The website of Notepad++ is banned in China as of Monday, "obviously due to" its release of editions named "Free Uyghur" and "Stand with Hong Kong," the source code and text editor announced on Twitter. TechCrunch reports: First released in 2003 by France-based developer Don Ho, free-to-use Notepad++ operates on Windows and supports some 90 languages. In his release notices for the two editions, Ho openly voiced his concerns over "human rights" conditions, respectively in the Xinjiang autonomous region and Hong Kong. Tests by TechCrunch found that the Notepad++ ban only applies to its Download page -- which showcases the special editions and thus politically sensitive language -- when one tries to reach it from Chinese browsers developed by Tencent (QQ Browser and WeChat's built-in browser), Alibaba (UC Browser), 360 and Sogou. These services flag the page as containing content "prohibited" by local regulators. Notepad++'s home page, on the other hand, remains unblocked through these local browsers. One can still access the full site from Chrome and DuckDuckGo in China. The ban began as early as August 12 when a user notified Ho of the ban, the developer told TechCrunch. He has never been contacted by any Chinese government authority and does not plan to take measures to cope with the website restriction.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon is being investigated by German authorities for allegedly abusing its market position during the coronavirus pandemic. The investigation, being led by the German Federal Cartel Office, is looking at Amazon's relationship with third-party sellers on its platform. It began around April and comes after the Cartel Office received a number of complaints. A spokesperson for the regulator told CNBC that it is "not up to a private platform to be a price regulator or the price police." Amazon is using "unknown mechanisms" to regulate sellers on its platform, they added. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was the first to report the investigation. "We are currently investigating whether and how Amazon influences retailers' pricing on the marketplace," Cartel Office president Andreas Mundt told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview. The regulator told CNBC that Amazon had provided it with a statement after it asked the e-commerce giant a number of questions. The responses in the statement are now being considered. The Cartel Office, which has the power to fine companies hundreds of millions of euros, declined to comment on how long the probe will take.

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Since its 1996 PC release, id's seminal shooter Quake has been ported to everything from flip phones and smartphones to game consoles and Web browsers. But even many serious fans of the series don't know about Quake Arcade Tournament Edition (Quake ATE), an officially licensed version of the game that ran on custom arcade cabinets. From a report: Even among those who know about it, few ever got a chance to play it during the brief time it was in arcades, and hardware-based DRM built into the cabinet meant the game wasn't playable on home emulators. That state of affairs now seems set to change thanks to the recent release of a Windows executable that can decrypt the data dumped from those aging arcade hard drives for play on a modern home computer.

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Apple is planning to terminate Epic Games' entire access to its App Store and app development tools, Epic Games said today. Apple told Epic that by August 28, all access will be ended. From a report: That includes Epic's access to the development tools necessary to create software for the Unreal Engine that Epic offers to third-party developers for their games. In response, Epic has filed a court order asking a Northern California court to stop Apple from removing Epic's âOEApp StoreâOE access. Further reading: Epic Games Sues Apple.

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An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced Chrome for Android's context menu will show "Fast page" labels for webpages deemed to have good performance. The label will be determined using Google's Web Vitals, an initiative the company announced in May to provide web developers and website owners with a unified set of metrics for building websites with user experience and performance in mind. Core Web Vitals, Google's attempt to spell out the metrics it considers critical for all web experiences, will measure a webpage's responsiveness and visual stability.

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The Pentagon announced last week that it had elevated the status of its UAP task force following pressure from Congress and the fact that multiple instances have been reported of unknown objects reportedly making incursions into military airspace. From a report: According to an emailed statement from Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough and a press release from the Department of Defense, on August 4th, the military approved the establishment of an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). "The Department of Defense established the UAPTF to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs," read a statement made by Gough. "The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze, and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security."

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Apple is expanding its program that provides parts, resources and training to independent repair shops to now include support for Mac computers. From a report: The repair program was first announced last fall, with the goal of making it easier for consumers to repair their out-of-warranty iPhones by allowing them to use third-party shops, including small businesses, that would now have access to official repair parts and other tools. The program was meant to complement Apple's existing network of over 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers, like Best Buy, which handle both in- and out-of-warranty repairs. To some extent, the program arose from consumer demand. Many iPhone users were turning to unauthorized repair shops for a variety of reasons -- perhaps the shop was closer to their home, could fix their device more quickly, or offered more affordable repairs, for example. But this choice could result in an uneven consumer experience as the shops were locked out from using official Apple parts. Since its U.S. launch, the independent repair shop program expanded to over 140 businesses and over 700 new locations. This summer, Apple announced the program would now expand internationally as well, to both Europe and Canada.

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The Trump administration announced on Monday it will further tighten restrictions on Huawei Technologies, aimed at cracking down on its access to commercially available chips. From a report: The U.S. Commerce Department actions will expand restrictions announced in May aimed at preventing the Chinese telecommunications giant from obtaining semiconductors without a special license -- including chips made by foreign firms that have been developed or produced with U.S. software or technology. The administration will also add 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 countries to the U.S. government's economic blacklist, the sources said, raising the total to 152 affiliates since Huawei was first added in May 2019. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business the restrictions on Huawei-designed chips imposed in May "led them to do some evasive measures. They were going through third parties," Ross said. "The new rule makes it clear that any use of American software or American fabrication equipment is banned and requires a license." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the rule change "will prevent Huawei from circumventing U.S. law through alternative chip production and provision of off-the-shelf chips." He added in a statement, "Huawei has continuously tried to evade" U.S. restrictions imposed in May.

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AmiMoJo writes: Facebook's algorithm "actively promotes" Holocaust denial content according to an analysis that will increase pressure on the social media giant to remove antisemitic content relating to the Nazi genocide. An investigation by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based counter-extremist organisation, found that typing "holocaust" in the Facebook search function brought up suggestions for denial pages, which in turn recommended links to publishers which sell revisionist and denial literature, as well as pages dedicated to the notorious British Holocaust denier David Irving. The findings coincide with mounting international demands from Holocaust survivors to Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, to remove such material from the site. Last Wednesday Facebook announced it was banning conspiracy theories about Jewish people "controlling the world." However, it has been unwilling to categorise Holocaust denial as a form of hate speech, a stance that ISD describe as a "conceptual blind spot." The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content.

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When I was first starting out as an entrepreneur in the early 80s, I had an Apple II product, and Apple was in serious trouble, judging by the stories in the press. I asked my lead investor what to make of it. Should we not ship our Apple product and port to the IBM PC? He asked what Apple's sales were. About a billion dollars. He said you can safely continue, companies with a billion dollars in sales don't disappear. He was right, of course. A year later they shipped the first Mac, and we were on board for the boom in 1986. Had we switched in 1983, we would have missed the boom, and been lost in the crowd of second-tier PC companies. On the Mac we had a chance to rise to the top, and we did.

The point of this story is that NYC has 8 million people. Most of them are staying. Many of the people with the means to leave are leaving. The business environment in NY will change. All that office space will be used for something. Nature abhors a vacuum. And NYC will have a lot of space, to be used creatively, we expect.

Also, the virus will weaken, like a hurricane as it moves inland. It won't go away, but the major damage is done as it makes landfall. At least judging from the 1918 pandemic. It was two years of hell, but the worst of it were the first waves, as it circled the world. In all likelihood that will also be the pattern of Covid-19. And remember, they never got a vaccine for the 1918 virus. It seems like we will have one, or more, and they will blunt the damage the virus does.

The idea that NYC is dead -- that's just opportunistic linkbait. That's who the author is. Famous as a promoter of himself. There isn't a whole lot of thought or science behind his theory that NYC is over. As with billion dollar PC manufacturers in 1983, cities of 8 million don't just disappear.

Like the world we left behind in March of this year, however, the old NY is gone. But there will be a new New York. There probably isn't another city on earth so capable of reinventing itself. In the two generations my family has been in NYC, the city has already reinvented itself a few times. My mother, herself an immigrant, lived to have her world disrupted by a new wave of immigration. It's a good thing, even a great thing.

And humans are a resilient species. We get accustomed to new realities very quickly. We'll do fine. And NYC will rise again.

Then there was the time the DNC did the Macarena! Wow.

Southeast Asia is facing a strain of the new coronavirus that the Philippines, which faces the region's largest outbreak, is studying to see whether the mutation makes it more infectious. From a report: The strain, earlier seen in other parts of the world and called D614G, was found in a Malaysian cluster of 45 cases that started from someone who returned from India and breached his 14-day home quarantine. The Philippines detected the strain among random Covid-19 samples in the largest city of its capital region. The mutation "is said to have a higher possibility of transmission or infectiousness, but we still don't have enough solid evidence to say that that will happen," Philippines' Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said in a virtual briefing on Monday. "People need to be wary and take greater precautions because this strain has now been found in Malaysia," the country's Director-General of Health Noor Hisham Abdullah wrote in a Facebook post, saying the strain can make it 10 times more infectious without citing a study. "The people's cooperation is very needed so that we can together break the chain of infection from any mutation." The strain "might be a little bit more contagious. We haven't yet got enough evidence to evaluate that, but there's no evidence that it's a lot more contagious," University of Hong Kong's Cowling said.

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At the Hot Chips 2020 conference, which was held virtually this year, IBM announced the IBM Power10. From a report: It's the successor to the Power9 and represents the next generation of the company's processor family. IBM claims that the Power10 delivers up to three times greater efficiency than its predecessor while at the same time delivering higher workload capacity and container density. The Power10 was designed over five years and has the distinction of being IBM's first commercial 7-nanometer processor. (In 2015, IBM, Samsung, and other members of IBM's Research Alliance produced the first test chips as part of a $3 billion R&D investment.) There will be multiple configurations, and while the specifics aren't yet being disclosed, the maximum single-chip-module offering won't exceed 15 SMT8 cores and the dual-chip-module offering won't exceed 30 SMT8 cores, according to IBM distinguished engineer and Power10 architect William Starke.

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To many college students, the prospect of a year of school during a pandemic -- with virtual classes, restricted movements and no parties -- is a huge bummer. Some Silicon Valley startups, hungry for young talent, see it as an opportunity. From a report: Over the past few months, several companies have presented an alternative to school: a remote internship, aimed specifically at young people looking for alternatives to a dismal school year. Dozens of Silicon Valley startups are looking to hire fall interns, according to a list assembled by startup accelerator Y Combinator. This month, venture firm Neo organized a virtual career fair for 120 students and a range of startups, hoping to match pairs for internships during the upcoming academic year. And venture firm Contrary Capital is offering to invest $100,000 in five teams of entrepreneurs if they take a gap year from school to build a company. Such arrangements allow interns to get paid and learn on the job, while avoiding paying tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom University. It also means that companies willing to improvise on hiring and gamble on younger workers may get new access to fresh talent. Ali Partovi, Neo's chief executive officer, said the firm surveyed 120 students who are part of its mentorship programs and found that 46% of them are interested in taking a gap semester and 21% are interested in taking a gap year. "There's a potential for a big shift right now," said Alexandr Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Scale AI Inc., a startup that helps people train computer vision. He said Scale would hire up to 10 gap-year workers if they found the right people. For many students he talks to, school this year seems like a "sub-optimal" option, Wang said.

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People who give the TV series Fargo the highest rating are people who really know a good thing. It is one of a small number of shows in the running for Best Series Ever. The others: The Wire (of course) and a show that a lot of people gave up on too soon: Mr Robot. Its final season was beautiful heart-filling drama. As much a vision as a story.