Conservative lawmakers in Utah have a passed a proposal this month requiring all cellphones and tablets sold in the state to automatically block pornography. It's unknown whether Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, will sign or veto the proposal. He has until March 25 to decide. The Associated Press reports: Supporters argue the restriction is a critical step to help parents keep explicit content away from kids -- especially as more children have their own electronic devices and have been forced to spend more time online during the pandemic. Combating porn is a perennial issue for Utah lawmakers who have previously mandated warning labels on print and online pornography and declared porn a "public health crisis." Utah's generally conservative culture means racy mainstream magazines and lingerie catalogs can be considered risque. Leaders of the predominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faith have also drawn attention to what they consider the harms of pornography. Even if Cox signs the measure, it wouldn't go into effect unless five other states also enacted similar laws, a provision added after manufacturers and retailers voiced concerns that it would be difficult to implement the filters for a single state. If Cox signs the bill, Utah appears poised to become the first state to mandate filters on devices, according to two prominent technology experts and the bill's sponsor, though federal internet restrictions aimed at preventing kids from accessing porn were passed in the late 1990s and later stuck down in the courts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Nvidia made a big deal about reducing the hash rate of Ethereum mining on its new RTX 3060 graphics card last month. A special system was supposed to make the RTX 3060 undesirable for cryptominers, but Nvidia has now confirmed that it has accidentally unlocked those restrictions with a new driver. "A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations," says an Nvidia spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "The driver has been removed." While Nvidia has now removed the driver, the genie is out of the bottle. Nvidia's latest 470.05 beta driver automatically unlocks performance for most RTX 3060 cards, boosting hashing rates for Ethereum mining. Mirrors of the driver can easily be found online, and Nvidia won't be able to prevent RTX 3060 owners from continuing to use this driver in the future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba's internet browser has been removed from several app stores in China as the company's feud with the Chinese government continues. From a report: Android app stores including those operated by Huawei and Xiaomi have blocked downloads or removed Alibaba's "UC Browser," according to Huawei and Xiaomi phone owners who spoke to CNBC. However, one Samsung phone owner in China said they could still see the browser in Samsung's app store. The UC Browser is also still available on Apple's App Store. It comes after the UC Browser was criticized on a TV show, broadcast by state-owned broadcaster CCTV, about misleading online medical advertising. The show accused the browser of allowing private hospitals to bid for the names of China's best known hospitals in keyword searches. Thus potentially luring patients to their websites instead of the public hospitals they are supposed to visit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Big Four all lean on the online encyclopedia at no cost. With the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise, the volunteer project will change that -- and possibly itself too. From a report: From the start, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia's reputation as a source of trustworthy information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google's bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name "Knol," short for knowledge. Knol never did catch on, despite Google's offer to pay the principal author of an article a share of advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even tighter -- not only linking to its articles but reprinting key excerpts on its search result pages to quickly deliver Wikipedia's knowledge to those seeking answers. The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming its own household word. But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet. Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too). Conversations between the foundation's newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia's thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nokia on Tuesday announced plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs within two years to trim costs and invest more in research capabilities. Reuters reports: After taking over the top job last year, Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark has been making changes to recover from product missteps under the company's previous management that hurt its 5G ambitions and dragged on its shares. He announced a new strategy in October, under which Nokia will have four business groups and said the company would "do whatever it takes" to take the lead in 5G, as it banks on also capturing share from Huawei. Lundmark is expected to present his long-term strategy, discuss action plans and set financial targets during the company's capital markets day on Thursday. The company said in a statement it expects about 600 million euros ($715 million) to 700 million euros of restructuring and associated charges by 2023. It expects the current restructuring to lower its cost base by about 600 million euros by the end of 2023. Half of the savings are expected to be realized in 2021. Nokia currently has 90,000 employees, and has cut thousands of jobs following its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent in 2016.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockstar Games has paid a modder $10,000 for identifying a way to make Grand Theft Auto Online load significantly faster. From a report: The modder, who goes by the handle 't0st,' recently posted their discovery of a single-thread CPU bottleneck that occurs in the PC version of the hit multiplayer mode. They created a fix they claim enables the game to load 70% faster, and included a message for Rockstar, advising that the issue "shouldn't take more than a day for a single dev to solve." Reports spread of t0st's discovery and Rockstar has confirmed not only that this works, but that it will release an official fix in a future update for the game. In a statement to PC Gamer, the company said: "After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved. "As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just as LastPass nerfs the free tier of its popular password manager, Dropbox has swooped in with a free version of its own password app -- but there's a bit of a catch. From a report: Dropbox today announced that Passwords will soon be free to all of its users, whether they're on its free basic plan or one of its premium individual or business tiers. Beginning in early April, any Dropbox user will be able to access a limited version of Passwords that will securely store up to 50 credentials. The catch here, of course, is that most people likely have more than 50 passwords to various accounts, and a password manager should ideally be used for all of them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the course of the last several weeks, Google has been adding App Privacy labels to its iOS apps in accordance with Apple's App Store rules, but it took Google multiple months to begin sharing the information. There was speculation that Google's delay meant that it had something to hide, which DuckDuckGo is leaning into with a blog that highlights Google's data collection and calls out the company for "spying" on users. [...] DuckDuckGo claims that Google "wanted to hide" the information that it collects, which is why Google took so long to roll out support for App Privacy labels. Most people are likely not surprised at the extent of the data that Google collects, but having it in one spot in the âOEApp StoreâOE is a stark reminder.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has reportedly agreed to show Russian users a prompt to preinstall some apps when they're first using an iPhone or other device. From a report: If a user doesn't select one of the government-approved apps, it won't be installed, according to newspaper Vedomosti. The company is said to have agreed to the measure to abide by a law that comes into effect on April 1st. The Russian-made apps include Mail.ru's email service, the MIR payment system, social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki and Kaspersky Lab antivirus software, according to RFE. Android users reportedly won't get to opt out and all of the software will be preinstalled on those devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new generation of Intel Core CPUs is here. Intel is using a new architecture on its ancient 14nm process to power the 11th-generation Rocket Lake-S processors. From a report: That results in some significant power improvements, but it also means that Intel can only fit 8 cores on its flagship Core i9-11900K. That sacrifice to the number of cores looks bad compared to the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X or even the last-gen 10-core i9-10900K. But Intel is also promising massive improvements to efficiency that should keep the Rocket Lake-S parts competitive -- especially in gaming. Rocket Lake-S CPUs launch March 30. The $539 Core i9-11900K has 8 cores and 16 threads with a single-core Thermal Velocity boost of 5.3GHz and 4.8GHz all-core boost. The slightly more affordable $399 i7-11700K boosts up to 5GHz, and the i5-11600K is $262 with 6 cores at a 4.9GHz boost. While the lack of cores is going to hurt Rocket Lake-S CPUs in multi-threaded applications, Intel claims that its 19% improvement to instructions per clock (IPC) will make up much of the difference. The UHD graphics processor in the CPUs also deliver 50% better performance than last generation. Of course, Intel is focusing on games because that is where its processors remain the most competitive versus AMD. And that should continue with its Rocket Lake-S chips. These high-clocked parts with improved performance should keep up and even exceed AMD's Zen 3 chips in certain games, like Microsoft's Flight Simulator (according to Intel).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google will lower its Play commissions globally for developers that sell in-app digital goods and services on its marquee store, the company said, following a similar move by rival Apple late last year. From a report: The Android-maker said on Tuesday that starting July 1, it is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15% -- down from 30% -- for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year. The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first $1 million in a year, it said. Citing its own estimates, Google said 99% of developers that sell goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees, and that 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods or pay any service fee. Google's new approach is slightly different from Apple, which last year said it would collect 15% rather than 30% of App Store sales from companies that generate no more than $1 million in revenue through the company's platform. That drop doesn't apply to iOS apps if a developer's revenue on Apple platform exceeds $1 million. "We've heard from our partners making $2 million, $5 million and even $10 million a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit," wrote Sameer Samat, VP of Android and Google Play, in a blog post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sad moment. I was doing a lookup for a bit about a programmer of my generation, I wanted to write about some of his ideas. I found they had a lot about him in the Computer History Museum. I started looking around at the other people they interviewed. I knew all of them, they knew me. But for some reason my ideas and my work are not part of their record.

Probably because I was the main blogger in Silicon Valley in the early days of the web. You've seen how they respond to journalism. How do you think they felt about one of their own writing publicly about what he thought of what they were doing. I was hoping they would join me. That's how I develop. By doing. And then building the software to support what I'm doing. That imho is part of the history that belongs in the Computer History Museum.

I think they must be missing a good 50 percent of the story. The literature of the web. They didn't understand how these were not just personal computers we were developing, they were personal publishing machines. Now in hindsight, they should adjust the image they're trying to project into the future. These machines were used for something they have never appreciated.

I was telling one of the devs I work with yesterday about Lotus 1-2-3's macro language. I'm going in that direction again, I think the web needs a scripting language. not one written for devs, but for people who think of themselves as users. That was the thing about 1-2-3. Also Hypercard. And my own product, UserLand Frontier. The idea that there are programmers who would reject the idea that they are programmers. It's a very subtle idea, people who are great hackers in the sense that they will work endlessly to find a way to do the thing they must do, who will develop a deep understanding of the problem they want to solve, but not much depth on the nature of programming. Mitch Kapor was one of these people. He wrote a product in 1980 or so called VisiPlot. Written in BASIC. It sold really well. Programmers didn't like it. But they sold a lot because it worked really well with Visicalc, the leading spreadsheet of the day. I love the idea of empowering users to create the products they want out of the components us "serious" devs create.

Aliza Sherman: "Sometimes I think the hardest thing about life may be that you finally begin to see and understand things about yourself as you are on the other side of middle age and have less time to live who you are."

I had a bunch of errands to run today and thought to get my car washed, to get rid of all the caked-on mud from the winter. It was so dirty, you couldn't even tell it was a white car. When I pulled up to the car wash the guy was just waiting for me, far away from the entrance way. I kind of got annoyed and opened the window and asked if he worked there. He asked if I have a mask. I wasn't wearing one. This is the attitude of a vaccinated citizen. Sometimes we forget to wear the mask, even though I know that's no excuse. Rather than say "Hey bud, I'm vaccinated," I just put the mask on. I felt a bit ashamed because I used to be so militant and vigilant about masks. I wonder if other vaccinated folk are having a similar experience.