The US Department of Homeland Security on Thursday announced that it is onboarding nearly 300 cybersecurity professionals and has extended job offers to 500 others in what it refers to as "the most successful cybersecurity hiring initiative in DHS history." From a report: The hiring spree is part of the department's 60-day cybersecurity workforce sprint that aimed to add 200 new cybersecurity personnel by July 1. As The Record reported in May, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told attendees of a US Chamber of Commerce event that one of the department's most significant priorities was building out its cybersecurity expertise with an emphasis on diversity.

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I was glad to see my former colleague Jon Zittrain write about making the web future-safe. I'd love to work on this with him and others. I don't think the way we're going about it has much of a chance of working.

I think we'll get better results sooner if we go for a sustainable web. That will require new financial structures and organizations that have longevity built into their models, for example, universities like Harvard. Insurance companies.

Say I want to give someone $10K to keep some of the domains I've registered going for say 100 years. And I give them say 10GB of static content. Add another $10K.

Set up systems to keep the archive of the static content up to date.

And let it be cloneable so many vendors can provide this service for a fee, and let app devs create automatic flows on behalf of users.

It seems it should be possible from there, if enough people and organizations pay money for longevity, at least it's a start.

LG plans to introduce its first consumer Mini LED TVs sometime next month, according to a press release from the South Korean company. Mini LED is a new variant of LCD TV tech that offers better contrast ratios, among other improvements. From a report: The new lineup in the US includes one 4K TV (dubbed the QNED90) and one 8K variant (called the QNED99). Both are available in three sizes: 65 inches, 75 inches, and 86 inches. Much of the recent advertising and marketing muscle behind Mini LED TVs has come from Samsung, but that's not the only company making them. TCL, Hisense, and others have introduced Mini LED sets as well. LG calls its Mini LED technology "QNED," which is just a marketing term that stands for "Quantum Nanocell Mini LED." As far as we can tell, there's nothing fundamentally different about these TVs that actually calls for a different acronym compared to Mini LEDs from other companies.

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Didi Global tumbled Friday after China said it's starting a cybersecurity review of the ride-hailing company just two days after it pulled off one of the biggest U.S. stock market debuts of the past decade. From a report: The move is to prevent data security risks, safeguard national security and protect public interest, according to a statement from the Cyberspace Administration of China. Didi has halted new user registrations during the probe. The company, which only started trading on Wednesday in New York after an initial public offering, fell 7% to $15.26. The surprise probe by China's internet regulator piles on the scrutiny of Didi over issues ranging from antitrust to data security. The company has been grappling with a broad antitrust probe into China's internet firms with uncertain outcomes for Didi and peers like major backer Tencent. More broadly, Beijing has been curbing the growing influence of China's largest internet corporations, widening an effort to tighten the ownership and handling of troves of information that internet giants from Alibaba Group to Tencent and Didi scoop up daily from hundreds of millions of users. Didi lost as much as 11% of its market value at one point on Friday, a rapid turnaround that underscores the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese government's crackdown on the internet sector.

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PagePark RFC: default domains folder.

Europe's tech chief Margrethe Vestager on Friday warned iPhone maker Apple against using privacy and security concerns to fend off competition on its App Store, reasons CEO Tim Cook gave for not allowing users to install software from outside the Store. From a report: Vestager, who is also the European Commission's executive vice president, last year proposed rules called the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that would force Apple to open up its lucrative App Store so that users can download apps from the internet or third-party app stores in a practice known as side-loading. Cook, speaking at an event last month, said the proposal would destroy the security and privacy of iPhones. read more Vestager said she shares Cook's security concerns. "I think privacy and security is of paramount importance to everyone," Vestager told Reuters in an interview. "The important thing here is, of course, that it's not a shield against competition, because I think customers will not give up neither security nor privacy if they use another app store or if they sideload," she said. Vestager indicated that she was open to changes in her proposal, which needs input from EU countries and EU lawmakers before it can become law. "I think that it is possible to find solutions to this," she said.

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Instagram doesn't see itself as a platform where people go to share photos anymore. From a report: That's the main takeaway from a series of recent comments made by the head of the company, Adam Mosseri. "We're no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app," Mosseri said in a video he posted to his social media accounts this week. According to Mosseri, the main reason for that is that people come to Instagram "to be entertained," and it's not the only app that offers that in what is a crowded marketplace. "Let's be honest, there's some really serious competition right now," Mosseri said. "TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger and there are a lot of other upstarts as well." To stay competitive, Mosseri said Instagram has to embrace that aspect of itself, "and that means change." One way the app will change is with Instagram handing out more recommendations

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Qualcomm's new chief thinks that by next year his company will have just the chip for laptop makers wondering how they can compete with Apple, which last year introduced laptops using a custom-designed central processor chip that boasts longer battery life. From a report: Longtime processor suppliers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have no chips as energy efficient as Apple's. Qualcomm Chief Executive Cristiano Amon told Reuters on Thursday he believes his company can have the best chip on the market, with help from a team of chip architects who formerly worked on the Apple chip but now work at Qualcomm. In his first interview since taking the top job at San Diego, California-based Qualcomm, Amon also said the company is also counting on revenue growth from China to power its core smartphone chip business despite political tensions. "We will go big in China," he said, noting that U.S. sanctions on Huawei give Qualcomm an opportunity to generate a lot more revenue.

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OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia-for-maps organisation that seeks to create a free and open-source map of the globe, is considering relocating to the EU, almost 20 years after it was founded in the UK by the British entrepreneur Steve Coast. From a report: OpenStreetMap Foundation, which was formally registered in 2006, two years after the project began, is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Following Brexit, the organisation says the lack of agreement between the UK and EU could render its continued operation in Britain untenable. "There is not one reason for moving, but a multitude of paper cuts, most of which have been triggered or amplified by Brexit," Guillaume Rischard, the organisation's treasurer, told members of the foundation in an email sent earlier this month. One "important reason," Rischard said, was the failure of the UK and EU to agree on mutual recognition of database rights. While both have an agreement to recognise copyright protections, that only covers work which is creative in nature. Maps, as a simple factual representation of the world, are not covered by copyright in the same way, but until Brexit were covered by an EU-wide agreement that protected databases where there had been "a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the data." But since Brexit, any database made on or after 1 January 2021 in the UK will not be protected in the EU, and vice versa.

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In a surprise announcement today, IBM announced that Jim Whitehurst, who came over in the Red deal, would be stepping down as company president just 14 months after taking over in that role. From a report: IBM didn't give a lot of details as to why he was stepping away, but acknowledged his key role in helping bring the 2018 $34 billion Red Hat deal to fruition and helping bring the two companies together after the deal closed. "Jim has been instrumental in articulating IBM's strategy, but also, in ensuring that IBM and Red Hat work well together and that our technology platforms and innovations provide more value to our clients," the company stated. He will stay on as a senior advisor to Krishna, but it begs the question why he is leaving after such a short time in the role, and what he plans to do next. Oftentimes after a deal of this magnitude closes, there is an agreement as to how long key executives will stay. It could be simply that the period has expired and Whitehurst wants to move on, but some saw him as the heir apparent to Krishna and the move comes as a surprise when looked at in that context.

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When I was planning the third BloggerCon, I realized at one point that I could, if I wanted, have every discussion leader of every session be a woman. I didn't go for it, felt like a stunt. Discussion leaders are like editors or teachers. They choose people to speak. We tried to discourage people from raising their hands (hard to enforce). The discussion leader is also empowered to move the mike to another person via a monitor (a human being, usually a student), who "owned" the mike. That's why things kept moving. I didn't choose DLs based on their fame, though I admit sometimes I gave into that, I chose people who could think on their feet in a classroom setting. So I often went with teachers, if one was available. There was a rule that vendors couldn't talk about their product. That became an issue at BloggerCon III at Stanford because Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurs will whore their product no matter what you say. BloggerCon was a users conference. We need to get back to that. Not just marketing events, but where users get together to talk about what they're doing and what they want.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As early as 1958, the oil industry was hiring scientists and engineers to research the role that burning fossil fuels plays in global warming. The goal at the time was to help the major oil conglomerates understand how changes in the earth's atmosphere may affect the industry -- and their bottom line. But what top executives gained was an early preview of the climate crisis, decades before the issue reached public consciousness. What those scientists discovered -- and what the oil companies did with that information -- is at the heart of two dozen lawsuits attempting to hold the fossil fuel industry responsible for their role in climate change. Many of those cases hinge on the industry's own internal documents that show how, 40 years ago, researchers predicted the rising global temperatures with stunning accuracy. But looking back, many of those same scientists say they were hardly whistleblowers out to take down big oil. Some researchers later testified before Congress, using their insider knowledge to highlight the ways in which the oil industry misled the public. Others say they have few qualms with how the petroleum giants handled their research. Few, however, could have predicted the imprint their work would have on history in efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for our climate emergency. The Guardian tracked down three of those scientists to see how they view their role today.

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Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone. From a report: It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has "billions of books and no central filing system." Imagine if libraries didn't exist and there was only a "sharing economy" for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It's no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be -- especially if someone reported a book being in someone else's home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That's what we have right now on the web. [...] People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary -- they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren't stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web -- the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks -- diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

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With better production tools and AI, and integration between them, it'll be possible to produce TV series about current events within weeks, then days, the perhaps almost instantaneously.

Some Facebook users in the United States are being served a prompt that asks if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist. Others are being notified that they may have been exposed to extremist content. From a report: It is all part of a test the social media company is running that stems from its Redirect Initiative, which aims to combat violent extremism, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN. Screen shots of the alerts surfaced on social media Thursday. "This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk," Stone said. "We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future," Stone added. One of the alerts, a screen grab of which made the rounds on social media Thursday, asks users, "Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?" "We care about preventing extremism on Facebook," explained that alert, according to a screen grab posted on social media. "Others in your situation have received confidential support."

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