AmiMoJo shares a report from Polygon: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has acknowledged the existence of racist stereotypes in its sourcebooks, and pledged to make changes to ameliorate the issue. In a blog post published on June 17 titled "Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons," Wizards of the Coast said that depicting a diverse array of human beings -- beyond "fantasy versions of northern Europeans" -- is "one of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D." The developers noted that while they want to feature characters "who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs," the game still contains problematic depictions of fantasy races. Among these races are the orcs, who are often characterized as a savage horde of creatures who lust for battle, and the drow, an evil dark-skinned subrace of elves who dwell in a subterranean matriarchy. Wizards of the Coast specifically addressed these two groups in laying out recent and future changes to D&D products: "We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do." They add: "Later this year, we will release a product (not yet announced) that offers a way for a player to customize their character's origin, including the option to change the ability score increases that come from being an elf, a dwarf, or one of D&D's many other playable folk. This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own." The publisher also said "it's adjusting material that maligns or stereotypes real-world ethnic groups like the Roma," reports Polygon. "The company has revised the adventure Curse of Strahd, which includes a people known as the Vistani that 'echoes some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world.'" "In addition, the publisher said two future books will be written with a Romani consultant so as to characterize the Vistani 'in a way that doesn't rely on reductive tropes.'"

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Google said Wednesday it was changing the defaults on its services in an effort to store less browser history and location data on its servers. NBC News reports: Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the first time a person turns on location history, the default option would be for the data to be stored for 18 months. Activity from the web and from apps would also default to 18 months for new accounts, he said. "This means your activity data will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it," Pichai said. There will be no automatic change for existing accounts and people who already have location history turned on in their Google settings, but the company plans to inform existing users of the option to set up auto-delete after three to 18 months, he said. People also have the option to turn the setting off.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Indiana's Supreme Court has ruled that the Fifth Amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her iPhone. The court held that the Fifth Amendment's rule against self-incrimination protected Katelin Seo from giving the police access to potentially incriminating data on her phone. The courts are divided on how to apply the Fifth Amendment in this kind of case. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia man was released from jail after four years of being held in contempt in connection with a child-pornography case. A federal appeals court rejected his argument that the Fifth Amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock hard drives found in his possession. A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion in 2009 -- as did a Colorado federal court in 2012, a Virginia state court in 2014, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2014. But other courts in Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that forcing people to provide computer or smartphone passwords would violate the Fifth Amendment. Lower courts are divided about this issue because the relevant Supreme Court precedents all predate the smartphone era. To understand the two competing theories, it's helpful to analogize the situation to a pre-digital technology.

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Cuomo says the NYC subway is visibly cleaner. Is it?

Safari 14, scheduled to be released later this fall with iOS 14 and macOS 11, is a release that is packed choke-full with features. From a report: The biggest and most important of the new additions is support for WebExtensions, a technology for creating browser extensions. What this means for Safari users is that starting this fall, they'll see a huge influx of new Safari extensions as add-on developers are expected to port their existing Chrome and Firefox extensions to work on Apple's browser as well. Apple said that, for now, WebExtensions will only be available for Safari on macOS. Safari 14 is also an end of an era, as this will be the first version of Safari that won't support Adobe Flash Player content. But while old stuff is being removed, new stuff is also being added. One of the new technologies added to Safari is support for HTTP/3, a new web standard that will make loading websites faster and safer. Another important addition in Safari is support for WebP, a lightweight image format that has been gaining widespread adoption across the internet. The format, created by Google, serves as an alternative to the older JPEG format, and Safari has been the last browser to add support for it. [...] But Safari hasn't been lagging behind other browsers just in terms of HTTP/3 and WebP support. Apple has also added support for another cool feature, namely breach alerts, already present in both Chrome and Firefox. Starting this fall, Apple says that Safari 14 will scan a user's locally-stored passwords and show a prompt if one or more of the user's credentials are present in publicly available lists of breached accounts.

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Taking place this week is the virtual Perl + Raku "Conference in the Cloud" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event to go virtual. A big announcement out of it is Perl 7. From a report: Perl 7 basically amounts to Perl 5 with more modern defaults and foregoing some of the extensive backward compatibility support found with Perl 5. News of Perl 7 comes a few days after the release of Perl 5.32. Perl 7 succeeds Perl 5 due to the Perl 6 initiative previously for what is now known as the Raku programming language. So to avoid confusion, similar to the PHP 6 debacle, Perl 7 is the next version. For the most part though Perl 7 is close to Perl 5.32 with changed defaults and is more forward looking with less commitment to backward compatibility support.

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Facebook is "aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation," said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. "They have become the vehicle for climate misinformation, and thus should be held partially responsible for a lack of action on climate change." From a report: Brulle was reacting to Facebook's recent decision, made at the request of climate science deniers, to create a giant loophole in its fact-checking program. Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company's third-party fact-checking program. But now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it "opinion." The organization that requested the change, the CO2 Coalition, is celebrating, E&E news reported on Monday. The group, which has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, says its views on climate change are increasingly ignored by the mainstream media. Now it plans to use Facebook to aggressively push climate misinformation on the public -- without having to worry about fact checks from climate scientists. A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that "climate models" were a "failure" that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook. There was just one issue: It wasn't true. This is exactly the kind of mess that Facebook's network of independent fact-checkers is supposed to solve.

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Olympus, once one of the world's biggest camera brands, is selling off that part of its business after 84 years. The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable. From a report: The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said. It had recorded losses for the last three years. The Japanese company made its first camera in 1936 after years of microscope manufacture. The Semi-Olympus I featured an accordion-like fold-out camera bellows, and cost more than a month's wages in Japan. The company continued to develop the camera business over the decades, becoming one of the top companies by market share. "There's a huge amount of affection for Olympus, going right back," says Nigel Atherton, editor of Amateur Photographer magazine. The 1970s was a high point, with their cameras advertised on television by celebrity photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Lichfield. "Those cameras were revolutionary - they were very small, very light, they were beautifully designed, had really nice quality lenses," adds Atherton.

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Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this week didn't bring any particularly revolutionary new feature, but it did something perhaps more important for Apple's long-term strategy. The latest updates will unify the company's devices and give customers more reasons to stay within its product ecosystem. From a report: From an average user's standpoint, the updates to iOS and iPadOS were underwhelming and minor, aside from widgets (which Android has had for years). Siri's interface changes were impressive, but there wasn't much discussion of a needed under-the-hood revamp, and the Watch update was incremental, other than sleep tracking. The company didn't let these products languish, but Apple's engineers essentially did just enough. The really impressive achievements came in getting the products to work together, plus sweeping improvements to the Mac. The biggest news of the conference was that Apple-made chips will replace those from Intel in Mac computers. Besides higher speeds and longer battery life, the change customers will notice first is that Mac computers will work more like an iPhone or an iPad, and will have the ability to run the same apps on the new macOS Big Sur operating system. Soon, someone will be able to buy an iPhone app and run it across Apple's major platforms: the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, and in some cases a variant of it on the Apple Watch and Apple TV. The company also moved toward increased unification by bringing over glance-able information (widgets) from the Apple Watch to its larger devices, and by more deeply integrating its smart home features across products. For example, a HomePod speaker can now be a doorbell and an Apple TV can be a door camera viewer. All of this may drive existing customers to buy additional Apple products, knowing that they'll work together seamlessly. The strategy could boost Apple's sales in the long-term and, just as importantly, make it more difficult for a user to leave behind a device, which could blow a hole in their network of Apple products.

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Brazil, the second largest market for WhatsApp, has suspended the instant messaging app's mobile payments service in the country a week after its rollout in what is the latest setback for Facebook. From a report: In a statement, Brazil's central bank said it was taking the decision to "preserve an adequate competitive environment" in the mobile payments space and to ensure "functioning of a payment system that's interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap." Banks in the nation have asked Mastercard and Visa, who are among the payments partners for WhatsApp in Brazil, to suspend money transfer on WhatsApp app. Failure to comply with the order would subject the payments companies to fines and administrative sanctions. In its statement, Brazil's central bank suggested it hadn't had the opportunity to analyze WhatsApp's payment service prior to its rollout.

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Glitch asks a very interesting question.

If you could rename JavaScript what would you name it?

Let's talk this through.

First what is JavaScript. Let's make a list of things it is.

• It's a single syntax that works in the browser and on the server. A lot of the built-in routines work in both place.
• It's a vastly too-hard-to-learn language, but it's what we got.
• If you were going to design one language that everything should be translated to, it would never be JavaScript, but once again, it's what we got.
• Every toolkit shows up as a package in the server runtime for JavaScript. It's the default platform. If you want to write software that integrates lots of back end services, JS is your best choice.
• It was created by the immediate competitive need of Netscape's visionary, and a future venture capitalist, combined with the longevity of a standard syntax that has grown a lot especially in the last couple of years.

In most of the answers to What Is It? you could summarize it by saying Worse Is Better. In every category, given a choice between elegance and simplicity, performance and ease of use, JavaScript picks the worst of the options. And since worse is better, that's good! That's why it wins. It doesn't worry about being better, does it work, if so, let's use it and go forward.

Let's go back to the beginning when Marc Andreessen didn't (presumably) want Java to run away with the web. That's the position Java had, and they were pressuring Netscape to bundle it with the browser, and he didn't want to do it, but he had to have something to put in his place. Pretty sure that's why he asked Brendan Eich to write it, the legendary 10-day project. So what was that product? Maybe that should be the name?

Even though they weren't thinking of server-side language that JS would become, really JS is the language of the web. That idea fits both the original vision and the current use.

But that's not really a product name: Language Of The Web. LOTW. Nah doesn't really live well in the mind.

I would have just called it Netscape. It's so central to everything the company was doing, you could have said -- this is the reason we created this company. The web is the UI, and that's important, but the real power is the network behind it, and that network is defined by the language, and this here is the language. It would have given Java a run for the money, probably would have pushed it closer to Microsoft (that's a whole other story) but long term, it would have worked.

BTW all that's left of Netscape today is -- JavaScript.

They didn't do it then, but you could do it now and it would be cool and fun, historic, respectful and something people would talk about.

New submitter feross shares a report: A group of Senate Republicans is looking to force tech companies to comply with "lawful access" to encrypted information, potentially jeopardizing the technology's security features. On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which calls for an end to "warrant-proof" encryption that's disrupted criminal investigations. The bill was proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, along with Sens. Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn. If passed, the act would require tech companies to help investigators access encrypted data if that assistance would help carry out a warrant. Lawmakers and the US Justice Department have long battled with tech companies over encryption, which is used to encode data. The Justice Department argues that encryption prevents investigators from getting necessary evidence from suspects' devices and has requested that tech giants provide "lawful access." That could come in many ways, such as providing a key to unlock encryption that's only available for police requests. The FBI made a similar request to Apple in 2016 when it wanted to get data from a dead terrorist's iPhone in a San Bernardino, California, shooting case. Giving access specifically to government agencies when requested is often referred to as an "encryption backdoor," something tech experts and privacy advocates have long argued endangers more people than it helps.

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India's antitrust regulator approved Facebook's purchase of a 9.99% stake in the digital services unit controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, giving the social media giant another foothold in one of the world's fastest-growing online markets. From a report: The U.S.-based company will invest $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms through Jaadhu Holdings LLC, an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to a filing on the Competition Commission of India website. The clearance paves the way for a slew of smaller deals that take Jio's parent -- Reliance Industries Ltd. -- closer to its goal of becoming net debt free by March 2021 while using its roughly 400 million wireless phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business. Ambani's $65 billion digital unit has sold more than 20% in stakes to buyers including Facebook and U.S. private equity firms KKR, Silver Lake Partners and General Atlantic.

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Driving on the Masspike yesterday, going west, listening to the audiobook of the People's History, when a phone call comes in. Looks like spam so I don't answer. Then the car's audio, coming from my fully updated iPhone XS Max, via CarPlay switches over to the Podcast app, and plays an episode of The Daily podcast, an episode I didn't want listen to, and there's nothing I can do until I can stop the car and reactivate the Audible app, about 15 miles of driving. To be very clear, it should have resumed the book, which was interrupted, not start a podcast. This is the kind of software lunacy that never gets fixed. Next year they'll revamp the OS of the car, or the phone, or switch the processor, or get rid of iTunes or Cookie Dough or whatever, and more stuff will break, and the process will continue next year and the year after, and it will not have been worth it. At some point some adult will run Apple, someone who can't be bluffed on software, will tell the engineers to shut up and eat your vegetables, you can watch TV when you finish your homework. It's an analogy. You can figure it out.

In what may be the first known case of its kind, a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man's arrest for a crime he did not commit. From a report: On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling him to come to the station to be arrested. He thought at first that it was a prank. An hour later, when he pulled into his driveway in a quiet subdivision in Farmington Hills, Mich., a police car pulled up behind, blocking him in. Two officers got out and handcuffed Mr. Williams on his front lawn, in front of his wife and two young daughters, who were distraught. The police wouldn't say why he was being arrested, only showing him a piece of paper with his photo and the words "felony warrant" and "larceny." His wife, Melissa, asked where he was being taken. "Google it," she recalls an officer replying. The police drove Mr. Williams to a detention center. He had his mug shot, fingerprints and DNA taken, and was held overnight. Around noon on Friday, two detectives took him to an interrogation room and placed three pieces of paper on the table, face down. "When's the last time you went to a Shinola store?" one of the detectives asked, in Mr. Williams's recollection. Shinola is an upscale boutique that sells watches, bicycles and leather goods in the trendy Midtown neighborhood of Detroit. Mr. Williams said he and his wife had checked it out when the store first opened in 2014. The detective turned over the first piece of paper. It was a still image from a surveillance video, showing a heavyset man, dressed in black and wearing a red St. Louis Cardinals cap, standing in front of a watch display. Five timepieces, worth $3,800, were shoplifted. "Is this you?" asked the detective. The second piece of paper was a close-up. The photo was blurry, but it was clearly not Mr. Williams. He picked up the image and held it next to his face. "No, this is not me," Mr. Williams said. "You think all Black men look alike?" Mr. Williams knew that he had not committed the crime in question. What he could not have known, as he sat in the interrogation room, is that his case may be the first known account of an American being wrongfully arrested based on a flawed match from a facial recognition algorithm, according to experts on technology and the law. A nationwide debate is raging about racism in law enforcement. Across the country, millions are protesting not just the actions of individual officers, but bias in the systems used to surveil communities and identify people for prosecution.

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