An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The broadband industry is suing Maine to stop a Web-browsing privacy law similar to the one killed by Congress and President Donald Trump in 2017. Industry groups claim the state law violates First Amendment protections on free speech and the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. The Maine law was signed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in June 2019 and is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2020. It requires ISPs to get customers' opt-in consent before using or sharing sensitive data. As Mills' announcement in June said, the state law "prohibits a provider of broadband Internet access service from using, disclosing, selling, or permitting access to customer personal information unless the customer expressly consents to that use, disclosure, sale or access. The legislation also prohibits a provider from refusing to serve a customer, charging a customer a penalty or offering a customer a discount if the customer does or does not consent to the use, disclosure, sale or access of their personal information." Customer data protected by this law includes Web-browsing history, application-usage history, precise geolocation data, the content of customers' communications, IP addresses, device identifiers, financial and health information, and personal details used for billing. Home Internet providers and wireless carriers don't want to seek customer permission before using Web-browsing histories and similar data for advertising or other purposes. On Friday, the four major lobby groups representing the cable, telco, and wireless industries sued the state in US District Court for the District of Maine, seeking an injunction that would prevent enforcement of the law. In the lawsuit, the groups said the state law "imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs', and only ISPs', protected speech," while imposing no requirements on other companies that deliver services over the internet. The plaintiffs are America's Communications Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom. The law allegedly violates the First Amendment because it "limits ISPs from advertising or marketing non-communications-related services to their customers; and prohibits ISPs from offering price discounts, rewards in loyalty programs, or other cost-saving benefits in exchange for a customer's consent to use their personal information," the lawsuit claims. As for how the Maine law violates the Supremacy Clause, the lawsuit says it's "because it allows consumers to dictate (by opting out or declining to opt in) when ISPs can use or disclose information that they must rely on to comply with federal law, rendering 'compliance with both' state and the foregoing federal laws 'impossible.'"

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Grandmasters and upstarts are reinventing the game online, becoming its most visible ambassadors and arguably its first entertainers. From a report: On Twitch, the most popular internet platform to livestream esports, time spent watching chess has risen by more than 500 percent since 2016, according to data from the company. With that consumption has come some money, mostly donations from viewers facilitated by Twitch but also in sponsorship dollars. That growth persuaded Botez in September to try livestreaming chess full time. She now has more than 60,000 followers on Twitch. And while streaming is offering players like Botez a new way to make a living from their chess skills, it's also giving new life to one of the oldest games in the world. "It's crazy to me to have this kind of support and this kind of viewership online for chess," Botez said. "Chess has always been a passion of mine, but it was never something that was popular. It was never something I would have imagined would have grown to what it is today." Chess came to the attention of Twitch less than four years ago, when the company formed a partnership with Chess.com, the largest chess website, with almost 33 million members. "Across all the different various competitive games on Twitch, chess has seen some of the most substantial growth in the same period of time than any other esport in the world," said Justin Dellario, Twitch's vice president of global esports. The rise of esports -- both in terms of competitive gaming and more social online gaming -- first gained attention in the 1990s and the early 2000s before emerging in the past 10 years. The gaming and esports market research company Newzoo forecast that 2019 esports revenues would hit $1.1 billion. Twitch is by far the largest esports platform. Chess hasn't enjoyed similar growth. While the game has a young, marketable genius in world champion Magnus Carlsen, it has struggled to attract the kind of money that can help sustain its growth.

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Electricity from sunlight costs less, a hopeful sign for developing nations building out their power grids. From a report: In a dusty northwest India desert dotted with cows and the occasional camel, a solar-power plant is producing some of the world's cheapest energy. Built in 2018 by India's Acme Solar Holdings, it can generate 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power all the homes in a middle-size U.S. town. Acme sells the electricity to distributors for 2.44 rupees (3.4 cents) a kilowatt-hour, a record low for solar power in India, a country that data trackers say has the world's cheapest solar energy. More remarkable, the power costs less to generate in India than the cheapest competing fossil fuel -- coal -- even with subsidies removed and the cost of construction and financing figured in, according to the Indian government and industry trackers. Price-conscious Indian utilities are eager to snap up that power. "We are infamous for low cost," says Sandeep Kashyap, Acme's president. Solar power has entered a new global era. The industry was long dependent on subsidies and regulatory promotions. Now, technological innovation and falling solar-panel prices have made solar power inexpensive enough to compete on its own with other fuel sources in some regions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.], when it comes to newly built plants. That could turbocharge growth of renewables in the global energy industry, especially in fast-growing Asian markets where much of the world's energy infrastructure expansion will take place. Governments in many solar markets -- including China, the biggest -- are phasing out or reducing supports. Solar-plant development is going mainstream, with finance provided by global investors like Goldman Sachs Group, Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund GIC and huge Western pension and private-equity funds.

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Alfred Ng, writing for CNET: Building 83 doesn't stand out on Microsoft's massive Redmond, Washington, headquarters. But last week, the nameless structure hosted what might be the software giant's most important product of 2020. Tucked away in the corner of a meeting room, a sign reading "ElectionGuard" identifies a touchscreen that asks people to cast their votes. An Xbox adaptive controller is connected to it, as are an all-white printer and a white ballot box for paper votes. If you didn't look carefully, you might have mistaken all that for an array of office supplies. ElectionGuard is open-source voting-machine software that Microsoft announced in May 2019. In Microsoft's demo, voters make their choices by touchscreen before printing out two copies. A voter is supposed to double-check one copy before placing it into a ballot box to be counted by election workers. The other is a backup record with a QR code the voter can use to check that the vote was counted after polls close. With ElectionGuard, Microsoft isn't setting out to create an unhackable vote -- no one thinks that's possible -- but rather a vote in which hacks would be quickly noticed. The product demo was far quieter than the typical big tech launch. No flashy lights or hordes of company employees cheering their own product, like Microsoft's dual screen phone, its highly anticipated dual-screen laptop or its new Xbox Series X. And yet, if everything goes right, ElectionGuard could have an impact that lasts well beyond the flashy products in Microsoft's pipeline. ElectionGuard addresses what has become a crucial concern in US democracy: the integrity of the vote. The software is designed to establish end-to-end verification for voting machines. A voter can check whether his or her vote was counted. If a hacker had managed to alter a vote, it would be immediately obvious because encryption attached to the vote wouldn't have changed. The open-source software has been available since last September. But Microsoft gets its first real-world test on Tuesday, when ElectionGuard is used in a local vote in Fulton, Wisconsin.

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In its latest dystopian stab at curbing the spread of COVID-19, the Chinese government has employed two of the biggest tech giants in Asia to help it roll out a nationwide color-based tracking system to keep tabs on those suffering from coronavirus symptoms, according to a new report. From a report: Companies enlisted for this real-life sci-fi movie endeavor to contain COVID-19 -- the World Health Organization's name for the deadly coronavirus behind this global health emergency -- include Alibaba Group Holdings, Asia's largest digital advertising, e-commerce, and cloud platform as well as Tencent Holdings, one of the world's largest video game companies and the force behind the popular messaging app WeChat. As part of a collaboration with Beijing, Alipay, a payment app operated by Alibaba's subsidiary Ant Financial, recently released a new feature that sends a color-based QR code to individuals via smartphone based on their answers to an online health survey. Depending on what symptoms they've been experiencing or whether they've traveled recently, they're assigned one of three colors that's tied to their ID number. Green means the user can travel freely; yellow prompts instructions for the user to remain quarantined for seven days; and red -- used in the most severe cases -- carries a 14-day quarantine period and instructs users to regularly check-in via an Alibaba chat app.

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Andrew Shell did a voicemailcast about his work with rssCloud, which plugs into RSS 2.0 feeds, and maintains backward compatibility with my implementation which I no longer maintain. He has to do really horrible things to run my software to be sure his stuff still works with it. His philosophy is mine. I really have very little influence on what other people do, sometimes they seem to not listen to prove they don't have to listen, and over time all our work gets erased. But Andrew definitely is a charter member of the soon-to-be-famous No Breakage Club.

Many of us have an overflowing kitchen cupboard of plastic containers to store our leftovers. But as awareness grows over the health and environmental pitfalls of plastic, some consumers may be wondering: Is it time to ditch that stash of old deli containers? From a report: Only 9% of all the plastic waste ever created has been recycled. From its contributions to global heating and pollution, to the chemicals and microplastics that migrate into our bodies, the food chain and the environment, the true cost of this cheap material is becoming more apparent. There are thousands of compounds found in plastic products across the food chain, and relatively little is known about most of them. But what we do know of some chemicals contained in plastic is concerning. Phthalates, for example, which are used to make plastic more flexible and are found in food packaging and plastic wrap, have been found by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in measurable levels across the US population (including in the body of Guardian journalist Emily Holden). They have been linked to reproductive dysfunction in animal studies and some researchers have suggested [PDF] links to decreased fertility, neurodevelopmental issues and asthma in humans. BPA, another chemical widely added to food plastics and can linings, has been subject to increasing regulations after studies linked the chemical to neonatal and infant brain and reproductive harm. But BPS and BPF, two common replacements used in products marketed as "BPA-free," may have similar effects to their predecessor: studies out of both the University of Texas and Washington State University found that even at a dose of one part per trillion, BPS could disrupt cell functioning. A 2019 study from New York University linked childhood obesity with BPS and BPF. There are many other chemicals added to plastic during production, and researchers concede that many gaps remain in our understanding of how they affect health and development. But research that is adding to concerns about the "miracle material" is growing.

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Update on Concord work. I've been trying to fit a more powerful keystroke capturer under Concord's keyboard handling code, but I'm not ready to debug the resulting code, which would basically be turned inside-out. The problem is that none of the JavaScript key handlers (that I've found so far) will decode an existing event, they have to actually capture the event itself and call back to the app. Maybe there's an exception. If such a toolkit exists, that would make the systematization of Concord's keystroke handling simple enough to attempt. The goal is to have all combinations of option, shift, cmd (or cntrl) be handleable by the outliner.

As Wall Street approaches the 20th anniversary of the piercing of the dot-com bubble, today's decade-old rally led by a few small players shows some similarities that cautious investors are keeping an eye on. From a report: March 11, 2000 marked the beginning of a crash of overly-inflated stocks that would last over two years, lead to the failure of investor favorites including Worldcom and Pets.com and take over 13 years for Wall Street to recover from. That bust ended a 1,000% decade-long Nasdaq .IXIC rally that had been fueled by low interest rates and a rush to invest in the emerging World Wide Web, often at any cost. Now, after hitting a record high on Feb. 13, the Nasdaq has reached over 9,700 points, almost double its high point in 2000 and about eight times the level of its trough in 2002. Among the so-called "Four Horsemen" of tech stocks that fueled much of the 1990s tech rally, only Microsoft's stock price has recovered from the dot-com bust. Intel and Cisco Systems remain below their 2000 highs, while Dell, the fourth member, has since been taken private and then relisted on the stock market. Microsoft is dueling with Apple for the title of Wall Street's most valuable publicly listed company, with its stock quadrupling since CEO Satya Nadella took over as chief in 2014 and refocused the maker of Windows on cloud computing, a technology central to the current rally in Silicon Valley stocks. With a market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, Microsoft is now trading at over 30 times expected earnings, its highest valuation since 2002, but still less than half of the highest PE it reached during the dot-com era. Intel and Cisco, no longer among Wall Street's most-favored tech stocks after investors refocused on software, are trading at PEs in line with recent years. Further reading: NYU Professor Scott Galloway adds: In the last 13 months Apple and Amazon have added Disney, AT&T/Time Warner, Fox, Netflix, Comcast, Viacom, MGM, Discovery, and Lionsgate to their market capitalization.

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Dell said it will sell RSA to a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group for $2.075 billion in a move to simplify its portfolio of businesses. From a report: RSA provides security technologies for threat detection and response, identity and access management as well as fraud prevention. RSA has more than 12,500 customers. According to Dell, the all-cash deal includes RSA Archer, RSA NetWitness Platform, RSA SecureID, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence and the RSA Conference. The Symphony Technology Group consortium includes the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers') and AlpInvest Partners (AlpInvest). Dell's deal to sell RSA comes as Broadcom acquired Symantec Enterprise Security business for $10.7 billion and Symantec's consumer unit became NortonLifelock. McAfee, formerly part of Intel, is now independent with a new CEO.

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Software developer Steve Streza: Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. [...] If you don't subscribe to these services, you'll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn't a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I'll break down all of the places in iOS that I've found that have Apple-manufactured ads.

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Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said on Monday that "all org[anizations] developing advance AI should be regulated, including Tesla." Musk was responding to a new Technology Review report on OpenAI, an organization founded in 2015 by Musk, along with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman. From a report: At the time of its founding in 2015, Musk posited that the group essentially arrived at the idea for OpenAI as an alternative to "sit[ting] on the sidelines" or "encourag[ing] regulatory oversight." Musk also said in 2017 that he believed that regulation should be put in place to govern the development of AI, preceded first by the formation of some kind of oversight agency that would study and gain insight into the industry before proposing any rules. In the intervening years, much has changed -- including OpenAI. The organization officially formed a for-profit arm owned by a non-profit parent corporation in 2019, and it accepted $1 billion in investment from Microsoft along with the formation a wide-ranging partnership, seemingly in contravention of its founding principles. Musk's comments this week in response to the MIT profile indicate that he's quite distant from the organization he helped co-found both ideologically and in a more practical, functional sense. The SpaceX founder also noted that he "must agree" that concerns about OpenAI's mission expressed last year at the time of its Microsoft announcement "are reasonable," and he said that "OpenAI should be more open." Musk also noted that he has "no control & only very limited insight into OpenAI" and that his "confidence" in Dario Amodei, OpenAI's research director, "is not high" when it comes to ensuring safe development of AI.

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The deadliness of the virus advances progressively with the age of the patient, research suggests.

The ravenous pests have devoured crops and pasture threatening a food crisis in East Africa.

OpenAI has a glossy exterior. In the four short years of its existence, it has catapulted itself to a spot among the leading AI research labs in the world. Part of it is its consistency in producing headline-grabbing research. Part of it is its co-founders Elon Musk and legendary investor Sam Altman. But above all, OpenAI is lionized for its mission. Its goal is to be the first to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI -- a machine with the learning and reasoning powers of a human mind. The purpose is not world domination, but rather, to ensure that the technology is developed safely and its benefits distributed evenly to the world. The implication is that AGI could easily run amok if its development is left to follow the path of least resistance. Narrow intelligence, the kind of clumsy AI that surrounds us today, has already served as an example. We now know that algorithms are biased and fragile; they can perpetrate great abuse and great deception; and the expense of developing and running them tends to concentrate their power in the hands of a few. By extrapolation, AGI could be catastrophic without the careful guidance of a benevolent shepherd. OpenAI wants to be that shepherd, and it has carefully crafted its image to fit the bill. In a field dominated by wealthy corporations, it was founded as a nonprofit. Its charter -- a document so sacred that employees' pay is tied to how well they adhere to it -- declares that OpenAI's "primary fiduciary duty is to humanity." This alluring narrative plays well with investors and the media, and in July Microsoft injected the lab with a fresh $1 billion. But a report on MIT Technology Review, for which it visited OpenAI's office -- and conducted nearly three dozen interviews with past and current employees, collaborators, friends, and other experts in the field -- suggest a different picture. There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors, the report said. Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration. Employees' accounts suggest that OpenAI, for all its noble aspirations, is obsessed with maintaining secrecy, protecting its image, and retaining the loyalty of its employees.

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