The new lightweight and royalty-free AVIF image format is coming to web browsers. Work is almost complete on adding AVIF support to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. From a report: The new image format is considered one of the lightest and most optimized image compression formats, and has already gained praise from companies such as Netflix, which considers it superior to existing image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and even the newer WebP. The acronym of AVIF stands for AV1 Image File Format. As its name hints, AVIF is based on AV1, which is a video codec that was developed in 2015, following a collaboration between Google, Cisco, and Xiph.org (who also worked with Mozilla). At the time, the three decided to pool their respective in-house video codecs (VPX, Thor, and Daala) to create a new one (AV1) that they planned to offer as an open-source and royalty-free alternative to all the commercial video codecs that had fragmented and clogged the video streaming market in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Day traders on viral video app TikTok are encouraging people to speculate on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. Based on an old Internet meme -- an overly sincere and whimsically grammar-challenged Shiba Inu dog -- the digital coin was developed as a Bitcoin-spinoff in 2013, after which it quickly rose to prominence as a gag. From a report: The shenanigans of the cryptocurrency-pumpers appear to be working, at least for now. The price of Dogecoin has nearly doubled since July 6th, rising 95% to $0.00448 from $0.0023, according to data from OnChainFX, a cryptocurrency data tracker. The price of Dogecoin peaked in January 2018 at $0.013 before promptly crashing. It appears a flood of stuck-at-home market hypers is behind the push to hype the cryptocurrency. "Go invest in Dogecoin, make me rich," wrote one pumper. "They cant stop us all," encouraged another. Yet one more: "worth it. i swear #stocks #coins #dogecoin #money"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's campus security system subjected Black and Latinx workers to bias and prompted complaints to management, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, leading the company to scrap a key part of the approach. From a report: The internet giant encouraged employees to check colleagues' ID badges on campus, and asked security staff to do the same. This went beyond the typical corporate office system where workers swipe badges to enter. The policy was designed to prevent unauthorized visitors and keep Google's open work areas safe. But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees, according to the people, who experienced this themselves or saw friends and colleagues go through it. As a result, these employees felt policed on campus in a similar way that they are under suspicion elsewhere in life, said the people, who weren't authorized to speak publicly about the issue. It's an example of the unconscious, or overlooked, biases that make working in Silicon Valley harder for minorities, the people added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Watching Biden give a speech via teleprompter and wondering why in 2020 we don't have a better way of doing this, so he can move his head where ever he likes and still have the text right in front of his eyes. He shouldn't have to turn his head to read.

I discovered a new feature in GitHub. If you create a public repository with the same name as your account, the readme.md file in that repo is displayed on your GitHub home page. Of course it's Markdown. Might be interesting to integrate some of the status-editing features I'm working on into this. It supports basic web stuff, as you would expect from a techies site like GitHub. Okay this might be fun.

Australian and British privacy regulators opened a joint probe into Clearview AI, saying they want to examine how the company's facial-recognition technology uses people's data, just days after the company suspended operations in Canada. From a report: The Australian Information Commissioner and the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office said they will focus on the company's use of "scraped" data and biometrics of individuals. Clearview is facing growing scrutiny of the billions of images it has scraped from social media platforms and how the New York-based company shares those with law enforcement agencies. It suspended a contract with its last Canadian client, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, after regulators there said they were investigating allegations Clearview collected personal information without consent and shared it with police. Clearview will cooperate with the U.K. and Australian regulators, Chief Executive Officer Hoan Ton-That said in a statement. The company searches publicly available photos from the Internet in accordance with applicable laws, he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. From a report: Jupiter, like the other gas giants, doesn't have a rocky surface, but that doesn't mean it's just a massive cloud floating through the vacuum of space. It's made up of mostly helium and hydrogen, and as you move from the outer layers of the atmosphere toward the deeper parts, that gas grows denser and the pressures become more extreme. Temperatures quickly rise. In 1995, NASA's Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what's experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun's surface. So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter's depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right? Well, there's another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft's electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn't look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft. Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm becoming a Deadhead. Today's song is China Cat Sunflower.

Apple today seeded the first public betas of upcoming iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 updates to its public beta testing group, two weeks after first providing the updates to developers after the WWDC keynote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Days after it was rumored that Apple might not ship a charger with its next iPhone, Samsung is copying that, too. According to a new report from South Korea, future Samsung phones may not ship with a charger. From a report: Samsung ships hundreds of millions of smartphones every single year. Dropping the charger from even half of its lineup is going to result in major cost reductions for the company. It may also enable the company to price its affordable devices even more aggressively. According to the report, Samsung is discussing plans to exclude the charger from the box components for some smartphones. If it decides to go ahead with this, we might see the first Samsung phones to ship without a charger starting next year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many Republican senators are apparently not going to Trump's convention in Jacksonville. Why not? Scared of the virus? Trump says it won't get you. Or does he?

Also hope their children and grandchildren will be going back to school in the fall. Kids don't get sick they say, and if they do they don't die, and if they die they were going to die anyway. This is the position of the Trump government. If it's good for Republicans then it's good for their representatives, right??

And there's a rally on Saturday in New Hampshire. They should go! Don't miss it. No masks, social distancing, lots of ways to get sick. Very sick. Hey if it's good for Americans, why not the senators? And of course their families.

The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which operates 38 of the company's stores in the UK, rose by more than 15% in the 12 months to 28 September. But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn, the firm reported before-tax profits of just $47m, slashing its tax bill significantly. In a statement describing itself as "the largest taxpayer in the world," Apple said that it always paid the taxes that it owed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following up on yesterday's post where I talk about striving for simplicity in using JavaScript, my friend Allen Wirfs-Brock, who has been involved in JavaScript language design for many years, and was editor of the ES6 spec, responded thus:

• Because of JavaScript’s "don’t break existing code" policy, often the only way to fix an existing problematic features is to leave it alone and add a better alternative. This inevitably leads to profiles that include the better features and leaves out the deprecated ones.
• You probably don’t use eslint , but most commercial JS devs seem to. There are probably thousands of configuration profiles for it that enforce various style guides and and subset preferences.
• For example JavaScript Standard Style is popular but controversial both because of its self-assumed name and because of the positions it takes on semicolon usage and other conventions.
• Regarding choice of function forms, my preference is to use the function hello () {} form in most situations where I wanted to define a named function, both global and local. I’d generally reserve arrow functions for cases where I’m passing an anonymous function as an argument or otherwise using it as a first class value.
• I’d probably only use const hello= () => {}; in situations where I need to name a function that needs to reference the this binding of its surrounding environment.

It's tough being a kid these days.

As Britain eases out of its Covid-19 lockdown, nitrogen vehicle emissions look to be going back up.