WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update its iOS app -- until or unless he adds in-app purchases so Apple can extract its 30 percent cut of the money. The Verge reports: Here's the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn't sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery's Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn't even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app -- it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space. Is Apple seriously asking for WordPress owner Automattic to share a cut of all its domain name revenue? How would it even know which customers used the app? Or was this all a mistake? Apple, Automattic, and Mullenweg didn't immediately reply to requests for comment. As the article points out, all of this is happening in the shadow of Epic Games' gigantic fight against Apple, one that Apple responded to this very afternoon.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus' authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement. The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced that President Alexander Lukashenko -- whom some call "Europe's last dictator" -- had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged. Peaceful protesters who poured onto the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate, schoolteacher Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, left for Lithuania -- under duress, her campaign said -- and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That's where Telegram -- which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements -- came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action. The people who run the channels, which used to offer political news, now post updates, videos and photos of the turmoil sent in from users, locations of heavy police presence, contacts of human rights activists and calls for new demonstrations -- something Belarusian opposition leaders have refrained from doing publicly themselves. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have responded to those calls. In a matter of days, the channels -- NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Belarus of the Brain are the most popular -- have become the main method for facilitating the protests, said Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian analyst and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. "The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology," Viacorka said.

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Today's Daily podcast explains what it's like for a reporter inside the NBA bubble. Totally worth listening to. But as with the last Daily I listened to, it has a significant error. At the end they say that what the NBA has done is too expensive to replicate elsewhere, but -- it's not true. The NBA is doing what China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam did. How did I learn about this? From the Daily podcast, in repeated interviews with Donald McNeil. An NBA-style bubble can be as large as the US.

Apple responded to Epic Games' lawsuit accusing it of anticompetitive behavior in how it controls the App Store, telling the court that the Fortnite maker violated Apple's rules and shouldn't be placed back into the store temporarily while the legal battle rages. From a report: In its filing, Apple alleges that Epic Games asked for an individual arrangement with Apple, producing three emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney that bolster its claim. This is Apple's first significant legal response to Epic Games after the dispute between the two companies spilled into the courts. It comes the week after Epic Games released a direct payment mechanism inside Fortnite designed to bypass the App Store's payment system, from which Apple takes a 30% cut. Apple subsequently removed Fortnite from its store for violating its policies. People who already have Fortnite installed on their iPhones can continue to play, but cannot update or download the app for the first time.

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The ongoing persecution by the Chinese government of Uyghur Muslims is far from a distant problem. Recent reporting has identified Uyghur forced labor in the supply chain of major global brands, including BMW, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, and Sony. From a report: Now, as school districts scramble to obtain electronic devices for a school year that may be primarily virtual, some children may end up using computers assembled by Uyghurs working in inhumane conditions. Shipping records show that since the start of the pandemic, Lenovo has imported an estimated 258,000 laptops from a Chinese manufacturer that has participated in a troubling labor scheme and been singled out by the U.S. government for violating human rights. The revelations serve as a reminder of how much of the supply chain is tied to forced labor and how many products that will aid us through the Covid-19 pandemic may be manufactured under duress. The Lenovo computers were made by the manufacturer Hefei Bitland, which participates in a Chinese government program to provide factories with cheap labor from persecuted Uyghurs. Some of the computers included lightweight Chromebooks bound for public schools in the U.S. -- and some were delivered even after the company was placed on a government list restricting trade. After they arrived at port, sources say, Lenovo apparently removed a portion of the computers from distribution; over the past few weeks, multiple school districts have reported holdups in their orders of Lenovo Chromebooks.

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Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly. Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

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Wouldn't it be great if people from the cities migrated to places like Wyoming and Idaho, where very few people vote, yet they have two senators and extra Electoral College oomph. Might not even be too late for the November election in some states. And btw, Zoom works in Wyoming too. It's almost like a bug fix for the Constitution.

A bug fix for BingeWorthy. When you change the rating of a program, the list of people who rated it now changes to reflects your rating.

Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. From a report: At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations. But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades.

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Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. From a report: Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s. It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive. "It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early '80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.

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An anonymous reader writes: The FBI and local police have made tens of arrests across the tri-state area this week as part of a crackdown against multiple criminal gangs who exploited a glitch in the software of Santander ATMs to cash-out more money than was stored on cards. According to reports in local media, the bulk of the arrests took place in Hamilton (20 suspects), across towns in Morris County (19), and Sayreville (11). Smaller groups of suspects were also detained in Bloomfield, Robbinsville, and Holmdel, while reports of suspicious cash-outs were also recorded in Woodbridge, towns across the Middlesex County, Booton, Randolph, Montville, South Windsor, Hoboken, Newark, and even in New York City itself, in Brooklyn. Based on information ZDNet received from a Santander spokesperson, sources in the threat intelligence community, and details released by police departments in the affected towns, criminal gangs appear to have found a bug in the software of Santander ATMs.

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Leonard Nimoy. A perfectly good actor, capable of playing lots of roles, but because he was Mr Spock on Star Trek, you'd always think wtf is Mr Spock doing on Mission Impossible. Typecasting. Another example. Bill Buckner, a good first baseman with a long career. He misjudged a ball once. That becomes his whole life story. As they say, it is what it is.

DeJoy should be called DeStroy because he’s doing that to our postal service.

A podcast to progressives. This was the convention for all Americans who want to vote to fight the virus and keep the Constitution. We know for a fact that progressives want this. We have to appeal to people who may be on the fence. The DNC was a commercial. Marketing. It wasn't there to make you feel heard. Personally I think to fight the virus we'll need to have single payer soon after Biden takes office. There may never be a moment where you hear from everyone that you're right. You'll have to find the glory within yourself.