Amazon is withholding ebook and audiobook versions of works it publishes through its in-house publishing arms from US libraries, according to a new report from The Washington Post. The Verge: In fact, Amazon is the only major publisher that's doing this, the report states. It's doing so because the company thinks the terms involved with selling digital versions of books to libraries, which in turn make them available to local residents for free through ebook lending platforms like Libby, are unfavorable. "It's not clear to us that current digital library lending models fairly balance the interests of authors and library patrons," Mikyla Bruder, the global marketing chief at Amazon Publishing, told The Washington Post's Geoffrey Fowler in an emailed statement. "We see this as an opportunity to invent a new approach to help expand readership and serve library patrons, while at the same time safeguarding author interests, including income and royalties." At the heart of the issue is a debate over whether libraries, which often pay far higher than retail price for physical and ebook copies of books, ultimately harm publisher sales by letting people check out copies for free. In the age of mobile apps and widespread Kindle usage, borrowing an ebook is now easier than ever -- you need a library card and the Libby app, and you can then place holds and eventually check out ebooks that can be sent directly to your Kindle e-reader or app to access for a limited time.

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Campaigners say UK government protections on the environment are already being flouted.

In 2020, the average US driver spent 26 hours stuck in traffic. While that's still more than a day, it's a steep decline from pre-pandemic times; in 2019 the average American sacrificed 99 hours to traffic jams. Around the world, it's a similar story. From a report: German drivers averaged an identical 26 hours of traffic in 2020, down from 46 the year before. In the UK, 2019 sounded positively awful, with 115 hours in traffic jams. At least one thing improved for that island nation in 2020: its drivers only spent 37 hours stationary in their cars. This data was all collected by traffic analytics company Inrix for its 2020 Global Traffic Scorecard that tracks mobility across more than 1,000 different cities around the world based on travel times, miles traveled, trip characteristics, and the effect of crashes on congestion in each city. And unless you've spent the past 12 months in a cave -- in which case, gee, do I have some crappy news for you -- you'll instinctively know that there were big declines in traffic in 2020, and in particular a drop in people traveling to downtowns and central business districts. Still, traffic didn't actually disappear completely, and averages hide a lot in a country as large as the United States. The worst traffic of 2020 was experienced in New York City, up from 4th worst in 2019, where drivers lost 100 hours to traffic jams. But New Yorkers still spent 28 percent less time stuck in traffic, traveled 28 percent fewer miles, and experienced 38 percent fewer crashes than in 2019. The biggest decline in traffic was seen in Washington, DC. In the nation's capital, drivers spent 29 hours in traffic, a whopping 77 percent decrease over pre-pandemic times. However, the city only saw a 26 percent reduction in crashes and a 25 percent decrease in vehicle miles traveled.

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Kelerei writes: A major fire has destroyed a data center of European cloud provider OVH in Strasbourg, France. The SBG2 data center is completely destroyed, while the blaze caused some damage to SBG1 before being contained. SBG3 and SBG4 were also taken offline, but a plan is underway to restart them once the firefighters give the all-clear. All OVH staff at the site are accounted for and unhurt, but it is unlikely that the data in SBG2 is recoverable. On OVH's status page, an ominous note states "if your production is in Strasbourg, we recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan." Among the sites affected is the WordPress image optimization site Imagify and the encryption utility VeraCrypt. (Submitter's note: this is why any disaster recovery plan should include offsite backups...)

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Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer's and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines' development and safety, U.S. officials said. From a report: An official with the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence. The websites played up the vaccines' risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims. Though the outlets' readership is small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media. "We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services," the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign. "They're all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States. They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they're all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem." In addition, Russian state media and Russian government Twitter accounts have made overt efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine in what experts outside the U.S. government say is an effort to promote the sale of Russia's rival Sputnik V vaccine. "The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik's market dominance," says a forthcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and that is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank. The foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep-seated anxieties about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some communities in the U.S. and internationally. Concern about side effects is a major reason for vaccine hesitancy, according to U.S. Census Bureau data made public last month.

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China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none. From a report: Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China's technological rise, the country's leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country's economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide range of industries, from smartphones to jet engines. China has made audacious and ambitious plans before -- in 2015 -- but is falling short of its goals. With more countries becoming wary of China's behavior and its growing economic might, Beijing's drive for technological independence has taken on a new urgency. The country's new five-year plan, made public on Friday, called tech development a matter of national security, not just economic development, a break from the previous plan. The plan pledged to increase spending on research and development by 7 percent annually, including the public and private sectors. That figure was higher than budget increases for China's military, which is slated to grow 6.8 percent next year, raising the prospect of an era of looming Cold War-like competition with the United States.

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There is no bipartisanship or "across the aisle" with Repubs who excused what Trump did on January 6.

This just in: The pandemic is not over.

A 36-minute podcast wherein I talk about nothing, or lots of stuff, depending on your point of view. Listen if you've got some time to kill and nothing better to do. This podcast is sold as-is. Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear

New submitter ekeko writes: A group of hackers say they breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada, gaining access to live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons and schools. Companies whose footage was exposed include carmaker Tesla and software provider Cloudflare. In addition, hackers were able to view video from inside women's health clinics, psychiatric hospitals and the offices of Verkada itself. Some of the cameras, including in hospitals, use facial-recognition technology to identify and categorize people captured on the footage. The hackers say they also have access to the full video archive of all Verkada customers. In a video seen by Bloomberg, a Verkada camera inside Florida hospital Halifax Health showed what appeared to be eight hospital staffers tackling a man and pinning him to a bed. Halifax Health is featured on Verkada's public-facing website in a case study entitled: "How a Florida Healthcare Provider Easily Updated and Deployed a Scalable HIPAA Compliant Security System." A spokesman for Halifax confirmed Wednesday that it uses Verkada cameras but added that "we believe the scope of the situation is limited."

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Epic Games filed a lawsuit against Google in Australia, widening a fight against the tech giant over the commissions charged in its app store. From a report: The maker of Fortnite is alleging that Google has abused its control over the Android operating system by forcing developers to use its payment systems, according to a statement on Epic's website on Wednesday. The Alphabet unit also makes it "egregiously difficult" for consumers to download software directly to Android devices, forcing the vast majority to obtain the apps through the Google Play Store, the statement said. Epic has pursued multiple legal claims against both Google and Apple, which operates its own App Store for iPhones, after they removed its popular Fortnite video game from their platforms last year in a dispute over commissions. Both Google and Apple take a 30% cut from in-app payments and Epic had attempted to introduce its own direct payment option to circumvent the charges.

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I've been accumulating tools to use Twitter as a blog-writing tool, for times when I'm not near my desktop the main place I write.

The first one was a tool that, using the Twitter API, gathered all my tweets in the last 24 hours and categorized them as:

1. Original tweets.
2. Links.
3. Replies.
4. RTs.

The idea was to get the original stuff first, to give me a way to jot down an idea in Twitter, so I could recall it later when I'm officially writing my blog for the day.

It worked okay, it was great at first actually, but it required too much work to reassemble a twitter thread for my blog.

What I really wanted was a tool that could gather a whole thread, like the one you're reading now, into a series of paragraphs, that could then be edited into a blog post.

But there was a missing feature in the Twitter API. No way to ask for all the replies to a given tweet.

Then a few days ago while my mind was wandering, I figured it out. Get the timeline for the person, and figure out which messages are in reply to the main tweet of the thread, or to one of its replies, and build the thread outside of Twitter that way. It worked.

So now I needed a thread to test it with. Something non-trivial, that could also be somewhat meta. And that my friends is what this thread is for. Thanks for your indulgence! :-)

PS: It worked. Here's the source as viewed by the new app.

I've been playing around with a new thread viewer app. Here's what the thread looks like in Twitter, and here's what it looks like in the app. This is just an experiment.

Asus, best known for its PC and gaming enthusiast gear, launched the latest in its Republic of Gamers smartphone line targeting Android gamers in markets like China. From a report: The ROG Phone 5 maintains the heritage of over-the-top specs and design: its exterior is decorated with angular motifs and its interior is populated with up to 18GB of memory and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 888 processor. It has a custom-made 6.8-inch Samsung OLED display, contains two battery cells and is cooled by a vapor chamber system -- and its higher-tier models bundle an attachable fan cooler for even more performance. In the commodified Android device market, Asus is betting on its brand association with gaming and the broad enthusiasm for a tailored user experience. The ROG Phone 5 comes with an app providing a console-like interface and Asus is working with game makers to add support for the highest refresh rates its display is capable of. Though to break past its 0.2% global market share, the company will need some help, according to Neil Mawston of Strategy Analytics. Asus has found success partnering with Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings. The two companies have collaborated on the marketing of ROG Phones and certification of games in China for several generations and the country is one of Asus' main focus markets, the Taiwanese manufacturer said. Unlike the PC market, where higher clock speeds and more memory can translate into being able to play at higher fidelity or on larger screens, in the mobile realm practically every company relies on the same basic architecture. And the leading duo of Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics consistently tout their devices' gaming capabilities, pushing brands like Asus to focus on hardcore gaming fans.

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The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of Sigstore, a new nonprofit initiative that aims to improve open source software supply chain security by making it easier for developers to adopt cryptographic signing for different components of the software development process. From a report: Sigstore will be free for software providers and developers, who can use it to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images, binaries, and bill-of-material manifests. Signing materials are then stored in a tamper-proof public log. The service's code and operation tooling will be fully open source and maintained and developed by the Sigstore community. Founding members include Red Hat, Google, and Purdue University. The idea for the service came from Luke Hinds, security engineering lead in Red Hat's Office of the CTO. He pitched the concept to Google software engineer Dan Lorenc, and the two began to work on it. Now the Sigstore project has a "small but agile community" working on its development, Lorenc says.

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