Surprise News About Superhero Actor Chadwick Boseman Becomes Most-Liked Tweet Ever Slashdotby EditorDavid on movies at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 10:35 pm)

Yahoo News reports: On Friday, Chadwick Boseman's family posted a final tweet on his Twitter account, announcing that he had died after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Twitter confirmed on Saturday afternoon that this tweet from Boseman's account is now the most-liked tweet on Twitter of all time... "The 43-year-old's death shocked many in Hollywood who were unaware he had spent the last four years fighting colon cancer," notes the Los Angeles Times. But the tweet confirmed that the nine movies he'd filmed over the last four years — including four Marvel movies — "all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy." That tweet has now risen to over 7.1 million likes — 65% more than the previous record-holder. Variety reports: Previously, the most-liked tweet on Twitter was from former President Barack Obama, who shared the Nelson Mandela quote, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion." The tweet was posted on Aug. 12, 2017, the same day as the deadly Charlottesville, Va., car attack at a protest against white supremacists. Obama's former record-holding tweet has 4.3 million likes and 1.6 million retweets. After Boseman's death, Obama was one of the countless people to post a tribute to the actor, who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42. "Chadwick came to the White House to work with kids when he was playing Jackie Robinson," the former president wrote. "You could tell right away that he was blessed. To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years." CNET reports: Many on social media expressed both shock and admiration that the actor continued to produce films during his illness, and many were deeply touched by a video circulating widely Saturday in which Boseman speaks of Ian and Taylor, two children with terminal cancer he'd been in touch with during filming for Black Panther. The kids' parents, Boseman said in the video, relayed that Ian and Taylor were trying to hold on until the 2018 Marvel superhero film came out. We now know Boseman was waging his own cancer fight as he spoke of the children, making the footage all the more poignant. Twitter has now restored its #BlackPanther emoji for fans organizing watch parties of the 2018 movie, reports Variety, and while some remembered his commencement address at Howard or his impact on other actors, others are sharing stories closer to home: "I keep thinking about my 3-year-old in his Black Panther costume," the writer Clint Smith tweeted. "How he wore it almost every day when he got it, refused to take it off. The way he walked around saying. 'I'm the Black Panther.' How happy it made him. What Chadwick gave us was immeasurable. What an enormous loss."

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Pandemic Sends Videogame Museum Into Two-Year Shutdown Slashdotby EditorDavid on classicgames at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 9:35 pm)

Oakland's nonprofit "Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment" housed 40,000 historic pieces of videogame memorabilia — including 11,000 playable games. In 2017 they were the ones urging America's copyright office to allow museums and libraries to circumvent DRM to preserve abandoned online games like FIFA World Cup, Nascar and The Sims. The museum's sponsors include GitHub, Google, PlayStation, and Dolby Digital. But now the MADE is "set to close its doors, with uncertainty ahead about whether it'll ever be able to reopen," reports GamesIndustry.biz: Founder and director Alex Handy said in an interview with GamesBeat that the group managing the museum couldn't reach an agreement on rent for the place during the COVID-19 crisis... 80% of its budget comes from admissions, its website says, and since it's been closed since March due to the pandemic, it's now forced to shut down and move its collections to storage. Storage will be paid for thanks to donations — still open on this page and will also go towards eventually finding a new space for the museum. "The current plan is to stay in storage for two years while we raise the funds and make plans to create our dream video game museum," the museum's website reads. "When we're ready, we will be back and better than ever, mark our words."

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Are Apple's Privacy Changes Hypocritical, Unfair to Facebook and Advertising Compani Slashdotby EditorDavid on advertising at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 8:35 pm)

iPhone users will have to opt-in to tracking starting with iOS 14. Advertisers are "crying foul," reports the Washington Post: [W]ith Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company's latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month... "This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS14 have forced this decision," Facebook said in a blog post. Some in the advertising industry see the moves as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple's access to the data becomes more valuable. "I think there's probably 30 percent truth in that they're doing it for privacy reasons and it's 70 percent that they're doing it because it's what's good for Apple," said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. "It's a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem," he said. "They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist...?" Apple says that when customers open apps, they'll be asked whether they'd like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an "ID for Advertisers," or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier... With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple... "There's been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They're saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we're going to do," said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers. "Personally, I don't see the problem here," argues Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy. The Post notes that Apple runs its own advertising business based on data gathered from its users — but Apple's director of privacy engineering "doesn't consider this data gathering 'tracking'...because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they're not using Facebook."

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ARM Not Just For Macs: Might Make Weather Forecasting Cheaper Too Slashdotby EditorDavid on supercomputing at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 7:35 pm)

An anonymous reader writes: The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that's not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash. ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world's most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark. The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides "a very cost-efficient solution...and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors."

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Major Internet Outage: Dozens of Sites are Down Slashdotby EditorDavid on internet at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 7:05 pm)

"Cloudflare, an internet service that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself Sunday, taking dozens of websites and online services along with it," reports CNN: Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems Sunday morning. Cloudflare said the problem was with a third-party "transit provider," and its service was becoming increasingly stable over the course of the day... CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:15 AM ET... DownDetector, which displays reports of internet and service outages, showed that reports of internet connectivity came in across the United States and Europe Sunday morning. Anyone experiencing any connectivity issues this morning?

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Pictures of the day Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 6:03 pm)

This is what today's Hitler Youth look like. They're laughing because Trump said it would be cool for them to shoot black people. They thought that was clever.

This is when I realized for sure Trump was on Team Russia.

How to fight mice in cars Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 6:03 pm)

Mice got my car. Learning how to fight back.

Notes --

[no title] Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 6:03 pm)

2011: Developers are familiar with the idea of bugs that never get fixed. They're called features.
Linux Developers Continue Evaluating The Path To Adding Rust Code To The Kernel Slashdotby EditorDavid on programming at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 5:35 pm)

Phoronix reports: As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference... To be clear though, these Rust Linux kernel plans do not involve rewriting large parts of the kernel in Rust (at least for the foreseeable future...), there would be caveats on the extent to which Rust code could be used and what functionality, and the Rust support would be optional when building the Linux kernel. C would remain the dominant language of the kernel and then it's just a matter of what new functionality gets added around Rust if concerned by memory safety, concurrency, and other areas where Rust is popular with developers. Various upstream developers have been interested in Rust for those language benefits around memory safety and security as well as its syntax being close to C. There would be a to-be-determined subset of Rust to be supported by the Linux kernel.... While the Rust code would be optional, the developers do acknowledge there are limitations on where Rust is supported due to the LLVM compiler back-ends. But at least for x86/x86_64, ARM/ARM64, POWER, and other prominent targets there is support along with the likes of RISC-V. Nothing firm has been determined yet but it's a topic that is still being discussed at the virtual LPC this week and surely over the weeks/months ahead on the kernel mailing list. There is Rust-For-Linux on GitHub with a prototype kernel module implementation. There is also the PDF slides from Thursday's talk on the matter. It's not clear to me that this is a done deal. But the article argues that "it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be..."

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[no title] Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 5:03 pm)

This is when I realized for sure Trump was on Team Russia.
[no title] Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 5:03 pm)

This is what today's Hitler Youth look like. They're laughing because Trump said it would be cool for them to shoot black people. They thought that was clever.
[no title] Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 5:03 pm)

Since people are moving out of cities, it would be so cool if they moved to swing states. In case we manage to get rid of Trump and restore the rule of law, it would be helpful to better-distribute blue state voters to places their votes are needed. Even better, move to low population red states, like Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas.
[no title] Scripting News(cached at August 30, 2020, 5:03 pm)

I’d like a political leader who says what I’m thinking, a kind of Occam’s Razor president. For the white supremacists, that’s what Trump is, and he’s good at it, and that’s why they’re winning.
Kingpin Behind Massive Identity-Theft Service Says He's Sorry Slashdotby EditorDavid on crime at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 4:35 pm)

Krebs on Security tells the tale of Hieu Minh Ngo, who earned $3 million by selling the identity records he'd stolen from consumer data brokers (which included social security numbers and physical addresses). "He was selling the personal information on more than 200 million Americans," one secret service agent tells the site, "and allowing anyone to buy it for pennies apiece." Handling over 160,000 queries each month, Ngo's service "enabled approximately $1.1 billion in new account fraud at banks and retailers throughout the United States," according to government estimates, "and roughly $64 million in tax refund fraud with the states and the IRS..." Ngo said he wasn't surprised that his services were responsible for so much financial damage. But he was utterly unprepared to hear about the human toll. Throughout the court proceedings, Ngo sat through story after dreadful story of how his work had ruined the financial lives of people harmed by his services... "[D]uring my case, the federal court received like 13,000 letters from victims who complained they lost their houses, jobs, or could no longer afford to buy a home or maintain their financial life because of me. That made me feel really bad, and I realized I'd been a terrible person." Even as he bounced from one federal detention facility to the next, Ngo always seemed to encounter ID theft victims wherever he went, including prison guards, healthcare workers and counselors. "When I was in jail at Beaumont, Texas I talked to one of the correctional officers there who shared with me a story about her friend who lost her identity and then lost everything after that," Ngo recalled. "Her whole life fell apart. I don't know if that lady was one of my victims, but that story made me feel sick. I know now that was I was doing was just evil." The article says Ameria's secret service describes Ngo "as someone who caused more material financial harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal." "Ngo was recently deported back to his home country after serving more than seven years in prison for running multiple identity theft services. He now says he wants to use his experience to convince other cybercriminals to use their skills for good..."

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Facebook Ignored 455 Complaints About Militia Page Urging Weapons at Kenosha Protest Slashdotby EditorDavid on facebook at January 1, 1970, 1:00 am (cached at August 30, 2020, 4:35 pm)

BuzzFeed News reports: In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of "an operational mistake." The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night. The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it "non-violating." The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting. "To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day," one Facebook worker wrote in the internal "Violence and Incitement Working Group" to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event... The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News reveals the extent to which concerned Facebook users went to warn the company of a group calling for public violence, and how the company failed to act. After BuzzFeed news published its story about Facebook's internal report, Mark Zuckerberg made the same comments in a public forum, reports CNN: The page clearly violated Facebook's rules against violent militias, Zuckerberg acknowledged in a video posted Friday to his Facebook profile, and that "a bunch of people" had even reported the page prior to the killing of two protesters, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Just last week, Facebook announced it would crack down on militia organizations that advocated for violence or spoke about the potential for violence. But in its first week of implementation, the policy's lack of enforcement led to the spread of violent messages on the platform directly linked to the events in Kenosha, where protests erupted after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

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