An anonymous reader shares a report: Some diamonds were formed billions of years ago in space as the carbon-rich atmospheres of dying stars expanded and cooled. In our own planet's lifetime, high-temperatures and pressures in the mantle produced the diamonds that are familiar to us as gems. 5,000 years ago, a large meteorite that struck a carbon-rich sediment on Earth produced an impact diamond. Each of these diamonds differs from the others in both composition and genesis, but all are categorized as "diamond" by the authoritative guide to minerals -- the International Mineralogical Association's Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification. For many physical scientists, this inconsistency poses no problem. But the IMA system leaves unanswered questions for planetary scientists, geobiologists, paleontologists and others who strive to understand minerals' historical context. So, Carnegie's Robert Hazen and Shaunna Morrison teamed up with CU Boulder philosophy of science professor Carol Cleland to propose that scientists address this shortcoming with a new "evolutionary system" of mineral classification -- one that includes historical data and reflects changes in the diversity and distribution of minerals through more than 4 billion years of Earth's history. Their work is published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We came together from the very different fields of philosophy and planetary science to see if there was a rigorous way to bring the dimension of time into discussions about the solid materials that compose Earth," Hazen said.

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The Justice Department sued Walmart on Tuesday for what it said was the company's role in fueling the nation's opioid crisis by allowing its network of pharmacies to fill millions of prescriptions for opioids, thousands of which authorities said were suspicious. From a report: The 160-page civil complaint alleges that the retail giant knew that its system for detecting illegitimate prescriptions was inadequate and details numerous instances when Walmart's own employees warned federal authorities and company managers about possibly suspicious prescriptions. "As one of the largest pharmacy chains and wholesale drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent the diversion of prescription opioids," Jeffrey Bossert Clark, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's civil division, said in a statement. "Instead, for years, it did the opposite -- filling thousands of invalid prescriptions at its pharmacies and failing to report suspicious orders of opioids and other drugs placed by those pharmacies." In one instance, an employee identified only by his or her initials admitted to the Drug Enforcement Administration to filling prescriptions that the employee knew were not legitimate, the lawsuit alleges.

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I read a lot of audiobooks. Sometimes the narrator is so excellent, it's worth calling out. I just got through One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, narrated by John C. Reilly. The book is wonderful, Keysey is a great writer, it's funny, warm, a great story beautifully told. Reilly is does all the voices. Usually male narrators have trouble pulling off the female characters and vice versa. Somehow Reilly does it. Highly recommend it. If you know of audiobooks that are great because of narration, let me know. I'm always looking for a good read. My next book is the Biden biography by Evan Osnos. Also the first book by Rudy Rucker is queued up.

An internal Nintendo leak has revealed measures the company took when approaching a 3DS homebrew hacker. The measures are rather extreme and apparently include surveillance of the individual in question, as well as internal presentations and instructions on how to approach him. From a report: This comes courtesy of prominent Twitter Nintendo leaker Eclipse. According to documents unearthed by Eclipse -- which also include a Switch software development kit and console security documents, among other things -- the company conducted surveillance on Neimod, a hacker who cracked the 3DS, in 2013. Online Nintendo historian Forest of Illusion corroborates this with an internal document showing findings about Neimod's personal life including where he lived and his average work week. In addition to the surveillance, Nintendo also created detailed plans on how to approach Neimod in order to get him to back down from hacking the 3DS. In the documents, IRC chats involving Neimod are included, showing Nintendo covertly extracting information from Neimod and altering its response to the issue based on what he says. The details of Nintendo's plan to approach Neimod are remarkably detailed, with multiple stages and potential outcomes mapped out in a flowchart.

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As you may have heard, I got a new OLED tv last week, and I'm starting to come to terms with it. I've added an old Roku stick to the device, and 99 percent of my interaction with the TV is through Roku. I'm not sure I'm getting the best video this way. Also the annoying LG user interface keeps popping up. And to adjust the hardware of the TV, I still need to use the LG remote. Which makes me wonder if there are any external devices, Apple TV, or some kind of Chromecast or something from Amazon that can also manage the hardware? I'd love to get it down to one remote. I still think Roku has the best remote. Almost as simple as possible. I loved the way my old TCL did everything from Roku. Perfectly integrated, and one less OS is better than two.

The way Trump relates to his base reminds me a lot of the way big tech companies talk to their user bases. In tech it's called FUD. You can't tell who's lying a lot of the time. They take advantage of the fact that their customers are confused, and they try to keep them that way. IBM as an example made many billions off this approach over decades. There are exceptions, companies who value their customers and users enough to tell them the truth. Not many, and not always.

The Wall Street Journal: To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon's fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike -- an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear. No competitor is too small to draw Amazon's sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon's site, hurting the vendor's sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm's owner said. Amazon said it didn't violate the company's intellectual-property rights. When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair, Mr. Bezos's deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter. Amazon set its sights on Allbirds, the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds' bestseller -- without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price. "You can't help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you've put your career against," said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. "You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us." This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify, a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, "Project Santos," to replicate parts of Shopify's business model, said people familiar with the project. Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails. From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service and FedEx. Mr. Bezos is the world's richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion. He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. "It is always day one," he likes to say. Day two is "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon's site.

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If Mission Impossible were still on the air, the old version with Barbara Bain and Martin Landau, they could do a mission to put Trump to sleep for 45 days. He wakes up in a hospital in Hungary or Belgium, maybe Russia, surrounded by incriminating evidence.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill Tuesday suspending the use of facial recognition and other kinds of biometric technology in schools in New York, also directing a study of whether its use is appropriate in schools. The legislation places a moratorium on schools purchasing and using biometric identifying technology until at least July 1, 2022 or until the report is completed and the state Education Department commissioner authorizes its use. The rule applies to both public and private schools in New York. In a statement, ACLU said. "This is a victory for student privacy and students of color, who are disproportionately harmed by this flawed and biased technology. New York has led the way, and now other states should follow."

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We should be supporting Americans during the pandemic. A country that won't come together in a crisis like this isn't imho a country. We support rich people who don't need support -- and we let people wait out the pandemic with no money for food or rent and no hope of ever getting out of debt, people who may have been middle class before Covid, who are now broke. The importance of health care is something everyone can understand now, even young people. We are a stupid country. We waste so much, yet we don't take care of our basic needs. This is about to come home in a huge way. I can't write coherently about this yet.

Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have seized this week the web domains and server infrastructure of three VPN services that provided a safe haven for cybercriminals to attack their victims. From a report: The three services were active at insorg.org, safe-inet.com, and safe-inet.net before the domains were seized and replaced with law enforcement banners on Monday. The services have been active for more than a decade, are believed to be operated by the same individual/group, and have been heavily advertised on both Russian and English-speaking underground cybercrime forums, where they were sold for prices ranging from $1.3/day to $190/year. According to the US Department of Justice and Europol, the three companies' servers were often used to mask the real identities of ransomware gangs, web skimmer (Magecart) groups, online phishers, and hackers involved in account takeovers, allowing them to operate from behind a proxy network up to five layers deep.

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Digital rights group Fight for the Future has unveiled an open letter signed by 2,000 parents calling on McGraw-Hill Publishing to end its relationship with Proctorio, one of many proctoring apps that offers services that digital rights groups have called "indistinguishable from spyware." From a report: As the pandemic has pushed schooling into virtual classrooms, a host of software vendors have stepped up to offer their latest surveillance tools. Some, like Proctorio, offer technologies that claim to fight cheating by tracking head and eye movements, without any evidence that their algorithms do anything but make students anxious (and thus perform worse). Others rely on facial recognition technology, which is itself rife with racial bias, and have regularly failed to verify the identities of students of color at various points while taking state bar exams, forcing the test to end. Proctorio is one of a few companies that has come under scrutiny from privacy groups not only for invasive surveillance, but exhaustive data extraction that collects sensitive student data including biometrics. The company is perhaps unique in its attempts to silence critics of its surveillance programs. Proctorio has deployed lawsuits to silence critics, forcing one University of British Columbia learning technology specialist to exhaust his personal and emergency savings due to a lawsuit meant to silence his online criticisms of the company. Proctorio has also targeted students and abused Twitter's DMCA takedown process to further suppress valid criticisms of its proctoring software. Further reading: Proctoring Software Company Used DMCA To Take Down a Student's Critical Tweets; and Cheating-Detection Software Provokes 'School-Surveillance Revolt'.

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Scientists say the cub, which died about 56,000 years ago, is "the most complete wolf mummy known".

Small advertisers that rely on Facebook to spread marketing messages are up in arms over the social network's automated ad systems, complaining that inflexible account blocking tools and a lack of customer assistance are hurting business. From a report: One digital marketer, Chris Raines, was setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook last week when his account abruptly stopped working. Raines uses his account to manage ads for clients' Facebook Pages. Without it, he couldn't do his job. The lockout was a nuisance, but then Raines noticed something more concerning: A $3,000-per-day ad campaign that he'd set up for a client before his account was locked continued to run even though he could no longer manage it. Raines was spending his client's money without any way to control how. Raines tried to confirm his identity using Facebook's automated systems, but received an error message. Eventually, he called the advertiser and asked if they would make his wife an administrator to the company-owned Facebook Page. Using her account, he was finally able to log in and manage the Facebook ads, which includes adjusting details like who sees the ad and how much to spend. "The actual injury, especially for advertisers and marketers, is immense," said Raines, who runs a digital media company called Bullhorn Media. "Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went away."

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Small advertisers that rely on Facebook to spread marketing messages are up in arms over the social network's automated ad systems, complaining that inflexible account blocking tools and a lack of customer assistance are hurting business. From a report: One digital marketer, Chris Raines, was setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook last week when his account abruptly stopped working. Raines uses his account to manage ads for clients' Facebook Pages. Without it, he couldn't do his job. The lockout was a nuisance, but then Raines noticed something more concerning: A $3,000-per-day ad campaign that he'd set up for a client before his account was locked continued to run even though he could no longer manage it. Raines was spending his client's money without any way to control how. Raines tried to confirm his identity using Facebook's automated systems, but received an error message. Eventually, he called the advertiser and asked if they would make his wife an administrator to the company-owned Facebook Page. Using her account, he was finally able to log in and manage the Facebook ads, which includes adjusting details like who sees the ad and how much to spend. "The actual injury, especially for advertisers and marketers, is immense," said Raines, who runs a digital media company called Bullhorn Media. "Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went away."

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