a secure approach. However, the protocol's creators anticipated this issue. Since its first version, LoRaWAN has used two layers of 128-bit encryption to secure the data being broadcast from devices — with one encryption key being used to authenticate the device against the network server and the other against a company's backend application. In a 27-page report published Tuesday, security researchers from IOActive say the protocol is prone to misconfigurations and design choices that make it susceptible to hacking and cyber-attacks. The company lists several scenarios it found plausible during its analysis of this fast-rising protocol. Some examples: "Encryption keys can be extracted from devices by reverse engineering the firmware of devices that ship with a LoRaWAN module." "Many devices come with a tag displaying a QR code and/or text with the device's identifier, security keys, or more."

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