An anonymous reader shares a post: Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it's the default search engine and that's a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively. I recently poked around in the Chromium project source code; the open-source foundation for Google's Chrome web browser. The Chromium project is co-developed by Google, and other corporate and individual contributors. The project is managed and controlled by Google, however. I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a feature called PreconnectToSearch. When enabled, the feature preemptively opens and maintains a connection to the default search engine. The preconnection feature resolves the domain name, and negotiates and sets up a secure connection to the server. All these things take time and they must happen before the search engine can receive the users' search queries. Preempting these steps can save a dozen seconds on a slow network connection or half a second on a fast connection. This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google's customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn't going to search the web. There's just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it's set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.

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Microsoft is to give its non-executive staff a $1,500 bonus for their work during the pandemic. From a report: The company told the BBC it was a symbol of appreciation "during a uniquely challenging year." It added: "We are proud to recognise our employees with a one-time monetary gift." In the first quarter of 2021 Microsoft's profits rose 38% on the same period last year. The Verge reported that employees below vice-president level who joined no later than 31 March 2021 would receive the payment, including part-time workers. The big tech firms have done well during the pandemic and Microsoft is not the only firm to have made bonus payments to staff. In March 2020, Facebook gave employees a $1,000 bonus to help them with increased expenses caused by the pandemic, such as those associated with setting up a home office. Google made a similar $1,000 payment in May 2020. In December, Amazon gave front-line employees a $300 dollar bonus with part-time workers receiving $150.

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Infrastructure cyberattacks are quickly becoming a significant problem in the US, and New York City is opening a facility that could help fend off those potentially dangerous hacks. From a report: The Wall Street Journal reports that NYC has launched a long-in-the-making Cyber Critical Services and Infrastructure (CCSI) operations center in Manhattan to defend against major cyberattacks. The initiative's members are a mix of public and private sector organizations that include Amazon, the Federal Reserve Bank, IBM, the New York Police Department and multiple healthcare providers. If a cyberattack hits, they'll ideally cooperate closely to both overcome the attack and muster a city response if the digital offensive hobbles NYC's infrastructure. Politicians first floated the idea in 2017, but CCSI has been a strictly virtual initiative until now.

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Ministers back down after hundreds of government offices insist banishing fax would be impossible. From a report: Most bureaucrats might be expected to welcome the chance to be freed from the tyranny of the fax machine. But in Japan, government plans to send the must-have item of 1980s office equipment the way of telex have in effect been scrapped after they encountered resistance from "faxophile" officials. A cabinet body that promotes administrative reform said in June it had decided to abolish the use of fax machines "as a rule" by the end of the month and switch to emails at ministries and agencies in the Tokyo district of Kasumigaseki, Japan's bureaucratic nerve centre. The move would enable more people to work from home, it said, citing concerns that too many people were still going to the office during the coronavirus pandemic to send and receive faxes. Exceptions would be made for disaster response and interactions with the public and businesses that had traditionally depended on faxes. Instead of embracing the digital age, however, hundreds of government offices mounted a defence of the much-maligned machine, insisting that banishing them would be "impossible," according to the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper. The backlash has forced the government to abandon its mission to turn officialdom into a digital-only operation, the newspaper said on Wednesday. Members of the resistance said there were concerns over the security of sensitive information and "anxiety over the communication environment" if, as the government had requested, they switched exclusively to email. Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses. "Although many ministries and agencies may have stopped using fax machines, I can't say with pride that we managed to get rid of most of them," an official at the cabinet body told the newspaper.

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The US Department of Commerce has sanctioned 14 Chinese tech companies over links to human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, including one backed by a top Silicon Valley investment firm. From a report: DeepGlint, also known as Beijing Geling Shentong Information Technology Co., Ltd., is a facial recognition company with deep ties to Chinese police surveillance, and funding from US-based Sequoia Capital. Today the Commerce Department added it to its Entity List, which restricts US companies from doing business with listed firms without a special license. Sequoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. DeepGlint co-founded a facial recognition lab in 2018 with Chinese authorities in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, according to the South China Morning Post. It has also gained international bragging rights through the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Face Recognition Vendor Test. DeepGlint claimed top accuracy in the test as of January 2021, giving it a potent marketing tool in the security and surveillance industry. While DeepGlint has been accepted for a public offering on Shanghai's STAR stock exchange, the firm hasn't seen the commercial success of other AI startups in the country, explained Jeffrey Ding in his ChinAI newsletter last month. Since the firm is so heavily invested in government work, it has to follow slow government procurement cycles and is unlikely to score huge infrastructure projects, Ding writes.

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In its latest rebuke to the ride-hailing giant Didi, China ordered 25 more of the company's apps removed from mobile stores on Friday, deepening the regulatory maelstrom that has engulfed the company since it went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week. From a report: The country's internet regulator said in its 10 p.m. announcement that the apps -- which include Didi's car-pooling app, its finance app and its app for corporate customers -- showed problems related to the collection and use of personal data. The latest announcement was nearly identical to one the same agency issued on Sunday, ordering a halt to downloads of Didi's main, consumer-facing app for the same reason. That order followed a separate one two days before that told Didi to stop registering new users while officials conducted a checkup of the company's network security practices. None of these recent commands offered any detail about the specific data and security problems that aroused officials" concerns. In a statement that was posted after midnight on Chinese social media, Didi said it would "sincerely accept and resolutely obey" the demands. Beijing's sudden moves against Didi, which has been celebrated for years in China as a homegrown innovator and industry pacesetter, have jolted the company's new Wall Street shareholders. The clampdown has also spooked investors and start-ups in China, who are wary about what seems to be growing hostility by Chinese officials toward domestic companies that list shares on overseas exchanges. A listing on Wall Street, such as Alibaba's record-breaking one in 2014, was once seen in China as an ultimate validation of a company's business achievements.

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Epic's legal spat with Apple over App Store practices will spill over to Australia. From a report: After a series of hearings and trials that stretched nearly nine months, Apple and Epic made their final pitches to a US District Court in California on May 24. Both companies now await Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' decision, but that doesn't mean the litigation is over. After a successful appeal Thursday by Epic, the case will soon be brought to an Australian court. At the center of the legal action is Apple's App Store. Epic's ultrapopular Fortnite was kicked off the iOS App Store in August after Epic built a direct payment system into the game that would allow it to bypass Apple's 30% fee for App Store purchases. Epic sued Apple immediately, accusing the company of anticompetitive practice. Epic argues that the App Store is monopolistic, that developers hoping to get their apps to customers have no choice but to go through the App Store -- and pay the fees associated with that. Apple calls Epic's lawsuit a marketing stunt and argues that the App Store gives developers access to a huge audience of iPhone and iPad users. In November, Epic brought the issue to Australia, initiating proceedings against Apple by arguing that the iPhone-maker's practices contravene Australia's Competition and Consumer Act. Apple was able to appeal against the suit in April, arguing that the case should be settled in the US District Court. Epic quickly counter-appealed, arguing that public policy concerns justify a separate trial. Australia's Federal Court ruled in favor of Epic on Thursday. "This is a positive step forward for Australian consumers and developers who are entitled to fair access and competitive pricing across mobile app stores," an Epic spokesperson said. "We look forward to continuing our fight for increased competition in app distribution and payment processing in Australia and around the world."

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A potential cyber attack on Iran's state railway company created "unprecedented chaos" at stations across the country and led to cancellations and delays on hundreds of lines, state TV reported. From a report: Departure notice boards showed blanket cancellations and carried the message "long delay following cyber attack," the national broadcaster said, adding that the disruption to Islamic Republic of Iran Railways' computer systems also affected station entrances and exits as well as ticket booths. The national rail company's website, www.rai.ir, wasn't loading as of 7.50 p.m. in Tehran. Iranian state TV didn't say where it got the information.

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Microsoft awarded $13.6 million to security researchers in the past 12 months, From a report: Microsoft said it awarded more than $13.6 million as monetary rewards to security researchers through its public bug bounty programs over the past 12 months. According to Microsoft: The funds were awarded for 1,261 bugs reported by 341 security researchers across 17 bug bounty platforms between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. The highest awarded bounty was $200,000 for a vulnerability reported in Hyper-V, Microsoftâ(TM)s OS virtualization technology. The average bounty was more than $10,000 per valid bug report across all programs. Most bug reports came from researchers residing in China, the US, and Israel. The company said it plans to announce the 2021 Most Valuable Security Researcher next month. The sum awarded this year is identical to what Microsoft reported one year ago when the company said it awarded $13.7 million to 327 security researchers for 1,226 vulnerability reports across 15 bug bounty programs in the previous 12 months (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020).

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President Biden is signing an executive order Friday urging federal agencies to more aggressively police conduct by Big Tech -- including to more closely review acquisitions that thwart competition. The action comes amid a growing backlash by lawmakers and regulators against massive Silicon Valley firms. From a report: Biden's order doesn't name the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple but the White House says it addresses "areas in which dominant tech firms are undermining competition and reducing innovation," including M&A, data collection and the "right to repair" devices. The order, "Promoting Competition in the American Economy," isn't just aimed at Big Tech. The sweeping set of recommendations also includes provisions targeted at internet service providers -- including an official call to restore net neutrality rules repealed under Trump -- as well as healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and banking and consumer finance. All told, Bidenâ(TM)s executive order includes 72 initiatives directed at more than a dozen federal agencies to "promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy," according to a White House press release.

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I'm thinking about how people will host their own Drummers.

I don't want to run the only server, I might not even want to run the main server. I do want to continue developing the software. This is different from how Facebook and Twitter run, I'm not trying to create another walled garden. It's not the kind of work I like, or am particularly good at. It's much more like how WordPress works. Only I think Drummer can be even easier to set up and manage.

I want to create networks of outliner users. I call this "Communication with a big C." Not the wires, but the ideas that go over the wires. Nodes in my network are human minds, not computers.

The world I imagine is something like 1980s software model with a much more efficient distribution system. And the product, unlike the one from the 80s, is built around networking, where the networking features of MORE and ThinkTank were barely a twinkle in the eye. There was no software to back it up

• One of the reasons I wanted Symantec to buy Think Technologies: they had one of the leading Mac email packages at the time, a product called InBox. There were two others, and I was friends with them too. I wanted desperately to get real networking support into MORE. Never happened, unfortunately, that had to wait for Frontier.

I'm starting to put the pieces together. One of them is to get the hosting working on systems like AWS, Digital Ocean and Glitch. So a user can just launch a server from a repo, have it mostly configure itself and have a Drummer server running in minutes. That's the goal. We have some experience with this, the various For Poets projects we've done here.

I've started a thread if you have questions or suggestions.

PS: For programmers, the key piece of software has a very funny name. daveappserver. It's an application server, perfectly set up to host Drummer, because in fact it is what I use to host Drummer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master's degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year. The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master's program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world's most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation's eighth wealthiest private school. For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master's students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can't fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. "Nevertheless," he said, "this is not what we want it to be." At New York University, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California's marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period. "NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions," said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a "gratifying career path that is in high demand." USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.

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I found it impossible to get excited about last night's NBA finals game between the Suns and Bucks. Two teams I spend no mental energy on. I know the Suns are great. I watch their teamwork, amazing stuff. That's what I love about sports, you see hugely talented people who spend their lives preparing to compete and, esp in basketball, it still matters how the least talented person on the court is doing. You don't see them complaining about each others' manners. They get on with it. They have a goal. Another reason this year's playoffs are interesting, no matter who wins, the players on the winning team will be champions for the first time. So they're playing for something that's real to them. Next year, if they make it back to the finals as the Warriors, Heat, Lakers, Cavaliers, etc have in recent years, you wonder how they get motivated. Another trophy, big eff'in deal. Anyway even with all the drama, I just don't care who wins. Maybe as the series progresses I will, but I doubt it -- it might be a sweep. It looks like it will.

Every time I switch my iPhone to a different computer, I have to start over with music. Why. After 15 years or so, couldn't they offer a way to back it up and then restore it? This must be some kind of copyright thing. I wish I had a phone that was rationally designed with the user in mind. I also have an Android phone, but as far as I can tell they broke the only way to copy music onto the device from a Mac. Not sure if a Windows machine is any better. Same reason I'd love to move my desktop act to Linux, but I can't do it without Frontier. Which is, btw, why I had to buy a new Mac. I mistakenly updated my iPhone and it wouldn't work with the Mac I keep un-updated so I can continue to run Frontier. All I have to say is this: Oy. What a mess.

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