An anonymous reader writes: Linux fans, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" Beta is now available for download. This doesn't just include the "vanilla" GNOME version either, but other variants like Kubuntu and Xubuntu as well. "20.10, codenamed 'Groovy Gorilla,' continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs," explains Åukasz Zemczak, Canonical.

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The next big Hollywood movie release, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's James Bond flick "No Time to Die," is being delayed again, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a person with knowledge of the situation, a result of the woeful economics that studios are facing because of the pandemic. From a report: "No Time to Die" will be released in 2021, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the decision isn't yet public. It had already been delayed from April to Nov. 20, after the pandemic forced movie theaters across the world to close. Hollywood has a growing inventory of big movies sitting on the shelf because of Covid-19. The only major film that's been released since the pandemic started, Warner Bros.'s "Tenet," has attracted a small domestic audience -- partly because theaters in New York and Los Angeles are closed. Cinemas also have to cap ticket sales to adhere to social-distancing requirements. The Bond film, which cost about $250 million to make, will now compete with other big movies for audience attention in 2021. The change also means theaters will have no major movies for adults to show until the end of the year, when Warner Bros. is scheduled to release sci-fi thriller "Dune" and DC Comics installment "Wonder Woman 1984."

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Facebook on Friday offered a rebuttal to the hit Netflix documentary-drama, "The Social Dilemma." The movie revealed, perhaps for the first time to some viewers, how social networks use algorithms to keep people coming back. It also addressed how tech companies have influenced elections, ethnic violence and rates of depression and suicide. Some viewers said they were deleting Facebook and Instagram after watching it. From a report: The rebuttal suggests that Facebook may be worried that the documentary's effects on usage. "The Social Dilemma" appeared in Netflix's top ten most popular movies and TV shows list in September and is still listed in its Trending section. In a post published on its site, Facebook addressed several concerns it has with the movie, covering topics like addiction, users being "the product," its algorithms, data privacy, polarization, elections and misinformation. "Rather than offer a nuanced look at technology, it gives a distorted view of how social media platforms work to create a convenient scapegoat for what are difficult and complex societal problems," Facebook said. It said the documentary sensationalizes social networks and provides a distorted view to how they work.

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Trump getting sick saves lives.

This is our country. In order to get out of the mess, we have to start thinking and acting like we're the owners of the United States. And by we I mean the weirdos, immigrants, people of color, people who read books, listen to other people. Have hope, give a shit.

Investments by China's Huawei are not regular market transactions but rather "predatory actions" and all countries should ban them, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a newspaper interview on Friday. From a report: "Their investments are not private because they are subsidised by the (Chinese) State. Hence they are not transparent, free, commercial transactions like many others but they are rather carried out to the exclusive benefit of (China's) security apparatus," Pompeo told Italian daily la Repubblica, at the end of his two-day visit to the country. "(Huawei's investments) are predatory actions that no nation must or can allow," he added.

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Google contract employees are alleging the company's confidentiality agreements prevent them from a range of legal rights from whistleblowing to telling their parents how much they make, according to a recent court filing. From a report: A California appeals court recently discussed a lawsuit accusing Google and one of its staffing firms, Adecco, of violating a number of California labor laws, including free speech, by requiring workers to sign extensive confidentiality agreements. The contractors state they can't talk about their wages, working conditions or colleagues, among other things, according to the court filing. "As a practical matter, plaintiffs argue, they are forbidden even to write a novel about working in Silicon Valley or to reassure their parents they are making enough money to pay their bills, matters untethered to any legitimate need for confidentiality," the filing states.

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Uncertainty can be hard for humans. It drives anxiety, an emotion neuroscientists are trying to understand and psychologists are trying to better treat. From a report: Under the threat of a virus, job insecurity, election uncertainty, and a general pandemic life-in-limbo that is upending school, holidays and more, people are especially anxious. Before the pandemic, anxiety was already climbing in the U.S., especially among young adults, according to a recent study. Add the pandemic and its many unknowns: 35% of adults in the Household Pulse Survey reported symptoms of anxiety disorder in July. (In the first half of 2019, it was roughly 8%.) "We have anxiety for a reason," says Stephanie Gorka, who studies the neurobiology of anxiety and treatments for anxiety-related disorders and phobias at the Ohio State University. Anxiety alerts people to pay attention to their environment and is key to our survival, but if it is chronic or excessive, it can have negative health consequences, she says. But how exactly the brain responds to uncertainty and leads to anxiety is unclear.

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Ben Wood and Geoff Blaber, commenting on Google's new Pixel smartphones at research firm CCI Insight: Historically, Google has been one of the leaders in developing and implementing computational photography, mixing optics with digital sleight of hand to make imaging magic. And again, Google is promising great photography by using software smarts. The camera on the new phones has an ultrawide lens, a Night Sight feature that works in portrait mode, and a setting that lets users adjust the lighting in post-processing. The challenge for Google is that its camera capabilities are no longer unique, as all leading smartphone makers focus on camera and imaging tech to try and make their latest and greatest devices stand out. [....] Given Google's scale, the progress of the Pixel business has been disappointing, particularly in light of the difficulties Huawei has faced. Mobile operators, retailers and consumers would benefit from a credible alternative to Apple and Samsung. On paper Google should fit the bill, but the company has consistently failed to live up to expectations. Sadly, it's hard to see how these new devices will do anything to address these shortcomings. Google's smartphone hardware strategy is in need of a reset. The company either needs to deliver differentiated flagship Android experiences or mass-market products with broad distribution. Right now, it provides neither and sits awkwardly within a vibrant ecosystem of Android players led by Samsung. Google must prove that Pixel still has a role.

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Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two companies for creating and distributing malicious browser extensions that scraped user data without authorization from the Facebook and Instagram websites. From a report: Named in the lawsuit are BrandTotal, an Israeli-based company with a Delaware subsidiary, and Unimania, incorporated in Delaware. The two companies are behind UpVoice and Ads Feed, two Chrome extensions available on the official Chrome Web Store since September and November 2019, where they racked up more than 5,000 and 10,000 installs, respectively. "BrandTotal enticed users to install the UpVoice extension from the Google Chrome Store by offering payments in exchange for installs, in the form of online gift cards, and claiming that the users who installed the extension became 'panelists . . . [who] impact the marketing decisions and brand strategies of multi-billion dollars (sic) corporations'," Facebook said in court documents filed today.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Last month, a bunch of users tweeted about how Twitter's image cropping algorithm seems to have a bias towards fair-skinned people. When users posted uncropped images containing both light and dark-skinned people, the social network's algorithm often showed the light-skinned person in the preview. At that time, Twitter said, while its algorithm was tested for bias, it will conduct further investigations to resolve the issue. Last night, in an update, the company said it's planning to give users more control over how the final image will look like.

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In 2017, two of Apple's top design and technology executives decided to leave the company to start their own venture with an ambitious vision: to create the next big computing paradigm. That startup, called Humane, is now announcing that it has raised $30 million in a series A round of venture funding to continue developing its mysterious product. From a report: While cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno refuse to reveal what they're working on, its cofounders seem to believe it will have the same kind of impact as the iPhone -- which is saying a lot, given that one of them designed the iPhone's original interface. "We are at a point in terms of computing platforms where there's a certain level of maturation that's led to a decline in innovation," says Humane president and chairman Chaudhri, who worked on the UI design of the iPhone and the iPad during his 21 years at Apple. "For us, it's really about how we actually bring vitality and how we bring a new opportunity to computing. How do we move the needle?" It's impossible to have an opinion about the potential impact of Humane's creation until it reveals at least some details. Tony Fadell, who spearheaded the iPod and also helped bring us the iPhone, left Apple over a decade ago and soon after started talking about "a product that could have a huge impact on a big problem," as he told The New York Times in 2011. His startup Nest's creation turned out to be a thermostat. But Humane is certainly dialing up the expectations for whatever it's working on. The startup's ambitions derive in part from Chaudhri reckoning with the downsides of the products he was instrumental in creating --particularly the ways in which smartphones can nag at and monopolize our attention while siphoning away private data for corporations to profit from. But that doesn't mean that Chaudhri and Bongiorno, a former director of software engineering at Apple who worked with Chaudhri to launch the iPad, believe that technology is a net negative force in society. "We're tech optimists at heart," says Bongiorno, who is Humane's CEO. "But we believe it's also time to question everything to build something better." Instead, they're betting that the time is right for a new, less invasive way to interface with computers. It's a compelling vision, despite the lack of details. "Every product, especially in computing, has a limitation in terms of how far it can go, what it can do before it starts to really become exhausted. That's exhausted in terms of creativity, exhausted in terms of usefulness, exhausted in terms of the experience of using it as well," Chaudhri says. "This is a cyclical thing that's always occurred. Some people from a certain perspective call it a 15-year cycle. We're coming on that for the smartphone." More on this on Jason Calacanis's podcast.

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Amazon has teamed up with Universal Music and Warner Music to remaster thousands of popular streaming tracks to better-than-CD audio quality [Editor's note: the link may be paywalleddd; alternative source], as the music industry tries to lure listeners to pricier subscriptions. From a report: In addition to a standard $10 a month streaming service comparable to Spotify, Amazon offers a high-definition option that delivers songs to smartphones at CD sound quality or better. This service costs $15 a month, or $13 a month for members of its Prime shipping programme. The ecommerce group has spent the past year working to boost its pricier streaming service with albums from stars including Lady Gaga, Nirvana, Ariana Grande and Bob Marley in what it calls "ultra high-definition." To do so, Universal Music went back to the original recordings of albums such as Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's Diana & Marvin and worked with sound engineers to remaster them. Amazon says the audio will "reveal nuances that were once flattened in files compressed for digital streaming or CD manufacturing." The move comes as the inflow of cash from music streaming has slowed over the past year as the market matures

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Dan Conover, on Facebook: "Trump is a sort of televised strong-man, superhero avatar for many of his supporters. The core of that support is White Evangelical Christians, most of whom literally believe that Trump was directly anointed by God to lead the nation four years ago."

Short podcast about why Trump getting the virus is good.