An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: President Trump's crackdown on social media companies faced a new legal challenge on Tuesday, as a technology policy organization claimed in a lawsuit that he violated the companies' right to free speech with his executive order aimed at curtailing their legal protections. The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology says in the suit that Mr. Trump's attempt to unwind a federal law that grants social media companies discretion over the content they allow on their platforms was retaliatory and would have a chilling effect on the companies. The lawsuit -- filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia -- is indicative of the pushback that the president is likely to face as he escalates his fight with social media companies, which he has accused of bias against conservative voices. It asks the court to invalidate the executive order. [...] "President Trump -- by publicly attacking Twitter and issuing the order -- sought to chill future online speech by other speakers," its filing said. The center added, "The order clouds the legal landscape in which the hosts of third-party content operate and puts them all on notice that content moderation decisions with which the government disagrees could produce penalties and retributive actions, including stripping them of Section 230's protections."

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Rodney King: Can We All Get Along?

Haven't heard this discussed on Twitter or in the news. Police are in trouble, their salaries are paid by localities whose tax base has crashed. We can’t take them for granted. I have no agenda, other than a need to be safe, and know that the police are an important part of that.

The U.S. investigation targets nine countries, plus the European Union, that have adopted or are considering new taxes that would hit American companies like Google and Amazon. From a report: The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would open an investigation into taxes on digital commerce that have been adopted or proposed in nine countries and the European Union, escalating a global battle that will affect where big American tech companies like Facebook and Amazon pay taxes. The administration's move could ultimately lead to American tariffs on imports from Brazil, Britain, India and a host of other countries, heightening the chances of another global trade dispute that results in retaliatory taxes on U.S. goods. The investigation, which will be conducted by the United States Trade Representative, could also complicate global negotiations that have been underway for more than a year and are aimed at reaching a multinational consensus on how to tax internet commerce that crosses borders. At issue are efforts spreading across Europe and beyond to impose so-called digital services taxes on economic activity generated online. Those taxes deviate from many traditional international tax regimes by affecting revenues earned by a company where they are generated -- regardless of whether the company has a physical presence there. For example, India imposed a 2 percent tax in April on online sales of goods and services to people in India by large foreign firms. The European Union has revived its push for a similar tax as a way to help fund response measures to the coronavirus.

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In a call with Facebook employees, who have protested the inaction on Mr. Trump's messages, Mr. Zuckerberg said his decision was "pretty thorough." From a report: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, on Tuesday stood firmly behind his decision to not do anything about President Trump's inflammatory posts on the social network, saying that he had made a "tough decision" but that it "was pretty thorough." In a question-and-answer session with employees conducted over video chat software, Mr. Zuckerberg sought to justify his position on Mr. Trump's messages, which has led to fierce internal dissent. The meeting, which had been scheduled for Thursday, was moved up to Tuesday after hundreds of employees protested the inaction by staging a virtual "walkout" of sorts on Monday. Facebook's principles and policies around free speech "show that the right action where we are right now is to leave this up," Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call, the audio of which was heard by The New York Times. He added that though he knew many people would be upset with the company, a review of its policies backed up his decision. "I knew that I would have to separate out my personal opinion," he said. "Knowing that when we made this decision we made, it was going to lead to a lot of people upset inside the company, and the media criticism we were going to get."

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schwit1 shares a report: Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus "immediately," and said its work and commitment to transparency were "very impressive, and beyond words." But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found. Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents. Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11. Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January -- all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.

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Services like Google Translate support only 100 languages, give or take. What about the thousands of other languages -- spoken by people just as vulnerable to this crisis? From a report: If we want to avoid a pandemic spreading to all the humans in the world, this information also has to reach all the humans of the world -- and that means translating Covid PSAs into as many languages as possible, in ways that are accurate and culturally appropriate. It's easy to overlook how important language is for health if you're on the English-speaking internet, where "is this headache actually something to worry about?" is only a quick Wikipedia article or WebMD search away. For over half of the world's population, people can't expect to Google their symptoms, nor even necessarily get a pamphlet from their doctor explaining their diagnosis, because it's not available in a language they can understand. [...] In a pandemic, the challenge isn't just translating one or a handful of primary languages in a single region -- it's on a scale of perhaps thousands of languages, at least 1,000 to 2,000 of the 7,000-plus languages that exist in the world today, according to the pooled estimates of the experts I spoke with, all of whom emphasized that this number was very uncertain but definitely the largest number they'd ever faced at once. Machine translation might be able to help in some circumstances, but it needs to be approached with caution. [...] That's not to say that machine translation isn't helpful for some tasks, where getting the gist quickly is more important than the nuanced translations humans excel at, such as quickly sorting and triaging requests for help as they come in or keeping an eye on whether a new misconception is bubbling up. But humans need to be kept in the loop, and both human and machine language expertise needs to be invested in during calmer times so that it can be used effectively in a crisis. The bigger issue with machine translation is that it's not even an option for many of the languages involved. Translators Without Borders is translating Covid information into 89 languages, responding to specific requests of on-the-ground organizations, and 25 of them (about a third) aren't in Google Translate at all. Machine translation disproportionately works for languages with lots of resources, with things like news sites and dictionaries that can be used as training data. Sometimes, like with French and Spanish, the well-resourced languages of former colonial powers also work as lingua francas for translation purposes. In other cases, there's a mismatch between what's easy to translate by machine versus what's useful to TWB: The group has been fielding lots of requests for Covid info in Kanuri, Dari, and Tigrinya, none of which are in Google Translate, but hasn't seen any for Dutch or Hebrew (which are in Google Translate but don't need TWB's help -- they have national governments already producing their own materials). Google Translate supports 109 languages, Bing Translate has 71, and even Wikipedia exists in only 309 languages -- figures that pale in comparison to the 500-plus languages on the list from the Endangered Languages Project, all human-created resources.

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India is offering financial incentives and plug-and-play facilities with an outlay of about 500 billion rupees ($6.6 billion) to attract investments from global companies in the manufacture of mobile phones and related components. From a report: The government will initially target five global suppliers and extend a financial incentive of as much as 6% on incremental sales of goods made in the country for a period of five years, according to the ministry for electronics and information technology. An incentive of 25% on capital expenditure will be provided for production of electronic components, semiconductors and other parts. Electronic manufacturing clusters with ready-to-use facilities will be offered. The move has the potential to make India as global hub for mobile phone manufacturing and make it the largest exported item out of India while generate half a million jobs, Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister for electronics and information technology, said at a press conference in New Delhi Tuesday.

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HBO Max, AT&T's big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T's mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data. From a report: That's the follow-up from a Vergecast conversation with Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive in charge of HBO Max. Asked whether HBO Max would hit the cap, Goncalves said his team "had the conversation" but didn't have the answer. AT&T later confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company's traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans. According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's "sponsored data" system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost.

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Hackers who obtained personal data on users of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange Coinsquare say they plan to use the information to perform so-called SIM swapping attacks, according to one of the hackers. Motherboard: The news shows hackers' continued interest in trying to leverage security issues with telecom-based forms of authentication. In a SIM swapping attack, a hacker takes control of a target's phone number, which then gives them the ability to request password resets for some websites or a victim's two-factor authentication code. Often, SIM swappers will use these techniques to steal cryptocurrency. The breach also signals the continued risk of insider access, with Coinsquare telling Motherboard a former employee was responsible for stealing the data. "The original intent was to sell it [the data] but we figured we would make more money by SIM swapping the accounts," a pseudonymous hacker who provided the Coinsquare data to Motherboard said in an online chat.

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Universities are struggling with online learning. And with social distancing here for some time, there are no easy solutions. From a report: As thousands of students logged into their university's systems at the same time, poor connections and technical problems were the norm -- and for the most part, teachers were left alone to troubleshoot issues, fix poor audio and video quality, and follow up with students individually to make sure they could access any missed content. With no end to the pandemic in sight, virtual classes are here to stay. They solve the problem of packed lecture halls and hallways that aren't designed for social distancing -- and are also far cheaper to run. But not many people want to pay almost $12,500 a year for the privilege of attending Zoom calls. Many UK universities are bracing for a gaping hole in their budgets as they expect fewer students to turn up in the autumn. A survey found that one in five people were willing to delay their undergraduate degrees if universities were not operating as normal due to the coronavirus pandemic. With 120,000 fewer students starting in September, UK universities could face a $950 million loss of income in tuition fees. The University of Manchester, which has announced plans to keep lectures online-only in the autumn term, is already preparing for the worst. On April 23, vice-chancellor Dame Nancy Rothwell told staff that redundancies and pay cuts may be necessary if 80 per cent of students from outside the EU and 20 per cent of UK and EU students decided to stay defer or drop out. In the worst-case scenario, the university could lose up to $338 in a single year -- a 15 to 25 per cent deficit. Unlike schools, universities are privately-run institutions free to develop their own roadmaps for getting out of lockdown. The University of Cambridge has become the first university in the country to say it will offer courses online for the entire 2020-21 academic year. With social distancing measures likely to stay in place for the foreseeable future, other universities are expected to follow suit with a "blended" mix of online lecturers and small group teaching -- for seminars, practical and laboratory work, and supervisions -- on campus. Start and break times will be staggered to avoid overcrowding and universities will redesign study areas and cafeterias to make them "Covid secure." But that will only work if universities can be dragged out of their traditional format and forced to use technology that works.

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An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 77 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox 77 includes faster JavaScript debugging, optional permissions for extensions, and Pocket recommendations in the U.K. You can download Firefox 77 for desktop now from Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 250 million active users, making it a major platform for web developers to consider. [...] Other than Pocket recommendations arriving in the U.K. (they've been in Canada, Germany, and the U.S. since April 2018), this is primarily a developer release. Firefox's Debugger is now better at handling large web apps with all their bundling, live reloading, and dependencies. Mozilla is promising performance improvements that speed up pausing and stepping, as well as cutting down on memory usage over time. Source maps should also see performance boosts -- some inline source maps load 10 times faster -- and improved reliability for many configurations. The debugger will now also respect the currently selected stack when stepping, which is useful when youâ(TM)ve stepped into a function call or paused in a library method further down in the stack.

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BTW, after Elizabeth Warren pulled out, we could have had a discussion about why her candidacy failed, but every time I tried to speak, I was told I couldn't understand because I am not a woman.

Too bad, but 1/2 the electorate is male, and if you want to win, you'll need a lot of male votes. It's the same old shit, drive a wedge in the electorate, your own electorate, as a supposed winning strategy? It's nuts to think that could work.

Warren appealed to imho the worst in women, based on the belief that men should shut up and do what we say. Not unlike the flavor of the #blm discussion, btw.

The women wanted some uninterrupted time to wallow about how fucked up the world is and how women would never gain full equality, there will never be a woman president they explained, because Warren was the best, and she didn't get the nomination. But Warren wasn't the best, and that was not the message of the Warren failure. They didn't want to hear it, and some of them, people I respect were incredibly abusive about it. These people don't want to win, they want pity. They were pretty clear about it. But I don't offer my pity in situations like this, because I don't accept the premise.

Warren wasn't a good-enough woman candidate. We aren't doomed to never having a woman president. But it isn't going to be Warren, until she's ready to be president for everyone. Obama did that, he didn't try to be the president for blacks, though blacks were rightfully proud, as I was, that our country had finally broken through on race, or so it seemed at the time. I will cry the day a woman is elected president, as I cried the day Obama won.

I supported the hell out of HRC, and at first supported Warren, until she started dropping in nasty bits about men into her speeches. At that point I knew if she got the nomination, she'd never get enough votes from men to win. She would've gotten my vote, but I wouldn't have liked doing it.

The US Department of Defense is woefully behind on its plan to upgrade its IT infrastructure to support the newer IPv6 protocol, according to a government report published on Monday. From a report: This current effort is the third time the DOD attempts to upgrade its infrastructure to support IPv6 over in the past 17 years. The first two attempts took place in 2003 and 2010, respectively. The 2003 effort was abandoned with the DOD citing security risks and a lack of personnel trained in IPv6, while the second attempt was also abandoned, similarly on the grounds that IPv6 was not yet secure enough for the DOD's sensitive networks. On Monday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing agency of the US government, said that the DOD's third attempt isn't doing any better either. GAO officials said the DOD failed to follow four basic requirements that were set out by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2006. The four requirements were part of an OMB guideline sent to all federal agencies detailing the proper procedure for upgrading networks from IPv4 to IPv6. "For its current [third] initiative, DOD has not completed three of four longstanding OMB requirements," GAO auditors said in a report published on Monday.

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The lights were out in the White House while the president hunkered in the bunker freaked out and humiliated. His enemy comes into focus, it's the people out there, complaining, again, like everyone else, they can't see how smart he is, he's got to do something about this. His speech on Saturday welcoming a new wave of space exploration didn't work, it didn't replace the protests as the top story. Alone in the dark White House, ignored, he hatched a plan to put the spotlight back on him.

One of his aides had discovered that he could order the military into DC, due to a loophole in some law, so he was going to use that to bust out of the bunker, and get back in charge. I'll show him (er them) he said to himself (the him he was referring to was his long-dead father). I'll bring in the military and have them do something spectacular, even better than the Blue Angels flying over the cities to get all their attention (another of his spectacular plans that didn't win him the adulation he deserves).

Timed to perfectly coincide with his speech, like the music playing in Apocyalypse Now or Rocky or Patton, the soldiers, on horseback, zoom in and clear the park for Trump's dramatic escape from the bunker! Super Trump. Accompanied by his sidekicks, The Law (Barr), The Gun (Esper) and The Troop (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Wonder Woman, of course, and the The Boy Wonder (Ivanka and Jared). Should we bring the dogs? Nahh that's too much he thought to himself but accidentally said out loud.

He spent two full days planning it out, like Captain Queeg and the strawberries. He would prove conclusively he was really in charge, even if his father didn't think he was good for anything.