From a paper on PNAS [PDF]: Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced "hockey stick" pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions. Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

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Amazon struck an agreement with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey to develop an air-cargo facility at Newark Liberty International Airport. From a report: Amazon Gobal Air, the company's cargo airline, plans to spend $125 million to transform two existing buildings at the airport, according to a Port Authority news release. The agency will receive $157 million in rent over a 20-year lease and an upfront payment of $150 million. The lease is expected to take effect later this year, the Port Authority said.

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After Havana shut down online access for 72 hours, the battle is on to keep the country connected. From a report: Cubans used to joke about Napoleon Bonaparte chatting to Mikhail Gorbachev, George W Bush and Fidel Castro in the afterlife. "If I'd have had your prudence, I'd never have fought Waterloo," the French emperor tells the last Soviet leader. "If I'd have had your military might, I'd have won Waterloo," he tells the Texan. Turning last to Castro, the emperor says: "If I'd have had Granma [the Cuban Communist party daily], I'd have lost Waterloo but nobody would have known." The joke no longer does the rounds. With millions of Cubans now online, the state's monopoly on mass communication has been deeply eroded. But after social media helped catalyse historic protests on the island last month, the government temporarily shut the internet down. Full connectivity returned 72 hours later, but the issue has become a hot potato in the US. Hundreds of Cuban-Americans marched against the regime in Washington last week, and politicians are trying to leverage political capital: Florida senator Marco Rubio has called for the US to beam balloon-supplied internet to the island nation, while Joe Biden said his administration is assessing whether it can increase Cuba's connectivity. Experts say it's unclear how internet access could be increased at scale if the host nation is unwilling to cooperate. "I haven't seen anything other than pie in the sky," said Larry Press, professor of information systems at California State University. Past US government attempts to bolster connectivity in Cuba read like a John Le Carre novel. In 2009, Alan Gross, a subcontractor for the US Agency for International Development, was arrested for distributing satellite equipment. His work was funded thanks to a US law that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the Castro regime. (Gross was later released as part of the restoration of US-Cuban relations during Barack Obama's second term.) Attempts to smuggle satellite ground stations disguised as surf boards on to the island were similarly foiled.

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Apple will roll out a technology that will allow the company to detect and report known child sexual abuse material to law enforcement in a way it says will preserve user privacy. From a report: Apple told TechCrunch that the detection of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is one of several new features aimed at better protecting the children who use its services from online harm, including filters to block potentially sexually explicit photos sent and received through a child's iMessage account. Another feature will intervene when a user tries to search for CSAM-related terms through Siri and Search. Most cloud services -- Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft to name a few -- already scan user files for content that might violate their terms of service or be potentially illegal, like CSAM. But Apple has long resisted scanning users' files in the cloud by giving users the option to encrypt their data before it ever reaches Apple's iCloud servers. Apple said its new CSAM detection technology -- NeuralHash -- instead works on a user's device, and can identify if a user uploads known child abuse imagery to iCloud without decrypting the images until a threshold is met and a sequence of checks to verify the content are cleared. News of Apple's effort leaked Wednesday when Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, revealed the existence of the new technology in a series of tweets. The news was met with some resistance from some security experts and privacy advocates, but also users who are accustomed to Apple's approach to security and privacy that most other companies don't have.

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Microsoft said this week it plans to run an experiment in its Edge web browser where it will intentionally disable an important performance and optimization feature in order to enable more advanced security upgrades in what the company is calling Edge Super Duper Secure Mode. From a report: Announced today by Johnathan Norman, Microsoft Edge Vulnerability Research Lead, the idea behind the new Super Duper Secure Mode is to disable support for JIT (Just-In-Time) inside V8, the Edge browser's JavaScript engine. JIT, while unknown to most end-users, plays a crucial role in all of today's web browsers. JIT works by taking JavaScript and compiling it to machine code ahead of time. If the browser needs the code, it gains a significant speed boost. If it doesn't, the code is discarded. However, JIT support in V8 is complex. Norman said JIT-related security issues amounted to 45% of all V8 vulnerabilities in 2019. Furthermore, more than half of the "in the wild" Chrome exploits rely on JIT-related bugs. Norman said that recent tests carried out by the Edge team have shown that despite its pivotal role in speeding up browsers in the early and mid-2010s, JIT is not a crucial feature anymore to Edge's performance.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: With their crane-like necks, spindle legs and knobbly knees, giraffes are among the best loved and most recognizable of animals. Despite their elevated stature, however, giraffes have kept their surprisingly intricate social behavior under wraps. Once perceived as humble creatures that focused solely on feeding their majestic bodies, one book from 1991 described the giraffe as "socially aloof, forming no lasting bonds with its fellows and associating in the most casual way." But new research from the University of Bristol, published Tuesday in the journal Mammal Review, suggests giraffes have been misunderstood and are in fact a highly complex and social species. The most surprising thing for me is that it has taken until 2021 to recognize that giraffes have a complex social system. We have known for decades about other species of socially complex mammal, such as elephants, primates and cetaceans, but it is baffling to me how such a charismatic and well-known species as the giraffe could have been so understudied until recently," said Zoe Muller, study author and biologist at the University Of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences.

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Obviously Tucker Carlson wants to the Viktor Orbán of the US.

Verizon Communications is enlisting artificial intelligence models to help place thousands of 5G wireless transmitters for optimal performance. From a report: Later this year, the company will begin a multibillion-dollar rollout of midband spectrum, which expands coverage of its existing ultra wideband 5G wireless service. Maximizing coverage with the least number of transmitters is a priority, said Shankar Arumugavelu, senior vice president and global chief information officer of Verizon. "When we build out these networks, these are very capital-intensive," he said. "We have to make sure that we are being very judicious in terms of how we are investing our capital." The models, designed by in-house data scientists and other employees, factor in a number of variables that can alter the strength of 5G signals, like buildings, bridges, terrain, the position of the transmitter, as well as other transmitters nearby. Verizon, along with rivals AT&T and T-Mobile, is racing to build out nationwide 5G service, a yearslong effort slowed by the lack of available airwaves for fast transmission and long signal ranges, and by the deployment of new network equipment, analysts have said.

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Apple intends to install software on American iPhones to scan for child abuse imagery, Financial Times is reporting citing people briefed on the plans, raising alarm among security researchers who warn that it could open the door to surveillance of millions of people's personal devices. From the report: Apple detailed its proposed system -- known as "neuralMatch" -- to some US academics earlier this week, according to two security researchers briefed on the virtual meeting. The plans could be publicised more widely as soon as this week, they said. The automated system would proactively alert a team of human reviewers if it believes illegal imagery is detected, who would then contact law enforcement if the material can be verified. The scheme will initially roll out only in the US. The proposals are Apple's attempt to find a compromise between its own promise to protect customers' privacy and ongoing demands from governments, law enforcement agencies and child safety campaigners for more assistance in criminal investigations, including terrorism and child pornography. [...] "This will break the dam -- governments will demand it from everyone," said Matthew Green, a security professor at Johns Hopkins University, who is believed to be the first researcher to post a tweet about the issue. Alec Muffett, a security researcher and privacy campaigner who formerly worked at Facebook and Deliveroo, said Apple's move was "tectonic" and a "huge and regressive step for individual privacy. Apple are walking back privacy to enable 1984," he said.

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President Biden wants 50 percent of all new cars sold in the United States in 2030 to be all-electric, plug-in hybrid, or hydrogen-powered. From a report: In addition, his administration will propose new fuel economy and emissions standards that will more or less erase the Trump administration's rollback of the previous Obama-era rules covering cars made through 2025. Biden will also sign an executive order that tasks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to develop aggressive long-term rules to support his 2030 target, ones that include medium- and heavy-duty vehicles as well. "When I say electric vehicles are the future, I'm not joking," read a tweet from the President on Wednesday night. This planned shift away from internal combustion engines is not as aggressive as the approaches that have been proposed or set in motion around the world. The European Union has proposed a de-facto ban on sales of new gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035, though France has pushed back on the phaseout of hybrids, which still use fossil fuels. The United Kingdom wants to stop selling new combustion engine vehicles by 2030. China wants all new cars sold in 2035 to be hybrids at the very least, but is aiming for 50 percent to be plug-in hybrid, battery electric, or hydrogen-powered.

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Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said he is "highly skeptical" about the need for the U.S. central bank to develop a digital currency. From a report: "While CBDCs continue to generate enormous interest in the United States and other countries, I remain skeptical that a Federal Reserve CBDC would solve any major problem confronting the U.S. payment system," Waller said in the text of remarks prepared for delivery Thursday to the American Enterprise Institute. The Federal Reserve Board stepped up its engagement on the possibility of a central bank digital currency in May when Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank will issue a paper outlining the Board's thinking on digital payments "with a particular focus on the benefits and risks associated with CBDC in the U.S. context." Powell said the central bank will also seek public comment on issues related to payments, financial inclusion, data privacy, and information security. The Boston Fed is also studying technologies around digital payments in conjunction with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

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DrTJ writes: Chipmaker Qualcomm places a bid of $4.6bn for Swedish automotive company Veoneer. As of last week, Magna offered $3.8bn for the company. Qualcomm is making an 18% higher offer, or $37 per share. Veoneer focuses its business on ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), including computer vision, radar sensing, LIDAR and drive policy software. Both Qualcomm and Magna states that they want to strengthen their ADAS position on the market by the purchase.

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The annual climate change summit is being held in Glasgow - who's going and what's at stake?

The U.S. government is enlisting the help of tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, to bolster the country's critical infrastructure defenses against cyber threats after a string of high-profile attacks. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security, on Thursday, is formally unveiling the initiative called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative. The effort will initially focus on combating ransomware and cyberattacks on cloud-computing providers, said Jen Easterly, director of the DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Ultimately, she said, it aims to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector. "This will uniquely bring people together in peacetime, so that we can plan for how we're going to respond in wartime," she said in an interview. Ms. Easterly was sworn in as CISA's director last month. She was previously a counterterrorism official in the Obama White House, and the commander of the Army's first cyber operations unit at the National Security Agency, America's cyberspy agency. Over the past year, ransomware attacks have disrupted large parts of daily life in the U.S. They have diverted ambulances, caused long lines at gas stations in the southeast, and disrupted the production of hot dogs and other meat products.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Well over 100 employees at Amazon Prime Air have lost their jobs and dozens of other roles are moving to other projects abroad as the company shutters part of its operation in the UK, WIRED understands. Insiders claim the future of the UK operation, which launched in 2016 to help pioneer Amazon's global drone delivery efforts, is now uncertain. Those working on the UK team in the last few years, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a project that was "collapsing inwards," "dysfunctional" and resembled "organized chaos," run by managers that were "detached from reality" in the years building up to the mass redundancies. They told WIRED about increasing problems within Prime Air in recent years, including managers being appointed who knew so little about the project they couldn't answer basic work questions, an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning and some staff being forced to train their replacements in Costa Rica. Amazon says it still has staff working for Prime Air in the UK, but has refused to confirm headcount. [...] An Amazon spokesperson says it will still have a Prime Air presence in the UK after the cuts, but refuses to disclose what type of work will take place. The spokesperson also refused to confirm, citing security reasons, if any of the test flights that once filled promotional videos will still take place in the UK. The spokesperson adds that the company has found positions in other parts of its business for some affected employees and that it will keep growing its presence in the region. The spokesperson did not confirm how many employees were offered other jobs internally.

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