"I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday. Since then, Vice reports, "Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network..." Zuckerberg's quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party system to do so. Nonetheless, Donald Trump later quoted Zuckerberg's favorable response in a tweet. Now, two satirical articles by websites with Australian domain names are going viral on Facebook, spreading misinformation about Zuckerberg and calling attention to his stance against fact checking by social media companies. The first article, posted on Thursday by a site called The Chaser, is titled "'Social media should not fact check posts,' says child molester Mark Zuckerberg," which also baselessly alleges that the CEO likes black jellybeans. It has more than 200,000 interactions on Facebook, according to the Facebook-owned analytics platform Crowdtangle. This article has also gone viral on Twitter, where The Chaser's tweet has amassed more than 4,000 retweets. Another article, also posted on Thursday from a site called The Shovel, is titled "Mark Zuckerberg — Dead at 36 — Says Social Media Should Not Fact Check Posts." This post has nearly 50,000 interactions on Facebook and is also viral on Twitter.

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Ridley Scott was the fifth choice to direct the 1979 film Alien, remembers the Los Angeles Times, "meaning that no one was expecting the film to become as important and influential as it now is." This week they chronicled some more remembrances about the film from 82-year-old Ridley Scott: The central role of Ellen Ripley — also portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in three subsequent sequels — was originally written as a man... "I think it was Alan Ladd [then president of 20th Century Fox] who said, 'Why can't Ripley be a woman?' And there was a long pause, that at that moment I never thought about it. I thought, why not, it's a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went... I found Sigourney by word of mouth. Somebody had been told that Siourney was on an off-Broadway stage doing something, that I should meet. And I did," Scott said. "And there it was, she was perfect. In terms of scale, size, intelligence, her acting is just fantastic. And so it was made for her, really." The film's notorious chest-burster scene, in which an alien creature emerges from within actor John Hurt's chest, is now among the classic scenes in modern horror cinema. It was shot with multiple cameras because Scott could only really perform the full effect once, "because once I blew blood all over that set, there was no cleaning it up... I kept it very much from the actors and I kept the actual little creature, whatever that would be, from the actors. I never wanted them to see it," Scott said. "Remember there was no digital effects in those days at all. I'm going to somehow bring that creature out of his chest...." Scott recalled the influence that Star Wars had on him at the time, noting, "It opened the gate for me feeling comfortable that science fiction was no longer silly fantasy but actually had a reality to it... So I was blown away... My hat still comes off to George," Scott said of Lucas for the first Star Wars. "Without question his was by far the best, still." Scott directed the 2017 film Alien: Covenant, the Times notes, "And he may not be done yet. "What I always thought when I was making it, the first one, why would a creature like this be made and why was it traveling in what I always thought was a kind of war-craft, which was carrying a cargo of these eggs. What was the purpose of the vehicle and what was the purpose of the eggs? That's the thing to question — who, why, and for what purpose is the next idea, I think."

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When Dutch restaurants open tomorrow, one will be using two shiny white-and-red robot waiters, reports the Associated Press: "Hello and welcome," the robots say — in a voice best described as pre-programmed. Their duties will include greeting customers, serving drinks and dishes and returning used glasses and crockery. It's unclear whether diners will be expected to tip. One thing the robots will certainly do is see that social distancing rules are respected. "We will use them to make sure the five feet we need during the corona crisis sticks," Leah Hu said. "I've had negative reactions," she said, "such as saying it makes it impersonal." But it may prove just what customers crave when Dutch restaurants are allowed to reopen Monday as lockdown restrictions are further eased. In a stab at quasi-human panache, one robot wears a chiffon scarf around its neck.... And in the southern Zeeland province, the Hus don't want to hear any complaints about the robots robbing young people of a job. They say it's hard enough anyway to find staff in a rural region without any major city close by... "We are often busy and cleaning tables and the robots give us an extra hand." It also frees up the human staff for some more personal contact. "We are not disappearing. We are still here. They will always need people in this industry," she said.

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techtsp quotes The Windows Club: In a major breakthrough, Microsoft Edge now supports Native File System API, which will take progressive web apps and their usage to a whole new level. An official roadmap entry points towards the new development, which only means one thing: Bridging the native app gap using modern web technologies... This is exactly where Microsoft Edge's Native File System API support comes into play, and Edge is already rolling out a native PDF editing support that uses this Native File System API. In the future, Microsoft Edge users can easily save edits made to PDF documents back to the file instead of saving a copy each time... Starting in Google Chrome 83, a new origin trial has started for the Native File System API for all desktop platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS. We saw it in action in the text editor demo.... Over the last few years, the web has evolved into an incredibly powerful platform in itself, and with the introduction and significant adoption of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), the cross-device software delivery became much easier. But no matter how great PWAs are, they have certain limitations that we can't possibly ignore. And these limitations prevent users from replacing native apps with progressive web apps. In short, PWAs can't do everything that native apps can do.

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A guide to SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle, which carried astronauts to the space station.

"Zoom plans to strengthen the encryption of its service for paying customers," reports Newsweek, "but the upgrade will not be available to users of its free service." Zoom security consultant Alex Stamos later confirmed the details of the reported move in an interview with Reuters, which first reported the changes on Friday. But he also told the news outlet that Zoom's plans could still change. "The CEO is looking at different arguments," Stamos said. "The current plan is paid customers plus enterprise accounts where the company knows who they are." In the wake of privacy concerns, he added that Zoom was making significant efforts to upgrade safety and trust on its platform. In an emailed statement to Newsweek, a Zoom spokesperson said: "Zoom's approach to end-to-end encryption is very much a work in progress — everything from our draft cryptographic design, which was just published last week, to our continued discussions around which customers it would apply to." The tech company's plans to boost the encryption of video calls on its platform have been revealed a month after it was reported that half a million Zoom account credentials were being sold on the Dark Web. Zoom's increased usage during lockdowns brought increase scrutiny, reports CNET, which "revealed several Zoom security problems and the fact that an earlier Zoom boast of end-to-end encryption was baseless."

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Long-time Slashdot reader lpq writes: I followed a link that pointed at a Microsoft security advisory about ".lnk" files. The original link, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/technet/security/advisory/2286198.mspx, produced this message: Your request has been blocked. This may be due to several reasons. 1. You are using a proxy that is known to send automated requests to Microsoft. Check with your network administrator if there is any proxy and what User-Agent they are sending in the request header. 2. Your request pattern matches an automated process. To eliminate, reduce the volume of requests over a period of time. 3. Reference ID: 41.70790b91.4823110533.409105b4 It turns out the advisory number doesn't matter, just the extension for "Active Microsoft Server Page" (https.../.mspx) at the end. I guess there were too many security advisory lookups for MS to handle! *snort*! The .mspx extension indicates a page using a special internal Microsoft rendering framework with a custom web handler (built in ASP.Net). But I ran some tests Saturday, and observed the exact same glitch described above using three different browsers — Firefox, Edge, and Brave. Anyone have a theory about what's going on? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Why is Microsoft blocking its own server pages?

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Ultimately imho the only form of protest that works is what Killer Mike said in his speech. Kick their asses in the voting booth.

We, and the world don't understand something really important. The United States is nothing like the country it was a few years ago. There's been so much change -- it's not reversible. There was still a little hope if nothing changed too much before the November election that we might possibly start to recover in January next year, but a couple of things happened that make that impossible now: 1. Barr. 2. Covid-19. We're way down Martin Niemöller's list. It's not just people of color that are under attack. The other day the president tweeted that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. Life is very cheap now. 100K people died of a preventable pandemic in the last few months and more that number will die before the election. When he talks about dead Democrats, listen. Yes, most of the dead are poor people and people of color. But also enough whites and people of priviledge for us all to feel it now. That's a very profound change, it must not be overlooked. But we cling to the same news system. We value the opinions of people who are heavily invested in the pre-Trump-Covid world. People who naturally tell the story of how we will return to what we were. I just got a heavy dose of that watching just a few minutes of the Sunday news on CNN and MSNBC. But we will not be going back to anything like what we were. We need to get in the moment, and get into save my life mode for all of us. The protests of the last few days are an impossible dream, you can see that in the police reaction. If we're going not be completely devastated, we need new thinking. I thought the two speeches I linked to yesterday were an excellent start. Killer Mike, Angela Merkel and one more, Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

"We're less than 10 meters away..." "@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago. They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube. 1,024,406 people are already watching... "NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed.

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Digital Trends reports: Waymo is planning to relaunch its fleet of self-driving minivans into Bay Area streets on June 8, according to an email acquired by The Verge. However, instead of transporting passengers, the vehicles will instead focus on delivering packages for non-profit organizations #DrawTogether, which gives art kits to children, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired... The pending return to the Bay Area follows Waymo's restart of its testing program in Phoenix, as lockdown restrictions were eased earlier this month... The autonomous vehicles will also soon also make their way back in Detroit and Los Angeles. The Verge argues that Waymo "is the latest autonomous vehicle operator to discover that doing deliveries allows it to sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles off the road."

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Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, writes "Over the last few weeks I've interviewed a range of open source project maintainers, most of which don't directly get paid for supporting their projects... Is this a bad thing?" It's not completely clear. Linux Foundation executive Chris Aniszczyk has been an outspoken opponent of open source "tip jars" that seek to sustain projects with donations. "These [open source developers] should be encouraged to start businesses or your business should hire them directly," he argues. But many such developers don't want a 9-to-5 corporate job, preferring the independence of contract work. Open source sustainability, in other words, is messy. Most open source project maintainers with whom I've spoken got started because it was a "fun" way to spend their free time. They had a variety of personal "itches" they needed to scratch. Exactly none started coding because they were hoping to get paid for that work. In fact, in some cases, it was specifically to create space from their employer that they started the project. For Datasette founder Simon Willison, for example, he "wanted a creative outlet." That is, a project that he got to have complete control over. In some ways, he said, it was perhaps "a way of blowing off steam," but really it was a place where he could express his creativity without a corporate overlord steering that creativity. See the problem...? Aniszczyk reasonably suggests that the most sustainable source of funding is a paycheck, but that's precisely what many of these developers don't want. Or, at least, they don't want a paycheck that comes with restrictions on their ability to code freely... [O]pen source sustainability will never have one, meta answer for all of open source. It's always a project-by-project analysis and, really, a founder-by-founder (or community-by-community) decision.

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The Irish chieftain was buried in the same Spanish chapel as Christopher Columbus.

Two astronauts launched into orbit for historic mission to the International Space Station.

US astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are closing in for a Sunday rendezvous with the ISS.