Users have found a major bug in Apple's iOS 14 iPhone software. The free software upgrade, which Apple made publicly available last week, includes features many users had long asked for, such as better ways to organize apps, living programs called widgets on the home screen, and the ability to change which default apps the phone uses to browse the web or send an email. That last one doesn't appear to work. From a report: A growing chorus of Twitter users has been posting about the bug in Apple's default email and default web browser options. What happens is that whenever they set the default browser to Google's Chrome, for example, it works as expected, and tapping any link in an app or browser will open Chrome on the iPhone. But then if they restart the phone, iOS 14 changes that default back to Apple's Safari. "We are aware of an issue that can impact default email and browser settings in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. A fix will be available to users in a software update," Apple said in a statement.

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Didn't have a lot on my blogging mind today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS," reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: "Be hired as eviction crew." During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can't-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers. Civvl aims to marry the gig economy with the devastation of a pandemic, complete with signature gig startup language like "be your own boss," and "flexible hours," and "looking for self-motivated individuals with positive attitudes:" "FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19," its website says. "Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants." The company, at first glance, appears to be some kind of _Nathan For You-_esque prank: siccing precarious gig jobs onto vulnerable people. But Civvl is connected to a larger -- and real -- gig economy company called OnQall, which describes itself as an app that provides "on-demand task services to non-urban communities beyond main city areas." OnQall is the developer behind other, more believable TaskRabbit-esque apps, like LawnFixr, CleanQwik, and MoveQwik. Given the fact that Civvl is advertising all over the country and that OnQall, though not popular, does exist, it seems as though Civvl actually is an attempt to simplify the process of evicting people who cannot pay their rent during a pandemic.

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Today's song: Rudy Wants To Buy Yez a Drink.

Nikola founder Trevor Milton has stepped down as executive chairman after a short seller accused Milton and the hydrogen and electric truck startup of misleading investors and overstating the value of a business deal. From a report: Milton has also resigned from the company's board, Nikola said in a statement on Sunday. The company has previously denied the allegations and threatened legal action against the research company that made them. Stephen Girsky, a former vice chairman of General Motors (GM) and current board member at Nikola, will take over as chairman, effective immediately. "The focus should be on the company and its world-changing mission, not me. I intend to defend myself against false accusations leveled against me by outside detractors," Milton said in a statement posted on Twitter. As part of the transition agreement that Nikola filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, Milton agreed to revise any references to the positions he held at Nikola on his social media profiles so it's clear he no longer holds them. He also agreed to check with lawyers for Nikola before posting anything about the company. By late Monday morning, Milton had made his Twitter account private, but his LinkedIn account remained public and active.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Everyone's favorite mathematical constant has received an inadvertent tribute from the universe. A team led by MIT researchers discovered a distant planet that orbits its star every 3.14 days, mirroring the famous first three digits of pi. MIT described the rocky Earth-sized planet K2-315b as "baking hot" and "likely not habitable" in a statement on Monday. "The planet moves like clockwork," said MIT graduate student Prajwal Niraula, lead author of a paper on the planet published in the Astronomical Journal this week. The team found the exoplanet (a planet located outside our solar system) in data gathered in 2017 by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope K2 mission. The planet-finding telescope was put into a permanent sleep mode in 2018. The researchers confirmed the planet's existence by taking another look with the ground-based Speculoos telescope network. "Speculoos" stands for "Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars." It's also a fun reference to a type of spiced cookie.

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The World Health Organization has not changed its policy on aerosol transmission of the coronavirus, it said on Monday after U.S. health officials published draft new guidance by mistake warning that it can spread through airborne particles. From a report: Mike Ryan, executive director of the UN agency's emergencies programme, said he would follow up with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the next 24 hours after it said COVID-19 could spread through airborne particles that can remain suspended in the air and travel beyond six feet. "Certainly we haven't seen any new evidence and our position on this remains the same," he said in a briefing. The CDC said a draft version of changes to its recommendations were posted in error on its website while it was in the process of updating its guidance.

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The 27 wooden coffins are said to have lain undisturbed inside a well at an ancient necropolis.

tola writes: Following a round of layoffs at Mozilla, their WebThings IoT platform is being spun out as an independent open source project by former employees, with a new commercial sponsor. WebThings is an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web, built on W3C Web of Things standards. It includes WebThings Gateway which is a software distribution for smart home gateways focused on privacy, security and interoperability and the WebThings Framework which is a collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things. The project will be renamed from "Mozilla WebThings" to "WebThings" and will move to a new home at https://webthings.io/ Users will be able to opt-in to receive software updates from the new community run update servers and be offered the opportunity to transition to a replacement remote tunnelling service before Mozilla servers are shut down at the end of the year.

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Energy companies stand accused of trying to downplay their contribution to global warming.

AmiMoJo writes: The GNOME 3 desktop environment was officially released in 2011, and in 2020 we are still on version 3.x. Yeah, despite many massive changes over the last (almost) decade, we have been stuck with point releases for GNOME 3. For instance, just last week, GNOME 3.38 was released. Historically, the stable releases all ended in even numbers, with pre-release versions ending in odd. For fans of the DE, such as yours truly, we have simply learned to live with this odd versioning scheme. Well, folks, with the next version of GNOME, the developers have finally decided to move on from version 3.x. You are probably thinking the new version will be 4.0, but you'd be very wrong. Actually, following GNOME3.38 will be GNOME 40. "After nearly 10 years of 3.x releases, the minor version number is getting unwieldy. It is also exceedingly clear that we're not going to bump the major version because of technological changes in the core platform, like we did for GNOME 2 and 3, and then piling on a major UX change on top of that. Radical technological and design changes are too disruptive for maintainers, users, and developers; we have become pretty good at iterating design and technologies, to the point that the current GNOME platform, UI, and UX are fairly different from what was released with GNOME 3.0, while still following the same design tenets," says Emmanuele Bassi, The GNOME Foundation.

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Only in 2012 have satellites seen the summer floes in the polar north more withdrawn than in 2020.

An algorithm Twitter uses to decide how photos are cropped in people's timelines appears to be automatically electing to display the faces of white people over people with darker skin pigmentation. From a report: The apparent bias was discovered in recent days by Twitter users posting photos on the social media platform. A Twitter spokesperson said the company plans to reevaluate the algorithm and make the results available for others to review or replicate. Twitter scrapped its face detection algorithm in 2017 for a saliency detection algorithm, which is made to predict the most important part of an image. A Twitter spokesperson said today that no race or gender bias was found in evaluation of the algorithm before it was deployed "but it's clear we have more analysis to do." Twitter engineer Zehan Wang tweeted that bias was detected in 2017 before the algorithm was deployed but not at "significant" levels.

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President Donald Trump said he might rescind his tentative blessing for a deal between Oracle and ByteDance to create a new U.S.-based TikTok service, casting doubt on the agreement as Chinese state media signaled reluctance in Beijing. From a report: Speaking in an interview on Fox News on Monday, Trump said he wouldn't approve the deal if the Chinese company retains control of TikTok. However, he also indicated that he expected Chinese influence to be diluted by a future public offering of the new company. "They will have nothing to do with it, and if they do, we just won't make the deal," Trump said, referring to ByteDance, which owns TikTok. "It's going to be controlled, totally controlled by Oracle, and I guess they're going public and they're buying out the rest of it -- they're buying out a lot, and if we find that they don't have total control then we're not going to approve the deal." Shortly after Trump's comments, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the China state-affiliated Global Times, tweeted that Beijing would likely reject the deal "because the agreement would endanger China's national security, interests and dignity."

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Facebook has threatened to pack up its toys and go home if European regulators don't back down and let the social network get its own way. From a report: In a court filing in Dublin, Facebook said that a decision by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) would force the company to pull up stakes and leave the 410 million people who use Facebook and photo-sharing service Instagram in the lurch. If the decision is upheld, "it is not clear to [Facebook] how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU," Yvonne Cunnane, who is Facebook Ireland's head of data protection and associate general counsel, wrote in a sworn affidavit. The decision Facebook's referring to is a preliminary order handed down last month to stop the transfer of data about European customers to servers in the U.S., over concerns about U.S. government surveillance of the data. Facebook hit back by filing a lawsuit challenging the Irish DPC's ban, and in a sworn affidavit filed this week, the company leveled some very serious accusations about the Irish data-protection commissioner, including a lack of fairness and apparent bias in singling out Facebook. Cunnane points out that Facebook was given only three weeks to respond to the decision, a period that is "manifestly inadequate," adding that Facebook wasn't contacted about the inquiry prior to judgment being handed down. She also raises concerns about the decision being made "solely" by Helen Dixon, Ireland's data protection commissioner.

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