If a Facebook page or an Instagram post is offering the location of your polling place, you should double check that with your local elections office, the FBI director said Thursday at a congressional hearing. Better yet, don't get your election information from social media at all. From a report: The House Committee on Homeland Security hosted on Thursday its annual worldwide threats hearing, where intelligence agencies in past years have warned about international cyberattacks and online disinformation. [...] The FBI director said that social networks like Facebook and Twitter have worked with the bureau to take down disinformation campaigns, but he also warned Americans against getting election information on those platforms. "It's particularly of concern to us in the election context when Americans make the mistake of getting information about elections themselves on social media," Wray said. "We're trying to make sure Americans know [that] to get information about where, when and how you vote, you need to go to your local election official's website. Don't take it from social media."

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I'm on a podcast roll these days. 17-minutes worth of rambling about how Apple should fix the TV problem, which btw is all those freaking wires. The tech has advanced so much, you could blow people away with elegance, ease of use, and power, and so what if it costs three times as much as the competition. We're accustomed to paying for the best. I should note that I have some $AAPL stock, purchased in 1997 and held since then so when Apple screws me in software at least I make up for it in my brokerage account. I'm so puzzled why I'm not using Clubhouse these days. And I'm totally maxed out on new services. OMG no more please.

Partnering with oil and gas producers is necessary for Amazon and other companies to achieve their climate goals, the tech giant's chief of sustainability, Kara Hurst, said during an Axios virtual event on Thursday. From a report: Amazon aims to hit carbon neutrality in 2040, 10 years earlier than the Paris climate accord. The company plans to reach its goal in part by helping companies develop climate-friendly technologies through a $2 billion venture fund. The first recipients were announced on Thursday. "Amazon, like every other company you just mentioned -- Google, Microsoft, many tech companies -- works across a wide variety of industries. And I believe it's absolutely necessary to work with those types of industries to create transformation," referring to oil companies.

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Twitter will require certain political candidates, elected officials and journalists to beef up their passwords, the company said Thursday, in an effort to head off any more breaches of high-profile accounts as the 2020 election draws near. From a report: The change comes two months after an embarrassing cyberattack in which hackers exploited Twitter employees' credentials to wrest control of dozens of accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The steps announced Thursday would not have prevented that hack but could foil less sophisticated exploits. Accounts deemed to have weak passwords will be compelled to make them stronger, and those users must now verify their phone number or email address before making password changes. The social media company will also encourage, but not force, high-profile users to implement two-factor authentication, a security measure that requires them to input a unique code in addition to their password.

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Mozilla is shutting down two of its legacy products, Firefox Send and Firefox Notes, the company announced today. From a report: "Both services are being decommissioned and will no longer be a part of our product family," a Mozilla spokesperson told ZDNet this week. Of the two, the most beloved was Firefox Send, a free file-sharing service, and one of the few that supported sharing files in encrypted formats. Launched in March 2019, the service gained a dedicated fanbase but Send was taken offline earlier this summer after ZDNet reported on its constant abuse by malware groups. At the time, Mozilla said that Send's shutdown was temporary and promised to find a way to curb the service's abuse in malware operations. But weeks later, things changed after Mozilla leadership laid off more than 250 employees as part of an effort to re-focus its business on commercial products.

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In the fight against Covid-19, contact tracing apps have so far largely been disappointments -- in the United States, at least. Proposed in the spring as a way to help quickly stifle viral outbreaks by tracking down potential exposures using smartphones, they were stunted by technical glitches, concerns over privacy, and the US's fragmented, haphazard pandemic response. Now, they may become mired in a fight over patents. From a report: The challenge comes from Blyncsy, a Salt Lake City-based maker of software that helps cities gather and analyze mobility data. In recent weeks, the company has sent claims seeking the equivalent of $1 per resident to states that have released or plan to release contact tracing apps, including Pennsylvania, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Virginia. The company holds three patents related to contact tracing. One of them, granted in February 2019, for "tracking proximity relationships and uses thereof," describes methods of tracking the spread of "contagion" using technology such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular signals. Apps launched by public health agencies during the Covid-19 pandemic infringe upon it, the company says. In April, Blyncsy launched a portal for others to request a license for its technology and submit plans for a privacy review. That was shortly after Google and Apple jointly announced an effort to get contact tracing technology in the hands of state and national governments, using Bluetooth features on the companies' smartphones. Blyncsy did not get any takers. "State governments have taken it upon themselves to roll out a solution in their name in which they're using our property without compensation," says Blyncsy CEO Mark Pittman. He describes the current crop of contact tracing apps as "fly-by-night" efforts and says his patent fight is driven by concerns about their privacy and effectiveness, not an attempt to profit.

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Kyle Wiggers, reporting for VentureBeat: Over 111.8 million people in the U.S. talk to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant every month, eMarketer estimates. Tens of millions of those people use assistants as data-finding tools, with the Global Web Index reporting that 25% of adults regularly perform voice searches on smartphones. But while voice assistants can answer questions about pop culture and world events like a pro, preliminary evidence suggests they struggle to supply information about elections. In a test of popular assistants' abilities to provide accurate, localized context concerning the upcoming U.S. presidential election, VentureBeat asked Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant a set of standardized questions about procedures, deadlines, and misconceptions about voting. In general, the assistants fared relatively poorly, often answering questions with information about voting in other states or punting questions to the web instead of answering them directly.

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Using sound waves from underwater earthquakes, researchers can more accurately measure sea temperatures.

MojoKid writes: Intel formally announced its 11th Gen Core mobile processor family, known by the code name Tiger Lake, a few weeks back and made some bold performance claims for it as well. The company even compared its quad-core variant to AMD's 8-core Ryzen 7 4800U in gaming and content creation. Today Intel lifted the embargo veil on benchmarks with its Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake CPU with on-board Iris Xe graphics and there's no question Tiger Lake is impressive. Intel indeed achieved single-threaded performance gains north of 20% with even larger deltas for multithreaded throughput in some cases as well. In addition, Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe graphics put up over 2X the gaming performance over the company's 10th Gen Ice Lake processors, and it looks to be the fastest integrated graphics solution for laptops on the market currently, besting AMD's Ryzen 4000 series as well. Battery life measurements are still out, however, as retail ready products have yet to hit the channel. Intel notes Tiger Lake-powered laptops from OEM partners should be available in the next month or so.

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Google has updated its Play Store rules to impose a "formal" ban on stalkerware apps, but the company has left a pretty huge loophole in place for stalkerware to be uploaded on the official store as child-tracking applications. From a report: Stalkerware is a term used to describe apps that track a user's movements, snoop on calls and messages, and record other apps' activity. Stalkerware, also known as spouseware, is usually advertised to users as a way to discover cheating partners, track children while outside their homes, and as a way to keep an eye on employees at work. The primary feature of all stalkerware apps, regardless if they're intended to be used on smartphones or laptops, is that these apps can be installed and run without the device owner's knowledge, operating in the operating system's background. Over the past decade, the Play Store has hosted hundreds of applications that fit into the stalkerware category. Google, which has intervened to take down stalkerware apps when they've been pointed out by security researchers, has usually avoided making public statements on the topic.

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Cloudflare and the Internet Archive are now working together to help make the web more reliable. Websites that enable Cloudflare's Always Online service will now have their content automatically archived, and if by chance the original host is not available to Cloudflare, then the Internet Archive will step in to make sure the pages get through to users. From a report: Cloudflare has become core infrastructure for the Web, and we are glad we can be helpful in making a more reliable web for everyone."The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has an impressive infrastructure that can archive the web at scale," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "By working together, we can take another step toward making the Internet more resilient by stopping server issues for our customers and in turn from interrupting businesses and users online." For more than 20 years the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been archiving much of the public Web, and making those archives available to journalists, researchers, activists, academics and the general public, in total to hundreds of thousands of people a day. To date more than 468 billion Web pages are available via the Wayback Machine and we are adding more than 1 billion new archived URLs/day. We archive URLs that are identified via a variety of different methods, such as "crawling" from lists of millions of sites, as submitted by users via the Wayback Machine's "Save Page Now" feature, added to Wikipedia articles, referenced in Tweets, and based on a number of other "signals" and sources, such multiple feeds of "news" stories. An additional source of URLs we will preserve now originates from customers of Cloudflare's Always Online service. As new URLs are added to sites that use that service they are submitted for archiving to the Wayback Machine. In some cases this will be the first time a URL will be seen by our system and result in a "First Archive" event.

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Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had his phone number and passport details obtained by a hacker after posting a picture of his boarding pass on Instagram. From a report: Hacker Alex Hope said he uncovered Mr Abbott's details from his Qantas boarding pass in just 45 minutes. He then spent months attempting to contact Mr Abbott to alert him of the security breach. Qantas said it had now updated its cyber security protocols. Mr Abbott posted an image of a boarding pass for his flight from Sydney to Tokyo on 21 March on his Instagram account, thanking the crew. Mr Hope said he received a message from a friend daring him to hack the former prime minister as they had recently been discussing the dangers of posting your boarding pass online. The hacker explained in a blog post published on Wednesday that he was able to find Mr Abbott's information because his booking reference was printed on the boarding pass. He was then able to log in to Mr Abbott's booking and search through HTML code to find his passport number and phone number. The code also included conversations with Qantas staff about Mr Abbott. "I had Tony Abbott's passport number, phone number and weird Qantas messages about him. I was the only one who knew I had these," Mr Hope said in a blog post. "Anyone who saw that Instagram post could also have them. I felt like I had to like, tell someone about this. Someone with like, responsibilities. Someone with an email signature." Mr Hope said he contacted the Australian Signals Directorate which handles cyber security. They thanked him for bringing the issue to their attention and said they would investigate.

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YouTube's video recommendation system has been repeatedly accused by critics of sending people down rabbit holes of disinformation and extremism. Now Mozilla, the nonprofit that makes the Firefox browser, wants YouTube's users to help it research how the controversial algorithms work. From a report: Mozilla on Thursday announced a project that asks people to download a software tool that gives Mozilla's researchers information on what video recommendations people are receiving on the Google-owned platform. YouTube's algorithms recommend videos in the "What's next" column along the right side of the screen, inside the video player after the content has ended, or on the site's homepage. Each recommendation is tailored to the person watching, taking into account things like their watch history, list of channel subscriptions or location. The recommendations can be benign, like another live performance from the band you're watching. But critics say YouTube's recommendations can also lead viewers to fringe content, like medical misinformation or conspiracy theories.

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I believe self-executing functions JavaScript are obsolete with EC6. I never liked and rarely used them. I prefer to use features put there by the designers, rather than use a clever hack that makes you wonder why the feature wasn't put there.

Now in EC6, you can create a simple block and declare your variables with let. No clever hacks needed.

Some real-world example code.

• { //insert headline for 1st level subs
• let htmltext = "";
• let ixButtonsArray = ix + 1;
• let theButton = theButtons [ixButtonsArray];
• function div (classname, val) {
• return ("<div class=\"" + classname + "\">" + val + "</div>");
• }
• function add (s) {
• htmltext += s;
• }
• add (div ("divButtonEmoji", theButton.htmlEmojiCode));
• add (div ("divButtonTitle", theButton.theTitle));
• add (div ("divButtonVal", ix));
• opInsertRawHtml (htmltext, right);
• }

The block, like a bundle in Frontier, allows you to collapse some code, hide its variables from the containing code, without declaring a new routine. It's essential that you put a comment at the opening left curly brace to say what the block does. If that's not easy to do that indicates a refactor is needed, imho.