The New York Times reports: When Yahoo banned working from home in 2013, the reason was one often cited in corporate America: Being in the office is essential for spontaneous collaboration and innovation. "It is critical that we are all present in our offices," wrote Jacqueline Reses, then a Yahoo executive, in a staff memo. "Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings." Today, Ms. Reses, now chief executive of Post House Capital, an investment firm, has a different view. "Would I write that memo differently now?" she said. "Oh yeah." She still believes that collaboration can benefit from being together in person, but over the last year, people found new, better ways to work. As the pandemic winds down in the United States, however, many bosses are sounding a note similar to Ms. Reses' in 2013. "Innovation isn't always a planned activity," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, about post-pandemic work. "It's bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea you just had." Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said working from home "doesn't work for spontaneous idea generation, it doesn't work for culture." Yet people who study the issue say there is no evidence that working in person is essential for creativity and collaboration. It may even hurt innovation, they say, because the demand for doing office work at a prescribed time and place is a big reason the American workplace has been inhospitable for many people... "There's credibility behind the argument that if you put people in spaces where they are likely to collide with one another, they are likely to have a conversation," said Ethan S. Bernstein, who teaches at Harvard Business School and studies the topic. "But is that conversation likely to be helpful for innovation, creativity, useful at all for what an organization hopes people would talk about? There, there is almost no data whatsoever. All of this suggests to me that the idea of random serendipity being productive is more fairy tale than reality," he said.... Professor Bernstein found that contemporary open offices led to 70 percent fewer face-to-face interactions. People didn't find it helpful to have so many spontaneous conversations, so they wore headphones and avoided one another. The chief people officer at real estate marketplace Zillow believes this always-in-the-office culture is what's ultimately lead to problems like long hours, the lack of representation, and burnout, according to the New York Times, which notes Zillow, Salesforce, and Ford are now reconfiguring their offices with fewer rows of desks and more places for informal gatherings. "Some experts have suggested a new idea for the office: not as a headquarters people go to daily or weekly, but as a place people go sometimes, for group hangouts."

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The Houston Chronicle reports: The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a "lawless no-man's-land" and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children. The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook's messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009. Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The majority wrote, "We do not understand Section 230 to 'create a lawless no-man's-land on the Internet' in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking... Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it," the opinion said. "Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking." The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction..... Annie McAdams, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a groundbreaking decision. This is the first case to beat Facebook on its argument that it had immunity under Section 230, she said.

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities... Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention." Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country... As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin. The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus. And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

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I used to read biographies as a kid, loved reading the stories of great people. Now I have trouble getting through them, because I know the truth and the stories in the biographies are not that. As a kid I reveled in gullibility.

If the Dems played as hard as the Repubs (they should) they'd be running ads in Florida with live images of the crashed building saying: "This is where 25 years of Republican leadership has gotten you." Love, The Democrats

Heinz Mayochup is an awful idea, so I gave it a try, and it’s delicious!

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.") But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? Slashdot reader Obipale shares the first clue from Engadget's report: Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore. Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail: Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP. Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal. Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning... At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your device

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an interesting report from Science Alert: Thunderstorms that roil across the Southern Great Plains of the US are amongst the strongest of such storms on Earth... Their intensity and frequency have been increasing, yet our best climate models still struggle to predict just how and when they'll arise. To help refine climate models for the Southern Great Plains, paleoclimatologist Christopher Maupin from Texas A&M University and colleagues used oxygen and hydrogen isotopes to track the ferocity of past storms. Water molecules based on elements wielding an additional neutron or two tend to require a little more energy to vaporize, and release more energy as they condense. This leaves a clear signature in the ratios of isotopes separated by rainfall under various conditions. By comparing the results of analyses taken today with historic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes found trapped by stalactites in Texan caves, the researchers developed an accurate picture of weather events in the past... Using another set of isotopes, this time measuring those of uranium and thorium, the team dated the stalactites and stalagmites to around the last Ice Age, 30-50 thousand years ago. Measuring the shifts in oxygen and hydrogen isotopes down their lengths allowed the researchers to see the storms cycled from weakly to strongly organized, roughly every thousand years. The more strongly organized the complex of storms becomes, the more intense and damaging they are. They discovered these changes in thunderstorm intensities coincided with well-known, abrupt shifts in global climate, known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. The researchers also found these intensity increases coincide with a reduction in rain in southwestern US and greater atmospheric upwelling in the Santa Barbara Basin area. They believe the observed pattern suggests an increased frequency or intensity of the giant global atmospheric waves that drive the weather, called Rossby waves, may be providing the extra lift needed to fuel these greater storms. "Modern anthropogenic climate forcing has increasingly favored an amplification of these synoptic factors," the team wrote in their paper. "This work will help predict trends of storms in the future," explained geoscientist Courtney Schumacher.

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A slogan for programmers. "Let's see what happens." An idea pops into my head. I wonder if that could possibly work? Go for it. Other kinds of product designers, engineers, or screen writers, don't have the luxury that we have. Usually we can try something out and see what happens, and if it blows up, you can shrug and say well I guess it doesn't work. Or maybe it does. Or maybe in its failure it'll give you and idea of what might work. Or even better. Be careful not to risk data. I expect this might show up in my snarkySlogans array.

Portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin, 1889.

When you see art on this blog or in my tweet stream, it came from the Art Show app, which is free for you to use. It's also a repository you can download and hook up to your screen saver.

I sometimes talk about "the family of geeks" — how our shared experiences can bring us together. But if that's true, there's been a death in the family.... Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period. The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53. Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19." But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus... When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...." Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week. Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet... As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws... [The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated." While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers. "These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."

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"Every Sony PlayStation 3 ID out there was compromised, provoking bans of legit players on the network," Threatpost is reporting, calling it "just the latest in a shocking spike in attacks on unsuspecting gamers." tlhIngan (Slashdot user #30,335) shares Threatpost's report: Sony reportedly left a folder with every PS3 console ID online unsecured, and it was discovered and reported by a Spanish YouTuber with the handle "The WizWiki" in mid-April... Now, several weeks later, players on PlayStation Network message boards are complaining that they can't sign on and are receiving the error message 8071006. After enabling two-factor authentication (2FA), one player was able to sign back in without issue, according to posts on the PS3 subreddit, which includes a link to instructions on how to opt into 2FA on the PS3. It appears threat actors have started using the stolen PS3 console IDs for malicious purposes, causing the legitimate players to get banned... Sony has not responded to Threatpost's request for comment or confirmed a connection between the PS3 ID breach and player reports of being locked out of the platform... Sony is hardly the only gaming company leaking data like a sieve. A report from January found a half a million credentials stolen from the Top 25 gaming companies on caches of breached data for sale in criminal marketplaces. In June, the "Battle of the Galaxy" mobile game leaked 6 million gamer profiles, and attackers are working out how to use gaming platforms like Steam to host or deliver malware.

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The Washington Post reports that this week the U.S. government "banned the import of solar panels and other goods made with materials produced by a Chinese company that it accused of using forced laborers from China's Xinjiang region, a move likely to complicate the U.S. push toward clean energy." U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a withhold release order Thursday barring silicon-based products from the company, Hoshine Silicon, which operates from plants in Xinjiang that have been connected to coercive state labor programs targeting Uyghurs and other minorities, as The Post reported on Thursday. The order could have widespread impact on the solar industry, which is dominated by Chinese suppliers that source materials from Hoshine, the world's largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, a key raw material in solar panels. "Almost the complete solar industry is affected by Hoshine," said Johannes Bernreuter, a research analyst in Germany who studies the solar supply chain... By banning only Hoshine imports, CBP stopped short of targeting Xinjiang producers of another key solar ingredient, polysilicon. Those producers have also been connected to coercive labor programs targeting Uyghurs. In a note to investors, Height Securities described the ban "as a substantive but measured first shot across the bow" by the Biden administration, "which needs solar industry support" as it tries to balance rooting out forced labor in U.S. supply chains and an environmental agenda... [I]ndustry experts said enforcement could be a challenge given the complexity of the solar supply chain and Hoshine's dominance in the industry. Hoshine has produced metallurgical-grade silicon for at least eight of the world's largest polysilicon makers, according to the company's public statements and annual reports. Analysts say that together these firms account for nearly all of the world's supply of solar-grade polysilicon. The move could also undermine U.S. hopes of cooperating with China on climate change, one of few areas of potential collaboration between the two countries increasingly at loggerheads over human rights and investigating the origin of the covid-19 pandemic... Industry experts say it would be safer for U.S. agents to assume all silicon products entering the United States from China contain at least some material sourced from Hoshine, whose metallurgical-grade silicon is used in a wide range of consumer products, including electronics, cars, chemicals and sealants... The import ban was the most prominent of several measures the Biden administration took Thursday against China's solar-product suppliers. The Commerce Department also added several Chinese polysilicon producers to an export black list, which bars U.S. entities from exporting technology or other goods to the firms without first obtaining a government license.

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