A law professor serving on the EFF's board of directors (and advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Democracy and Technology) offers this analysis of "the push for stricter rules for internet platforms," reviewing proposed changes to the liability-limiting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — and speculating about what the changes would accomplish: Short of repeal, several initiatives aim to change section 230. Eleven bills have been introduced in the Senate and nine in the House of Representatives to amend section 230 in various ways.... Some would widen the categories of harmful conduct for which section 230 immunity is unavailable. At present, section 230 does not apply to user-posted content that violates federal criminal law, infringes intellectual property rights, or facilitates sex trafficking. One proposal would add to this list violations of federal civil laws. Some bills would condition section 230 immunity on compliance with certain conditions or make it unavailable if the platforms engage in behavioral advertising. Others would require platforms to spell out their content moderation policies with particularity in their terms of service (TOS) and would limit section 230 immunity to TOS violations. Still others would allow users whose content was taken down in "bad faith" to bring a lawsuit to challenge this and be awarded $5,000 if the challenge was successful. Some bills would impose due process requirements on platforms concerning removal of user-posted content. Other bills seek to regulate platform algorithms in the hope of stopping the spread of extremist content or in the hope of eliminating biases... Neither legislation nor an FCC rule-making may be necessary to significantly curtail section 230 as a shield from liability. Conservative Justice Thomas has recently suggested a reinterpretation of section 230 that would support imposing liability on Internet platforms as "distributors" of harmful content... Section 230, after all, shields these services from liability as "speakers" and "publishers," but is silent about possible "distributor" liability. Endorsing this interpretation would be akin to adopting the notice-and-takedown rules that apply when platforms host user-uploaded files that infringe copyrights. Thanks to Slashdot reader Beeftopia for sharing the article, which ultimately concludes: - Notice-and-takedown regimes have long been problematic because false or mistaken notices are common and platforms often quickly take-down challenged content, even if it is lawful, to avoid liability... - For the most part, these platforms promote free speech interests of their users in a responsible way. Startup and small nonprofit platforms would be adversely affected by some of the proposed changes insofar as the changes would enable more lawsuits against platforms for third-party content. Fighting lawsuits is costly, even if one wins on the merits. - Much of the fuel for the proposed changes to section 230 has come from conservative politicians who are no longer in control of the Senate. - The next Congress will have a lot of work to do. Section 230 reform is unlikely to be a high priority in the near term. Yet, some adjustments to that law seem quite likely over time because platforms are widely viewed as having too much power over users' speech and are not transparent or consistent about their policies and practices.

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Monty Python alumnus John Cleese "is going to be selling an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge he did on his iPad as an NFT," reports Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair. So far the highest offer is $50,000, though Cleese's "buy it now" price has been set higher — at $69,346,250.50. But marveling at the wild popularity of NFTs, Bilton muses (hyperbolically?) that "The crazy thing is, he actually might get it..." The rapper Ja Rule recently launched an NFT platform on which he's selling a painting from the disastrous Fyre Festival with a starting bid of $600,000. Collectible NBA trading cards called "Top Shots," which are essentially digital trading cards of basketball players, are selling (and people are buying them) for as much as $240,000 ($208,000 is the highest price sold so far). And Beeple, a 39-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, whom you had never heard of until three weeks ago but who is now all anyone can talk about, a guy who makes dark and atramentous memeified "works of art," including pieces featuring a naked Elon Musk riding a Dogecoin dog and an image of a postcoital Santa Claus after — one assumes? — he's just cheated on Mrs. Claus, managed to sell a random pixelated artwork to another cryptocurrency investor at auction this month for $69,346,250 — exactly 50 cents less than John Cleese, I mean the Unnamed Artist, hopes to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for... [T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing. As such, like any collectible or limited number of artworks, people have gone crazy to get a slice of this new fortune. The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple's "artwork" are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly. Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there's everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey's first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show's characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There's an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you... It's almost like we're living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are — some believe — destroying the culture.

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After three decades in Silicon Valley, billionaire Jim Breyer chose Austin for the next era of his venture capital/venture philanthropy work, and cites "early, but compelling, signals that Austin is emerging as the next great tech hub." While Silicon Valley's critics "make some fair points about rising living costs and government overreach," he argues that Austin's advantages are being overlooked — and they go beyond just the University of Texas: Austin, more than any other city in the country, encourages a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration. Because the city has catered to so many types of professionals, and not just technologists, the depth of talent here is unique. Artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and professors, all at the top of their trade, frequently choose to build things together. By breaking down silos and embracing novel approaches to company-building, Austin's diverse entrepreneurs will usher in a new era of growth for the city, state and country... Austin has every type of entrepreneur that a great company needs... Austin has attracted and will continue to attract young, brilliant talent because of its comparative affordability, outdoor culture and professional development opportunities. This vast pool of expertise is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. With Tesla, Facebook, Apple, Google, Oracle and other leading companies moving to or expanding in Austin, the entrepreneurial ecosystem will be bolstered when talent from these companies breaks away to start new ventures. Some of my best investments have been in entrepreneurs who gained valuable experience at an outstanding established company before starting their own. Five years from now, Austin will benefit from many tech company alums eager to leverage their expertise to tackle some of the world's most pressing problems... Lastly, Austin entrepreneurs are among the most impact-driven in the world. The city, in a push to "Keep Austin Weird," emphasizes thinking outside the box. It encourages a frontier spirit where founders take big problems into their own hands — I have seen more impact investing pitches in Austin than any other geography... [T]he majority of people at startups here are determined to make the world a better place... I think Austin founders will offer indisputable proof that companies can simultaneously earn money for shareholders and improve society. "The things that made Silicon Valley special are not going anywhere," Breyer adds. "The Bay Area will continue to be a global hub of innovation that attracts courageous entrepreneurs, benefits from world-class institutions and nurtures talent from leading tech companies." But he's ultimately predicting a bright future for both cities, while arguing that Austin "offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity."

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So all the kids are down in Florida distributing the newest variants of the virus to each other so they can go home and deliver it to their friends and family, esp states with no mask mandate, and 100% re-opened. Just in time for the virus to go exponential for a second summer.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a discussion between a 77-year-old "father of the internet" and a 75-year-old "father of public key cryptography". Long before Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman changed the world with their inventions, they were young assistant professors at Stanford University who became fast friends... More than 50 years and two technological revolutions later, the friendship between Vint and Marty — as they know each other — endures. This is despite, or perhaps because of, their sometimes different views. You see, while they do not always agree, they both enjoy a good intellectual debate, especially when the humans they sought to bring together with their inventions face existential threats. Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?" While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary. "Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.) But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes. "I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions: What evidence supports the belief that the risk of nuclear deterrence failing is currently at an acceptable level?Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown? If you were on the call — what would you say?

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"If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred," says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We may never have even known about it!" Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN... The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said. "It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said... In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.

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America's Environmental Protection Agency "just resurrected a website chock full of data, background and science about global warming that the Trump administration had deleted," reports Bloomberg. EPA Administrator Michael Regan cast the website's revival as part of a broader effort to ensure EPA decisions are grounded in sound science. "Trustworthy, science-based information is at the foundation of strong, achievable solutions," he said. CBS News reports that the relaunched site "has two simple messages on an image carousel on the home page: The climate crisis is an EPA priority and public understanding of the implications of the crisis are essential to addressing it." Thursday the agency released this statement: Climate change leads to rising seas, retreating snow and ice, and to changes in the frequency and intensity of heat waves, precipitation, and extreme weather events. These changes, occurring as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases due to human activities, are changing the climate at a pace and in a way that threatens human health, society, and the natural environment. Children, the elderly, and the poor are among the most vulnerable to climate-related health effects.

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An idea for a pilot program connecting the daily flow from Scripting News with one of the new knowledge databases.

The Biden administration "is preparing a series of aggressive cyber attacks on Russia in a major shift in tactics designed as a warning shot to rival powers," reports the Telegraph newspaper: The attack, which is expected in the next fortnight, is in retaliation for the SolarWinds hack, the large-scale infiltration of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year that was traced back to the Kremlin... The U.S. will not target civilian structures or networks, but the hack is instead designed as a direct challenge to Mr Putin, Russia's President, and his cyber army, The Telegraph understands. The White House confirmed it will take "a mix of actions" — both "seen and unseen" — although it did not provide specifics on when and how it would do so... "I actually believe that a set of measures that are understood by the Russians, but may not be visible to the broader world, are actually likely to be the most effective measures in terms of clarifying what the United States believes are in bounds and out of bounds, and what we are prepared to do in response," Jake Sullivan, U.S. National Security Adviser, told the New York Times last week. Mr Sullivan stressed that traditional sanctions alone do not sufficiently raise the cost to force powers like Russia, or China.

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Here's another thing people don't get, imho. The Republicans are over. Look forward. It doesn't matter who did what in the past, our two-party democracy has become something else. What it is, I don't know.

As a long-suffering Knicks fan, I have say it looks like the drought just might be over.

The New York Times reports: Along with baking and jigsaw puzzles earlier in the pandemic, model trains are among the passions being rediscovered while people are cooped up indoors. Several companies that make trains are reporting jumps in sales. For many people, the chance to create a separate, better world in the living room — with stunning mountains, tiny chugging locomotives and communities of inch-high people where no one needs a mask — is hard to resist. "Outside, there is total chaos, but inside, around my little train set, it is quiet, it is picturesque," said Magnus Hellstrom, 48, a high school teacher in Sweden, who has indulged in his hobby while working from home during lockdowns. "It's a little piece of a perfect world," he said. The Times visits Märklin, the 162-year-old German maker of model trains, whose engines now include "tiny speakers that reproduce scores of digital chugging noises and whistles (recorded, if possible, from the original), and interior and exterior lights that can be controlled separately... Real steam coming out of the steam locomotives has been a feature for years." The company's owner tells the newspaper "What's really changed during the last 20 years is the focus on truly replicating the original." The trains can be controlled by computer console or by a phone app, with different trains on the same track going different speeds or traveling different circuits. Märklin even added the option of controlling the trains via train engineer simulator software, allowing devotees to control their little model train as though they were sitting in the engineer's chair. "It is a traditional toy that through digital functions, like sound and light, has become more and more like a real train," said Uwe Müller, who was a product manager at Märklin for 15 years and now runs the Märklineum, the company's museum. Just 12 years ago the company had declared bankruptcy. But now one 64-year-old employee (who's assembled models trains for the company for over 38 years) tells the Times "We're booming so much it's hard to keep up."

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Everything should be great in America, but it isn't. Why?

FIrst watch this video from a 60 Minutes interview with Fed chairman Lewis Powell on how he creates money.

One of the biggest misperceptions about how money works, even among educated people, is that we have to pay for projects by raising taxes. The fact they're missing is that the Federal Reserve creates money. So we don't have to raise taxes to provide relief to victims of disasters. When they say the debt is something our children will have to pay off, that's not true either. We can pay the debt by printing money. If we owe you $100 who's to say if we got that money by taxing Americans or simply by giving you new money we created just for that purpose?

Money has to start somewhere, and unlike a household budget, the US government has an infinite supply of it. Basically the only country with the power to create new money that can be spent everywhere is the United States. The United States is unique because our dollar is the reserve currency for the world. So if say Egypt owes money to India, they pay them in dollars. If a small country is reserving some money for a future project, they store it in dollars. Our currency, unlike all others, is in demand all around the world. Which means we can give them dollars we just printed and they will send us goods that cost real money, because of course when we printed the money, it was real, simply because we printed it.

We are the richest country there is, it's not hyperbole. And yet we have one of the worst benefit systems for our people in the world. If people really understood how this works (just re-read this piece) they would be enraged about how health, education, infrastructure, everything basically, in the US, is shit. You see this when you travel to Europe. A sense that everything is first class. And they don't have the economic advantage that we do. Some of it is the rich self-dealing, grift, the 1%, inequality, etc -- but a lot of is the dysfunction of Congress. A lot of waste happens that way.

Enoch Choi has appeared on this blog many times, he's a heroic doctor, natural-born blogger, he works to save lives, always, and now, is caring for Covid patients in the Santa Clara Valley in California.

He's also an advocate for Asian-Americans, and now his son Aidan, who I watched grow up on Facebook, is an artist, and has a couple of pieces about an assault on a Chinese-American grandmother, who fought back and sent her attacker to the hospital, in San Francisco last week.

Asian grandpa, by Aiden Choi.

Asian grandma, by Aiden Choi.

One of the biggest misperceptions about how money works, even among educated people, is that the Federal Reserve creates money, and gives it to the US government. So we don't have to raise taxes to "pay" for projects we want to do, or to provide relief to victims of disasters. And in fact very often we don't, we pay for it with money we create for that purpose. The United States is unique in its ability to create new money because our dollar is the reserve currency for the world. So If say France owes money to India they pay them in dollars. If a small country is reserving some money for a future project, they store it in dollars. Our currency unlike all others is in demand all around the world. We are the richest country there is, it's not hypeperbole. And yet we have one of the worst benefit systems for our people in the world. If people really understood how this works (just re-read this bit) they would be enraged about how health, education, infrastructure, everything basically, in the US, is shit. You see this when you travel to Europe. A sense that everything is first class. And they don't have the economic advantages that we do. Some of it is the rich self-dealing, grift, the 1%, inequality, etc -- but a lot of is the dysfunction of Congress. A lot of waste happens that way.