AmiMoJo quotes TechCrunch: TikTok announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national security law. "In light of recent events, we've decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong," said a TikTok spokesperson. The company declined further comment on the decision... ByteDance, founded by Chinese serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, has been working to disassociate TikTok from its Chinese ownership and Beijing censorship. Efforts have ranged from keeping an overseas data center for TikTok that's supposedly out of reach by the Chinese authority, giving outside experts a glimpse into its moderation process, through to hiringDisney's Kevin Mayer as the app's new global face.

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"The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21," reports Aviation Week. "By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism." The Skyborg family of aircraft is expected to fill an emerging "attritable" category for combat aircraft that blurs the line between a reusable unmanned aircraft system and a single-use cruise missile. As the aircraft are developed, Skyborg also will serve as the test case of a radical change in acquisition philosophy, with ecosystems of collaborative software coders and aircraft manufacturers replacing the traditional approach with a supply chain defined by a single prime contractor... At the core of the Skyborg program is the software; specifically, the military aviation equivalent of the algorithm-fed convolutional neural networks that help driverless cars navigate on city streets... The autonomy mission system core — as integrated by Leidos from a combination of industry and government sources — will be inserted into multiple low-cost UAS designed by different companies, with each configured to perform a different mission or set of missions... "Even though we call Skyborg an attritable aircraft, I think we'll think of them more like reusable weapons," says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.... "I expect that the pilots, depending on the mission, [will] decide: Does the Skyborg return and land with them and then go to fight another day, or is it the end of its life and it's going to go on a one-way mission?" Roper explains. In some cases, the pilot may decide a target is important enough that it is worth the loss of a Skyborg, even if its service life has not been used up, he adds. "The Air Force's goal is to build up a large fleet of armed, sort-of disposable jets that don't need conventional runways to take off and land," reports Popular Mechanics: Skyborg will be available with both subsonic and supersonic engines, indicating both attack and fighter jet versions. The basic design (or designs) will likely be stealthy, carrying guided bombs, air defense suppression missiles, and air-to-air missiles inside internal weapons bays. Interesting, according to AvWeek, the Air Force is considering Skyborg as a replacement not only for the MQ-9 Reaper attack drone but early versions of the F-16 manned fighter.... Unmanned jets like Skyborg promise to remake the U.S. Air Force and other air forces. Manned aircraft have become increasingly large, difficult to develop, and expensive. This in turn means the Pentagon can afford fewer jets, ultimately leading to a smaller Air Force. Unmanned jets, on the other hand, are smaller, easier to develop, and cheap — allowing the Air Force to buy lots of them... The drone will grow the fighting arm of the U.S. Air Force, move air power away from air fields, fly alongside fighter jets, and escort traditionally undefended assets like the E-3 Sentry. And it promises to do it all affordably. If the Air Force really can get Skyborg into the game by 2023 it will dramatically change the shape of aerial warfare.

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A new Motherboard article interviews William, a ventilator refurbisher who's repaired at least 70 broken ventilators that he's bought on eBay and from other secondhand websites, then sold to U.S. hospitals and governments to help handle a spike in COVID-19 patients. He's part of a grey-market supply chain that's "essentially identical to one used by farmers to repair John Deere tractors without the company's authorization and has emerged because of the same need to fix a device without a manufacturer's permission..." The issue is that, like so many other electronics, medical equipment, including ventilators, increasingly has software that prevents "unauthorized" people from repairing or refurbishing broken devices, and Medtronic will not help him fix them... Faced with a global pandemic, hospitals, biomedical technicians, right to repair activists, and refurbishers like William say that medical device manufacturers are profiteering by putting up artificial barriers to repair that drive up the cost of medical care in the United States and puts patient lives in danger. They describe difficulty getting parts and software, delays in getting service from "authorized" technicians, and a general sense of frustration as few manufacturers appear ready to loosen their repair restrictions during the COVID-19 crisis. For the past decade, medical device manufacturers have refused to sell replacement parts and software to hospitals and repair professionals unless they pay thousands of dollars annually to become "authorized" to work on machines. The medical device industry has lobbied against legislation that would make it easier to repair their machines, refused to release repair manuals, and used copyright law to threaten those who have made repair manuals available to the public. The technicians who are unable to gain access to repair parts, manuals, and software are not random people who are deciding on a whim to try to fix complex medical equipment that is going to be used on sick patients. Hospitals and trained professionals are regularly unable to fix the equipment that they own unless they pay for expensive service contracts or annual trainings from manufacturers. While hospitals deal with a resurgent coronavirus that is overtaxing intensive care units across the country, their biomedical technicians are wasting time on the phone and in Kafkaesque email exchanges with medical device manufacturers, pleading for spare parts, passwords to unlock diagnostic modes, or ventilator repair manuals. The article notes that newer medical devices even have "more advanced anti-repair technologies built into them. Newer ventilators connect to proprietary servers owned by manufacturers to verify that the person accessing it is authorized by the company to do so."

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In 2012 "Russian hacker" Yevgeniy Nikulin breached the internal networks of LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring, and then sold their user databases on the black market, reports ZDNet. (He stole 117 million login codes, according to Bloomberg.) Nikulin was arrested in 2016 (while on vacation in the Czech Republic), and after an extradition battle spent years in U.S. prisons while awaiting his trial, which Bloomberg calls "an ongoing constitutional violation that deeply distressed U.S. District Judge William Alsup." Yesterday a jury finally found Nikulin guilty: It was the first trial in Northern California since the coronavirus pandemic shut Bay Area courtrooms in mid-March... The trial started in early March but was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and a shelter-in-place order for the Bay Area on March 16, when almost all in-person court hearings were postponed nationwide... Forced by circumstances to twice delay the trial, Alsup stood firm on a July 7 start. The judge, Nikulin and lawyers wore masks. Witnesses testified from behind a glass panel... Nikulin is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 29. The Justice Department said he faces as long as 10 years in prison for each count of selling stolen usernames and passwords, installing malware on protected computers and as many as five years for each count of conspiracy and computer hacking. He also faces a mandatory two year sentence for identity theft, according to prosecutors.

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Slashdot reader shirappu writes: AI|Writer is an experiment in which artificial intelligence is used to simulate both real and fictitious famous personalities through written correspondence. Users can ask questions and receive explanations from simulated versions of Isaac Newton, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie, Mary Shelley, and many more. The Next Web calls it "a new experiment by magician and novelist Andrew Mayne," pointing out that it's using OpenAI's new text generator API. Other simulated conversations include Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, and even Edgar Allen Poe. "We have all kinds of theoretical ideas about AI and what counts as real or not," Mayne said on Twitter, "however I think you just have to be pragmatic and just ask: What can it do? I think this gets lost in a lot of discussions about AI. The end goal isn't a witty chatbot. It's to expand our knowledge." There's a wait list for access to the site "so we can make sure everything works right and we don't accidentally create Skynet," Mayne jokes on Twitter. But assuming this isn't another magic trick, The Next Web is already reporting on some of the early results: The system first works out the purpose of the message and the intended recipient by searching for patterns in the text. It then uses the API's internal knowledge of that person to guess how they would respond in their written voice. The digitized characters can answer questions about their work, explain scientific theories, or offer their opinions. For example, Marie Curie gave a lesson on radiation, H.G. Wells revealed his inspiration for The Time Machine, while Alfred Hitchcock compared Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to Stanley Kubrick's 2001... The characters could also compare their own eras with the present day... Mayne says the characters did well with historical facts, but could be "quite erratic with matters of opinion" and "rarely reply to the same question in the same way." He demonstrated these variations by asking both Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus. "Newton almost always insists that he invented Calculus alone and is pretty brusque about it," Mayne wrote on his website. "Leibniz sometimes says he did. Other times he'll be vague." At one point, Leibniz even threatened to kill Mayne if he tried to take the credit for the discovery. As well as historical figures, the system can respond in the voice of fictional characters. In fact, Mayne says the most "touching" message he's received was this reply from the Incredible Hulk. Another conversation shows Bruce Wayne's response when asked to make a donation to support freeing the Joker...

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Long-time Slashdot reader sjritt00 writes: A final collection of Terry Pratchett's early stories will be published in September as The Time-Travelling Caveman. These stories appeared in the Bucks Free Press and Western Daily Press in the 1960s and early '70s and introduce many of the themes which later power his Discworld series. The Guardian reports that the stories "range from a steam-powered rocket's flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd's discovery of the resting place of King Arthur." In a statement Pratchett's editors said "It is very fitting that some of the first stories he wrote will be in the last collection by him to be published..."

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First thanks to Allen Wirfs-Brock for his comments on the evolution process for ES6. I wanted to let his ideas settle in for a couple of days before responding.

• I applaud the rule of "don't break existing code." We had the same rule in the RSS world. It was very controversial with some. They wanted to break it. That's what the big debate was about. On one side, mine, trying to maintain continuity, because I and others were developing and deploying software to users that built on RSS. We couldn't afford to change things just for the sake of change. And we had a lot at stake in preserving simplicity, because that kept the barrier to entry low. The more different ways there were to do something, the harder it would be to enter the market, and the leaders could become complacent. We've all seen how markets stagnate when the leaders are protected. I didn't want to see that happen.
• We had the same rule in the Frontier world . We called it Rule 1, and it was simply this: Don't Break Users. As a joke Rule #1a was: Don't Break Dave. That was meant to tell the team this was personal. If my code was broken, I would probably raise my voice. The rule came about because the guy who was working on the core code would routinely break the upper-level code. To him, the core was never finished, and all the work we were doing at upper levels was just to test his stuff. So he didn't really feel it. I think that's true of many other developers. They don't get that the people who build on their tech are skilled in ways they can't comprehend (and of course vice versa). That's the power of layering tech. It becomes virtually impossible without the No Breakage rule. And you can see it in the market. Good ideas from previous generations are nowhere to be found in today's systems. Because someone wiped the slate clean without any idea how much had been built on it.
• BTW there's a great story about this in Soul of a New Machine. They were shocked when they saw real people using their product. They had never imagined it, and it felt wrong to them.
• I have another rule -- "One way of doing something is better than two, no matter how much better the second way is." This is a variant of the famous XKCD cartoon, and of Postel's robustness principle. Postel says be conservative in what you send. I say one way is better than two. Applied to JavaScript, adding the arrow syntax was a mistake. It didn't add any new expressive power to the language, and it meant anyone who needs to read code (i.e. everyone who develops) now has to understand two ways of doing the same thing. Even worse, newbies now have to learn two ways, and they have to learn when to use which way, and all the explaining avoids the truth -- it really doesn't make a difference.
• "One way is better than two" is another instance of Worse Is Better. Stop trying to make it better. Because that just makes it worse. Good postulates are true from every angle.
• Another story I like to tell is when we were working on the names for things in XML-RPC the rule was we had to come up with the worst name for each element. So if you thought you had a better name, everyone would laugh. Heh, we don't want that. It's in the groundrules.

Last week leaked audio surfaced of investors arguing that journalists have too much power. But the Verge's Silicon Valley editor asks, "What if you take the whole discussion of "tech versus journalism" and reframe it as 'managers versus employees'? Then, I think, you get closer to the truth of what's going on." After all, this conflict started with employees. They were the people who initially described their working conditions under Steph Korey at Away, leading her to step aside as CEO. (She later returned, only for the company to say she would step aside later this year after her comments about the media on Instagram.) The employees made their comments at a time of increasing activism inside workplaces. Since the Google walkout in 2018, employees of venture-backed startups and public companies have become increasingly comfortable in speaking out — often using social media platforms to call out their employers. This trend has only accelerated since the Black Lives Matters protests swept the nation last month — which, among other things, led to the first-ever virtual Facebook walkout a few weeks later. Workers still face significant obstacles as they lobby to create more fair and equitable workplaces. But Twitter in particular has given them a place where not only can they be heard, but — crucially — employers can't really fight back... [T]weets have given workers an asymmetric advantage in the unrest — a one-sided argument is easy to win — and we're seeing it play out in new ways all the time. This dynamic, which is tilted heavily against bosses, goes a long way in explaining the disdain that the managerial class has for what they call "hit pieces." A "hit piece," in angry Twitter parlance, is typically a piece of journalism in which one or more employees are granted anonymity to talk about their working conditions. Journalists, myself included, would simply call that reporting. But it's the kind of reporting that tilts the balance away from managers and toward their employees — and in ways that are difficult to fight back against... And so it shouldn't be surprising, when a prominent reporter like Taylor Lorenz calls attention to posts like Korey's, the managerial class rises to Korey's defense. When CEOs can be held accountable not just for their working conditions but for social media defenses of their work, that represents a threat to the entire managerial tribe. And that explains how venture capitalists, who have millions of dollars at their disposal and could comfortably retire without ever participating in a single Twitter fight, have nonetheless come to see themselves as the underdogs in this situation. They got where they are in part because they've been good at winning arguments, and now they find themselves living in a world where they get punished for arguing... [T]he next time you see journalists and tech overlords going a few rounds online, ask yourself whether what you're looking at isn't, on some level, a labor issue... Workers are justifiably outraged about the state of affairs in this country, and some of that outrage is being captured by journalists. David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and the founder of Basecamp, called the piece "a wonderful framing of the issue" in a series of tweets. "While I decry this website as the bane of modern living half the time, the other half it has probably done more to move my own position on many issues than anything else online. "Which is why I'm not actually sure that VC Twitter should be so eager to cheer on 'citizen journalism'. The number of citizens that count themselves in the worker class vs. manager class are far more plentiful. And their unfiltered stories really do add up to paint the picture."

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Try to give people who have earned the benefit of the doubt, the benefit. Save outbursts of anger for when there's a real need to alert the other person to imminent danger. Also try to not be offended. You want a more civil net? Be the change you wish to see in the world.

One more thing, my disappointment in the EFF, as I discussed yesterday, is that they started off with the hippie ideal, the three founders were immersed in it, but as the EFF grew, they let the billionaire monopolists set the agenda. I wanted them to tell the story of how podcasting as it was created by following the grain of the web, not by throwing huge money and installed base at the idea. Sometimes soft power is the way to get something done. They wouldn't even listen, that's how little respect they have for the individual. Why should they, the most I can contribute is a few thousand, Google can contribute millions. Imagine what Bernie Sanders would say. The EFF is a prime example, imho, of flower children losing their way.

On NPR this morning a question that has a simple answer, but no one can seem to find it. How did the flower children of the 60s become the Boomers of the 90s and 00s? Not a good question, because that isn't what happened. Hippies were a very small part of the Boomer generation. George W. Bush is a Boomer, but not a hippie, then or now. And sure, some hippies didn't drop out, but then a bunch of them did. My uncle, for example. He really did live the dream of the hippies. As I read the Lies book, I come to appreciate that there are people applying the scientific method to history, and not accepting the simple and wrong stories of heroes and villains, weak and strong, the savages and the civilized. BTW, some of the hippies became programmers. That's a whole other thread to pick up. That's why the freedoms of the net and the web persist to this day. A fair number of people believe in them, still, and follow the grain, instead of trying to build forts.

DuckDuckGo made the news twice this week. First its service was reinstated across India last Saturday, after being unreachable for nearly three days, for reasons which remain unclear. "We have contacted the Indian government but have not yet received a response," a DuckDuckGo spokesperson told The Verge. "We are bewildered on why the Indian government would instruct Indian ISPs to block DuckDuckGo, but are optimistic that this will be resolved soon." But at roughly the same time the search engine faced another controversy about how DuckDuckGo fetches favicons, according to one cybersecurity blog: First submitted as an issue in July 2019, GitHub user Tritonio flagged the offending script, saying: "This seems to be leaking all(?) the domains that users visit to your servers." The script in the Android version of the DuckDuckGo application showed that favicon fetching was routed through DuckDuckGo systems, rather than made via direct website requests. Daniel "tagawa" Davis, communications manager at DuckDuckGo, said at the time that the "internal" favicon service was used to simplify the favicon location process, but as the service is rooted in DuckDuckGo's existing systems, the script adhered to the company's privacy policy which pledges not to collect or store any personal user information. The case was then closed. However, when the issue became public on the GitHub tracker this week, this assurance was not enough for everyone. Some users requested that the case be re-examined, citing potential information leaks caused by the script choice, considered by some as an inherent 'design' flaw or human error. In response to the discussion concerning the favicon telemetry, founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg said he was "happy to commit us to move to doing this locally in the browser" and will address it as a matter of priority. He added that as DuckDuckGo's services are encrypted and "throw away PII [personally identifiable information] like IP addresses by design", no information was collected, stored, or leaked. The company's slogan is "Privacy Simplified". It is this concept, Weinberg told The Daily Swig, that led to the rapid decision in changing how favicons are managed. Weinberg acknowledged that there is an ongoing security debate concerning which option for fetching favicons is more secure, and arguments can be made for each choice — but added they both offer "basically a similar amount" of privacy... You can ask a browser to connect to a website and fetch the favicon — potentially making multiple requests in the process — or you can use the firm's encrypted service... "It's a known anonymous service," Weinberg told us. "You're already connected to DuckDuckGo because you're using the app. It's not that it is leaking any more information, because you conduct a search with us which has the favicons anyway." DuckDuckGo's service is also faster and uses less bandwidth as the service is running server-side and favicons are cached, Weinberg says.

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Today's song: Can't find my way home.

New version of LO2 this morning with a few minor fixes. As before if you spot problems, please report them here.

theodp writes: From the Home Office in Cupertino: "Apple today announced a new set of tools to help educators teach coding to students from grade school to college. In addition to significant enhancements to the Develop in Swift and Everyone Can Code curricula, Apple is also starting a new professional learning course for Develop in Swift, available to educators at no cost. The course is designed to supplement the need for computer science educators in the US, and helps instructors of all skill levels build foundational knowledge to teach app development with Swift. In addition, with many institutions operating remotely, Apple is adding resources for educators and parents to help ensure they have the tools they need to help students learn and grow from anywhere. [...] To support parents with kids learning to code at home, Apple is adding a new guide to its set of remote learning resources. 'A Quick Start to Code' is now available and features 10 coding challenges designed for learners ages 10 and up, on iPad or Mac. [...] In 2016, Apple launched Everyone Can Code, a comprehensive program and curriculum to help students of all abilities, from kindergarten to college, learn coding to solve problems and prepare them for the workforce. Develop in Swift was released in 2019, and today more than 9,000 K-12 and higher education institutions worldwide are using the Everyone Can Code and Develop in Swift curricula from Apple." Back in 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that most students shunned programming before Apple introduced Swift "because coding languages were 'too geeky.'" As Apple introduced Swift in 2016, Cook called for requiring all children to start coding in 4th grade (9-10 years old), which Cook reiterated to President Trump in a 2017 White House meeting with tech titans.

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