The Lincoln Project does to Trump what Trump did to his 2016 adversaries. Thank heavens someone did this. The Democrats are terrible at being nasty. For that you need a Republican.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: One of the three Google employees who created Kubernetes — the open source container-orchestration platform now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — was software engineer Brendan Burns. But in 2016 Burns became an engineer at Microsoft (where since March he's been a corporate vice president at Microsoft). This week in a new podcast interview [video here], Burns explained why he went from Google to Microsoft, which was "all-in on cloud": Obviously growing up in Seattle, Microsoft is sort of like the home-town team — so that was a big plus also. And it's been great to be able to come in and really help them figure out — I think one of the really amazing things about being there is it's a company in transition. Certainly four years ago when I joined, it's a company in transition. And getting a chance to help continue that transition, and help continue and shift its focus from closed-source and Windows to a really renewed focus on open source and Linux and cloud native application development — that ability to influence and help shape direction has been really awesome also. But it was more than just their commitment to the cloud... "There's just such a great developer history there, of developer tooling and developer productivity. Just such a focus on empowering people to build stuff. That's really compelling to me too, because I think one of the things we really haven't done a good job of in Kubernetes is make it easier to build these programs. Right? We do a lot to make it easier to operate the stuff, but it's still really hard to build these systems, and Kubernetes isn't helping you at all. So I'm really excited and interested and thinking a lot about how can we make it easier for developers to build systems. And I think the DNA and history and experience of Microsoft to build things, the hugely successful platform that is Windows, means there's just a great — a really strong amount of DNA about what it takes to build a platform that doesn't just succeed for elite devs but can really succeed for people all the way from no-code solutions all the way through to advance systems solutions. And so that opportunity is really exciting.

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shirappu writes: Nick Walton created AI Dungeon as an experiment to build an AI dungeon master for D&D games. Since then, it's grown into a text adventure game in which players can type in anything they want, with the game's AI responding dynamically [and with over 1.5 million players and multiplayer adventures.] In this interview about the year since its release, Nick talks about how it works and what they're working on now: quest systems, world persistence, and longer-term memory. He also opens up about where he thinks AI systems can support game development. "One of our visions for AI is not as a tool to replace game designers, but a tool for augmenting their work. We want to make it easier to create awesome games. If it only takes one or two people to build an awesome game because AI fills in the details, it opens up doors for a lot of people. "We really want to enable people to build cool things with this tech. Deploying this kind of AI training and these massive models is really hard for the average person, so our hope is that we build out the infrastructure and platform, and then let people build cool things on top of that." Walton says they've recently added a modding feature that "basically allows for people to create custom modifications for their worlds." In a test run I was a cyberpunk "living in the the futuristic city of Zail. You have a bag of drugs and a holoband. You wake up in a dark alley with bruises all over your body. You have no idea what happened. You stand up and see three men pointing guns at you..."

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Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes: For several years, Zipline has deployed autonomous, fixed-wing airplane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received permission to test their aircraft in the U.S., ferrying COVID-19 supplies from a depot to a hospital in North Carolina. The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight — just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less. The article notes it's America's "first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA." But meanwhile, another headline this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones "will drop library books so kids in Virginia can do their summer reading." Wing, a company owned by Google parent Alphabet, started delivering household goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and local restaurants to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand homes last October. The company has seen a jump in demand during the pandemic as people are increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like grocery stores, said Keith Heyde, head of Virginia operations for Wing. The company reached a high of 1,000 deliveries globally in a single week this spring, he said. And they're not the only companies experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes: UPS and CVS have also paired up with a focus on medical products. The two companies are partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to residents of The Villages in Florida, one of the country's biggest retirement communities. The deliveries come from a CVS store about a half mile away and mark the first paid residential deliveries by UPS's drone unit Flight Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a central location, where a Flight Forward employee will ferry them by golf cart to homes. Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have tried using drones to spray disinfectant in crowded cities. But Forbes reports that around the world, "the biggest use case has been the deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and monitor crowds." Although at least one Paris prefect complains that there's still one problem with the drones. "Sometimes they are attacked by birds, which mistake them for rivals."

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"An innocent man faced a torrent of online threats and abuse after being mistakenly identified in a viral video in which an angry cyclist hurt a child," reports the BBC: Mr. Weinberg was falsely identified when the wrong date was attached to the initial appeal made by the police in Bethesda, U.S. Mr. Weinberg used the popular fitness tracking app Strava, which showed him as having been on the Maryland bike trail on that day. However on the correct date he was working at home... Once his address had been shared by others — a practice known as doxxing — the police had to patrol the area for his safety, reported New York magazine... Mr. Weinberg has since received dozens of apologies from people who abused him online. Weinberg mistakenly thought his app only shared his bike-ride routes with his network of friends, New York Magazine reports. They add that Weinberg also discovered tweets wrongly accusing another man — a former police officer in Maryland — which had been retweeted and liked more than half a million times. And that the woman who'd posted Weinberg's home address later "deleted it and posted an apology, writing that in all of her eagerness to see justice served, she was swept up in the mob that so gleefully shared misinformation, depriving someone of their own right to justice. "Her correction was shared by fewer than a dozen people."

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I think the #BLM protests will become more substantial as the hardships of the virus get deeper. In the US, for example, the rent moratoria are expiring. Unemployment subsidies as well. Hunger and homelessness will explode as unemployment did in March and April.

NBC News reports that in various parts of America, "States that had committed to using contact tracing apps or expressed interest are now backing away from those claims." The few states that have rolled them out have seen only tepid responses. And there are no indications of any momentum for the apps at a national level... A survey of state health officials from Business Insider this week showed that only three states — Alabama, North Dakota and South Carolina — said they were going to use the software provided by Apple and Google. The number hasn't grown since the same three states reported interest last month, and none has launched an app with the Google-Apple software... Even the World Health Organization has piled on. "Digital tools do not replace the human capacity needed to do contact tracing," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing this week, adding that more evidence was needed and that the WHO would convene experts to share information... A handful of states — North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah — launched apps without the support of Apple and Google, but none saw widespread adoption. More states, including Washington, have considered doing so or have launched test versions, and it's possible that apps will gain momentum closer to the fall, when they might be taken up by more employers, schools and universities and at related football games. Two months ago Google and Apple announced a joint project to build a contact-tracing app -- which was supported by the governor of America's most populous state, California. But now a spokesperson for California's public health department tells NBC News that the state isn't currently using any apps or cellphone tracking technology. "Most of the contact tracing work (notifying people who have been in close contact with an infected person to prevent the disease from spreading to others) can be done by phone, text, email and chat."

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Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K writes: The site known in amateur radio for access to a plethora of SDR (Software Defined Radio) sites sdr.hu has now closed down. The SDR sites that exists all over the world are for listening in to primarily shortwave radio. From the site: I'd like to say a big thanks to everyone who joined my journey with this project! I hope you had a good time listening on the site, and learnt some things about SDR. The purpose of this site was to provide a technological demonstration for amateur radio operators about Software Defined Radio, and I hope this goal has been reached. As this website was a one-person hobby project, with my tasks and responsibilities growing, and my focus moving to other projects at which I hope to make a greater positive impact, I'm unable to further develop SDR.hu and protect it from abuse. Furthermore, I think this site has some good alternatives now. Nevertheless, in my opinion amateur radio receivers should be shared with strict access control in the future. Archive.org shows versions of the site dating back to at least 2015. But now in an FAQ its operator says they don't have the capacity to "protect it from abuse." Though one amateur radio news site has already shared an alternative for finding online SDRs.

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Do you want to return to normal? Normal was pretty fucked up. Normal got us here.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: In September of 2019, Facebook launched its Deepfake Detection Challenge -- a public contest to develop autonomous algorithmic detection systems to combat the emerging threat of deepfake videos. After nearly a year, the social media platform announced the winners of the challenge, out of a pool of more than 2,000 global competitors... Facebook spent around $10 million on the contest and hired more than 3,500 actors to generate thousands of videos -- 38.5 days worth of data in total. It was the amatuer, phone-shot sort you'd usually see on social media rather than the perfectly-lit, studio-based vids created by influencers... The company then gave these datasets to researchers. The first was a a publicly available set, the second a "black box" set of more than 10,000 videos with additional technical tricks baked in, such as adjusted frame rates and video qualities, image overlays, unrelated images interspersed throughout the video's frames. It even included some benign, non-deepfakes just for good measure. On the public data sets, competitors averaged just over 82 percent accuracy, however for the black box set, the model of the winning entrant, Selim Seferbekov, averaged a skosh over 65 percent accuracy, despite the bevy of digital tricks and traps it had to contend with... While the company does intend to release these models under an open source license, enabling any enterprising software engineer free access to the code, Facebook already employs a deepfake detector of its own. This contest, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer explained, is designed to establish a sort of nominal detection capability within the industry... "A lesson I learned the hard way over the last couple years, is I want to be prepared in advance and not be caught flat footed, so my whole aim with this is to be better prepared in case [deepfakes do] become a big issue," Schroepfer continued. "It is currently not a big issue but not having tools to automatically detect and enforce a particular form of content, really limits our ability to do this well at scale."

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What if after journalism purges all the unacceptable points of view there’s nothing left but baby pandas and such.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On May 29, President Trump said his administration would take immediate action to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization. "Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization, and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving, urgent global public health needs," Trump said at the time, while criticizing the WHO's response to the coronavirus pandemic and claiming that "China has total control" over the United Nations agency. But now, two weeks later, there's nothing to indicate that Trump has followed through on his plan. In an article yesterday titled "U.S. hasn't taken action to withdraw from WHO despite Trump pledge," The Hill wrote that "no steps toward a formal withdrawal have been taken," and that "a WHO spokesman told The Hill that the agency had received no formal notification that the United States would withdraw." Another article yesterday in Stat, a health news website, said that "none of the levers that would need to be pulled to follow through on [Trump's WHO] decision has been pulled." For example, the Trump administration has "not paid outstanding financial obligations to the WHO, a step that would be required before the United States could pull out under a joint resolution signed by Congress," the article said. These reports follow a Vanity Fair article published Monday that describes "the secret plan to unwithdraw from the WHO after Trump's 'bizarre,' 'ruinous' exit." The article continued: "Now, Vanity Fair has learned, secret negotiations aimed at reversing Trump's decision have begun between [U.S.] Ambassador [Andrew] Bremberg and the WHO's director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. A phone call Saturday between the two men resulted in a possible framework agreement to restore the relationship, which the U.S. diplomatic corps views as essential to the global fight against coronavirus and myriad other public health issues. The framework would allow for both increased scrutiny of China's conduct and an independent review of the WHO's performance in the first six months of the outbreak. And discussions continue over whether the WHO would exert pressure on China to turn over original samples of the live virus and allow its scientists to be interviewed regarding the virus's origins. "It's fair to say the US is not out of WHO, and negotiations are ongoing to address concerns and hopefully walk back from this decision," said an official who participated in a call with G7 partners, an alliance of countries with advanced economies, where this information was shared."

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Twitter announced Thursday that it had deleted more than 170,000 accounts tied to a Chinese state-linked operation that were spreading deceptive information around the COVID-19 virus, political dynamics in Hong Kong, and other issues. The Hill reports: Almost 25,000 of the accounts that were deleted formed what Twitter described as the "core network," while around 150,000 accounts were amplifying messages from the core groups. "In general, this entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities," the company wrote in a blog post. "They were Tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China (CCP), while continuing to push deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong." According to an analysis of the accounts by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), many of the accounts shut down were tweeting about the COVID-19 pandemic, with activity around this issue beginning in late January and reaching its peak in late March. The accounts primarily praised China's response to the COVID-19 crisis. While most of the accounts had less than 10 followers and no bios, the SIO found that they had tweeted almost 350,000 times before being shut down.

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Proudrooster writes: Can SpaceX's Starlink deliver less than 100ms latency? That is the $16 billion dollar question as the FCC looks to pump more money into rural broadband (PDF). Will rural America ever get broadboand? What will America get for giving billions of dollars to incumbent providers? Is this all just FUD or a publicity stunt by the FCC to stop states from building out their own networks? Will American's continue to pay the highest prices on earth for broadband? Will broadband and Internet access ever be considered a human right. So many questions, so few answers. Stay tuned. "FCC Chairman Ajit Pai backed off a plan that would have completely prevented SpaceX and other LEO companies from applying for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers," reports Ars Technica. "But the FCC's full order was released today and suggests that SpaceX will have a tough time convincing the commission that its service will deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms." The FCC has "serious doubts that any low-Earth orbit networks will be able to meet the short-form application requirements for bidding in the low-latency tier" and that companies like SpaceX thus face a high chance of being rejected when they apply for funding as low-latency providers: "Service providers that intend to use low-Earth orbit satellites claim that the latency of their technology is "dictated by the laws of physics" due to the altitude of the satellite's orbit. We remain skeptical that the altitude of a satellite's orbit is the sole determinant of a satellite applicant's ability to meet the Commission's low-latency performance requirements. As commenters have explained, the latency experienced by customers of a specific technology is not merely a matter of the physics of one link in the transmission. Propagation delay in a satellite network does not alone account for latency in other parts of the network such as processing, routing, and transporting traffic to its destination. Short-form applicants seeking to bid as a low-latency provider using low-Earth orbit satellite networks will face a substantial challenge demonstrating to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold." As Proudrooster mentioned, if SpaceX is rejected from the low-latency category, it "will be at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion -- $1.6 billion yearly, over ten years -- from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)," the report says. "The FCC will prioritize low-latency networks when awarding funding, so SpaceX and other LEO providers could come up short against terrestrial networks. Even DSL providers would have an advantage over LEO networks in funding battles if the satellite companies are placed in the FCC's high-latency category."

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