Affected users say social-networking site owned by Microsoft is obstructing them over 'prohibited content' without further explanation. From a report: Eyck Freymann, an Oxford University doctoral student, was surprised to get a notice from LinkedIn this month telling him his account had been blocked in China. The "Experience" section of his profile, which detailed his career history, contained "prohibited" content, he was informed. The social-networking site owned by Microsoft didn't explain more, but Mr. Freymann said he thought it was because he had included the words "Tiananmen Square massacre" in the entry for his two-year stint as a research assistant for a book in 2015. "LinkedIn is pulling people's material off without telling them why," he said. "It was surprising because I am just a graduate student. I didn't think I would have mattered." The academic is one of a spate of LinkedIn users whose profiles have been blocked in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal identified at least 10 other individuals who had their profiles blocked or posts removed from the China version of LinkedIn since May, including researchers in Jerusalem and Tokyo, journalists, a U.S. congressional staffer and an editor based in Beijing who posted state media reports about elephants rampaging across China. A LinkedIn spokeswoman said in a statement that while the company supports freedom of expression, offering a localized version of LinkedIn in China means adherence to censorship requirements of the Chinese government on internet platforms. The company didn't comment on whether its actions were proactive or in response to requests from Chinese authorities. LinkedIn made a trade-off to accept Chinese censorship when it entered China in 2014 and has typically censored human-rights activists and deleted content focused on posts deemed sensitive to the Chinese government. The recent dragnet stands out for having caught several academics in its path, resulting in the deletion of entire profiles instead of individual posts.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Blender is one of the most important open source projects, as the 3D graphics application suite is used by countless people at home, for business, and in education. The software can be used on many platforms, such as Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. Today, Ubuntu-maker Canonical announces it will offer paid enterprise support for Blender LTS. Surprisingly, this support will not only be for Ubuntu users. Heck, it isn't even limited to Linux installations. Actually, Canonical will offer this support to Blender LTS users on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Proof-assistant software handles an abstract concept at the cutting edge of research, revealing a bigger role for software in mathematics. From a report: Mathematicians have long used computers to do numerical calculations or manipulate complex formulas. In some cases, they have proved major results by making computers do massive amounts of repetitive work -- the most famous being a proof in the 1970s that any map can be coloured with just four different colours, and without filling any two adjacent countries with the same colour. But systems known as proof assistants go deeper. The user enters statements into the system to teach it the definition of a mathematical concept -- an object -- based on simpler objects that the machine already knows about. A statement can also just refer to known objects, and the proof assistant will answer whether the fact is 'obviously' true or false based on its current knowledge. If the answer is not obvious, the user has to enter more details. Proof assistants thus force the user to lay out the logic of their arguments in a rigorous way, and they fill in simpler steps that human mathematicians had consciously or unconsciously skipped. Once researchers have done the hard work of translating a set of mathematical concepts into a proof assistant, the program generates a library of computer code that can be built on by other researchers and used to define higher-level mathematical objects. In this way, proof assistants can help to verify mathematical proofs that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, for a human to check. Proof assistants have long had their fans, but this is the first time that they had a major role at the cutting edge of a field, says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London who was part of a collaboration that checked Scholze and Clausen's result. "The big remaining question was: can they handle complex mathematics?" says Buzzard. "We showed that they can."

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Spanish Newspaper El Mundo's story.

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Uber added a disclosure to its food delivery app saying menu item prices may be higher than those charged by restaurants, bowing to pressure from attorneys general. From a report: The disclaimer will only be shown to customers in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., after the attorneys general there pressed for a concession from the company. They said in a joint statement Tuesday that the change will offer customers more price transparency. Before customers finalize an order, Uber will show a message that reads, "Prices may be lower in store."

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See the GitHub thread for this post.

I've been building apps on the assumption that if you store something on GitHub, when you get the raw version of that thing, it'll be current. I was getting inconsistent results, so I decided to test that assumption, and it seems that it is not reliable storage.

If you read an object immediately after writing it, you will not always get back what you wrote. It's not just a matter of waiting a second or two, sometimes it's wrong for up to 10 seconds (the delay I programmed into the test).

Here's the Node app I'm running to test this. It wakes up every minute and saves a file to GitHub with the current local time string. If I reload the non-raw version of the page, it usually seems to have the current value. But if I reload the raw version of the page, it often does not have the correct value.

Here are the results of the app for the first half hour.

• everyMinute: 1:58:13 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 1:59:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:00:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:01:00 PM, status == 200, good
• everyMinute: 2:02:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:03:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:04:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:05:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:06:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:07:00 PM, status == 200, good
• everyMinute: 2:08:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:09:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:10:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:11:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:12:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:13:00 PM, status == 200, good
• everyMinute: 2:14:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:15:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:16:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:17:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:18:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:19:00 PM, status == 200, good
• everyMinute: 2:20:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:21:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:22:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:23:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:24:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:25:00 PM, status == 200, good
• everyMinute: 2:26:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:27:00 PM, status == 200, bad
• everyMinute: 2:28:00 PM, status == 200, bad

You can see that more often than not the raw value is incorrect after ten seconds.

I'm leaving the app running for a while, so if you want to verify this, you can.

I'll post a note in the GitHub thread when I turn the app off.

Morgan Stanley plans to ban workers from its New York headquarters if they have not received a Covid-19 vaccine. The rule will apply to non-vaccinated guests and clients as well. From a report: According to a source close to the company, Morgan Stanley said in a memo to its employees in the New York metropolitan area that all staff working in buildings with a "large employee presence" are required to confirm their vaccination status by July 1. The source added that "vaccine attestation is on an honorary basis for employees, contingent workforce, clients and visitors." The company plans to expand the vaccination mandate to employees and guests in other Morgan Stanley locations in New York City and nearby Westchester starting July 12. "Operating within a fully vaccinated environment allows us to lift restrictions like the use of face coverings and the need to maintain physical distancing, returning to more normal office conditions," the source added.

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Kickstarter announced Tuesday that it plans to experiment with a four-day work week in an effort to offer workers more flexibility and additional time to spend on creative pursuits. From a report: Lots of tech companies are planning to offer flexibility around where employees work post-pandemic. Now some companies are also rethinking when people work. Kickstarter plans next year to test a four-day work week with some or all of its employees, though details of that remain to be figured out, including whether all workers will have the same schedule. Dating app Bumble, meanwhile, says it's giving all employees this week off to allow a much-needed break. Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan told Axios that he had toyed with the notion of a four-day week in the past, but was motivated by the pandemic to actually give it a try. "What we've been all living through the last 18 months, you feel this compression on your professional life, your personal life," Hasan said. The idea of a four-day work week wasn't spurred by the company's ongoing collective bargaining negotiations, Hasan said. He added that the company's newly formed union has been supportive of the idea.

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A pair of South African brothers have vanished, along with Bitcoin worth $3.6 billion from their cryptocurrency investment platform. From a report: A Cape Town law firm hired by investors says they can't locate the brothers and has reported the matter to the Hawks, an elite unit of the national police force. It's also told crypto exchanges across the globe should any attempt be made to convert the digital coins. Following a surge in Bitcoin's value in the past year, the disappearance of about 69,000 coins -- worth more than $4 billion at their April peak -- would represent the biggest-ever dollar loss in a cryptocurrency scam. The incident could spur regulators' efforts to impose order on the market amid rising cases of fraud. The first signs of trouble came in April, as Bitcoin was rocketing to a record. Africrypt Chief Operating Officer Ameer Cajee, the elder brother, informed clients that the company was the victim of a hack. He asked them not to report the incident to lawyers and authorities, as it would slow down the recovery process of the missing funds. Some skeptical investors roped in the law firm, Hanekom Attorneys, and a separate group started liquidation proceedings against Africrypt. "We were immediately suspicious as the announcement implored investors not to take legal action," Hanekom Attorneys said in response to emailed questions. "Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack." The firm's investigation found Africrypt's pooled funds were transferred from its South African accounts and client wallets, and the coins went through tumblers and mixers -- or to other large pools of bitcoin -- to make them essentially untraceable.

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test #1. sorry for the interruption.

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. From a report: These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. And with thousands of exoplanets already found orbiting other stars in our universe, could we have already seen life on other planets come and go? Might they have seen us? "The universe is dynamic," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, and lead author of the study. "Stars move, we move. First the Earth moves around the sun, but the sun moves around the center of our galaxy." About 70% of exoplanets are found using the transit method: when a planet passes between a star and an observer, the star dims enough to confirm the presence of a previously unseen celestial body. Kaltenegger and coauthor Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History compiled a list of stars that either will see or already have seen Earth transit in their lifetimes. Of these, they found seven stars with orbiting exoplanets that could potentially be habitable. Statistically, one out of four stars has a planet that exists in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, and just far away from a star to support life. But how do we determine whether faraway exoplanets meet these criteria? When transiting exoplanets block stellar light, part of that light filters through the atmosphere. Energy and light interact with the molecules and atoms of that planet, and by the time that light reaches an astronomer's telescope, scientists can determine whether it has interacted with chemicals like oxygen or methane. A combination of those two, Kaltenegger says, is the fingerprint for life.

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Carolina Morning by Edward Hopper, 1955

Journalism, academia, government and the corporate world all hire from the same talent pool.

They go to the same universities, get their news from the same sources, corporate people take government jobs, then go back to the corporations. The people move fluidly in and out of each other.

So you get the same story, developed over centuries. They are almost impervious to change.

Sometimes change is driven from outside their circle, new technologies can make that possible, like the one we're using now.

That's why we can't rely on journalism, not because of a campaign run by Russians or Republicans or billionaires.

They think the problem is that we don't see what they see, but I think it's the other way. They hold on to a normalcy that is slipping away.

They can't see what they can't see.

Tim Berners-Lee has defended his decision to auction an NFT (non-fungible token) representing the source code to the web, comparing the sale to an autographed book or a speaking tour. From a report: The creator of the world wide web announced his decision to create and sell the digital asset through Sotheby's auction house last week. In the auction, which begins on Wednesday and will run for one week, collectors will have the chance to bid on a bundle of items, including the 10,000 lines of the source code to the original web browser, a digital poster created by Berners-Lee representing the code, a letter from him, and an animated video showing the code being entered. "This is totally aligned with the values of the web," Berners-Lee told the Guardian. "The questions I've got, they said: 'Oh, that doesn't sound like the free and open web.' Well, wait a minute, the web is just as free and just as open as it always was. The core codes and protocols on the web are royalty free, just as they always have been. I'm not selling the web -- you won't have to start paying money to follow links. "I'm not even selling the source code. I'm selling a picture that I made, with a Python programme that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me. "If they felt that me selling an NFT of a poster is inappropriate, then what about me selling a book? I do things like that, which involve money, but the free and open web is still free and open. And we do still, every now and again, have to fight to keep it free and open, fight for net neutrality and so on."

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In April 2020 I gave Glitch a try.

It's a unique free Node.js hosting service, that cuts out a lot of the complexity in creating and managing network apps. It's a Joel Spolsky project, run by Anil Dash, both people I've known for many years. Early bloggers. Joel is founder of Stack Exchange, Trello and many other projects, and now is super rich, probably a billionaire, after selling both his hits to big companies. I knew him when he was a normal ex-Microsoft NYC-based developer.

Anyway, I succeeded at getting several apps running on Glitch last year, but it wasn't simple for me, an experienced Node developer. That's okay. I left them the apps there, and they continued to work. But when I tried to update my PagePark installation on Glitch to the latest version, all of a sudden I'm getting errors from Node that make no sense. Things that worked before. There have been hardly any changes in PagePark in the last year. I have no idea what the problem is. And I'm concerned it might take days to figure it out and get things working properly. And these are days I don't have. Trying to complete Drummer, my latest product release, and help users get going in the OPML ecosystem (which is why I was drawn back to Glitch in the first place).

So now I'm trying to figure out what's the best use of my time. Glitch is inexpensive, but not the least expensive way to run a server, if you don't want the server to go to sleep. It takes (it seems) a minute or more for it to wake up. Perhaps that's the incentive to get you to pay. I'd understand that. But their price is $8 a month, paid annually. I can host a server on Digital Ocean for $5 a month, and it's pay as you go. If you use the server for a week you pay for a week. And while I appreciate that Glitch is trying to make it easier by factoring and editing in the browser (good things to do!), Digital Ocean makes it as easy as possible to get started using standard Linux at the command line, and their docs are excellent, the best I've seen. It's what got me to switch from AWS in the first place (their docs are impossibly bad). I've been using Digital Ocean for years now, and the other thing I like about it is that my apps continue to work, they don't break them, as apparently has happened on Glitch (which is okay, not complaining, just making a decision).

But then something amazing happened. After writing this post, all of a sudden PagePark-on-Glitch is working. Fuck me.