ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. From a report: The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn't log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation -- in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn't cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying premises rented by Le Petit Cambodge -- a restaurant that was targeted by the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. On September 1st, the group published an article on Paris-luttes.info, an anticapitalist news website, summing up different police investigations and legal cases against some members of the group. According to their story, French police sent an Europol request to ProtonMail in order to uncover the identity of the person who created a ProtonMail account -- the group was using this email address to communicate. The address has also been shared on various anarchist websites. The next day, @MuArF on Twitter shared an abstract of a police report detailing ProtonMail's reply. According to @MuArF, the police report is related to the ongoing investigation against the group who occupied various premises around Place Sainte-Marthe. It says that French police received a message on Europol.

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Automated resume-scanning software is contributing to a "broken" hiring system in the US, says a new report from Harvard Business School. Such software is used by employers to filter job applicants, but is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable candidates, say the study's authors. It's contributing to the problem of "hidden workers" -- individuals who are able and willing to work, but remain locked out of jobs by structural problems in the labor market. From a report: The study's authors identify a number of factors blocking people from employment, but say automated hiring software is one of the biggest. These programs are used by 75 percent of US employers (rising to 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies), and were adopted in response to a rise in digital job applications from the '90s onwards. Technology has made it easier for people to apply for jobs, but also easier for companies to reject them. The exact mechanics of how automated software mistakenly reject candidates are varied, but generally stem from the use of overly-simplistic criteria to divide "good" and "bad" applicants.

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Abundant, easily processed silicon has been the material of choice for decades in the semiconductor industry, but electric vehicles are helping chip away at its dominance in the pursuit of energy efficiency. From a report: Tesla has been a catalyst for this change. The U.S. automaker became the first of its peers to use silicon carbide chips in a mass-produced car, incorporating them into some of its Model 3s. This move gave the power-saving material a boost of momentum in the EV supply chain, with ramifications for the chip industry. "Thus far, chipmakers have worked together to build up the silicon carbide market, but we've reached the stage of competing with each other," said Kazuhide Ino, chief strategy officer at Japanese chipmaker Rohm. Silicon carbide, abbreviated SiC, contains silicon and carbon. With chemical bonds stronger than those in silicon, it is the world's third-hardest substance. Processing it requires advanced technology, but the material's stability and other properties let chipmakers cut energy loss by more than half compared with standard silicon wafers. SiC chips also dissipate heat well, allowing for smaller inverters -- a crucial EV component that regulates the flow of power to the motor. "The Model 3 has an air resistance factor as low as a sports car's," said Masayoshi Yamamoto, a professor at Nagoya University in Japan. "Scaling down inverters enabled its streamlined design." Tesla's move jolted the chip industry. In June, German chipmaker Infineon Technologies introduced an SiC module for electric vehicle inverters. "The timing of the expansion of SiC has clearly moved closer than what we had expected," said Takemi Kouzu, manager at Infineon's Japan unit. Hyundai Motor will use Infineon-made SiC chips in its next-generation EV. These chips are said to enable a more than 5% increase in vehicle range compared with silicon. French automaker Renault signed a deal in June with Switzerland-based STMicroelectronics for a supply of SiC chips beginning in 2026. The agreement also covers chips made with gallium nitride, another alternative material for semiconductor wafers.

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China said local governments should set the fees for after-school tutoring institutions that offer compulsory education subjects, another step in the country's efforts to overhaul the private education sector. From a report: Local governments should establish benchmark fees and floating ranges, and include them in pricing catalogs, according to a notice from the National Development and Reform Commission. Price increases from the standard level will be capped at 10%. Local governments need to release their standard price for private tutors and related polices by the end of 2021. Beijing unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its private education sector in July, banning companies that teach school curriculums from making profits or raising outside capital. It also banned any tutoring for school subjects during vacations or holidays. The shares of companies such as TAL, New Oriental Education and Gaotu, once stock market darlings, have all tumbled.

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An anonymous reader shares a post: But what's at stake is not just employing people properly and/or paying them well -- what is often called the 'casualisation of work.' At the core of enabling, financing and founding this servant economy is something much less tangible but substantial: what kind of an economy do you want to produce with your decisions? How far do you want to push the division of labour between (elite) educated high earners and people providing menial services for this class? The economy we are currently seeding is one where convenience for some is worth more than community and solidarity for all. It pits one class of unstably employed (gig) work 'entrepreneurs' against an often older, surely more established class blessed with safety and security, benefitting from a new choice of servant services.

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Each of the two calls are implemented on a server, btw.

opml.getAtt ("tmp.opml", "name") + " is " + opml.getAtt ("tmp.opml", "age") + " years old."

Ask a friend who's a JavaScript dev why this is interesting.

Covid is raging in Texas and the government responds by setting citizens against each other over abortion.

Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. From a report:Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks -- i.e., "digital content." In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as "heart-wrenching stories" from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: "The responsible thing to do -- and the best way to serve our patrons right now -- is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19." The library added, "We will continue to offer access to e-books." The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries -- they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.

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The Guardian writes: About a third of all the world's food goes to waste, and producing, transporting and letting that food rot releases 8-10% of global greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country, it would have the third-biggest carbon footprint after the U.S. and China... Food waste fell sharply last year during lockdown as people stuck at home began to use leftovers, plan meals and freeze food rather than throw it away. Once lockdown ended, however, food waste rose again. Their conclusion? "Cutting food waste can help the climate."

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They're not coming through the windows - they were already inside.

Scientists fear four species are already extinct but say urgent action can save others.

"The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs," argues American economist Tyler Cowen (in a Bloomberg opinion column). "Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back... Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role. The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your "game" just might influence events in the real world... [R]egulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government's attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.) Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing. If the much-heralded "metaverse" ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

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Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

"Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby's drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks," reports the Associated Press. They're arguing that the pandemic "didn't just threaten Americans' health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs." Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn't easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand. Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe... Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that's happening now, it's not moving quickly enough, he says. Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. "The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector," he says. "I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise." Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people — tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can't get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies. Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity — but also kill low-skill jobs. "Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified," they wrote in a January paper... Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.

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A Guardian article begins with the story of how a digital surveillance platform called Sneek ruined the first week on the job for a remote worker named David: Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague's face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek's integration with the messaging platform Slack. According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. "We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it's not the solution for those folks," Currie says. "But there's also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they're working together." For David, though, Sneek was a dealbreaker. He quit after less than three weeks on the job. "I signed up to manage their digital marketing," he tells me, "not to livestream my living room." Little did he realize that his experience was part of a wide-scale boom in worker surveillance- and one that's poised to become a standard feature of life on the job... One of the major players in the industry, ActivTrak, reports that during March 2020 alone, the firm scaled up from 50 client companies to 800. Over the course of the pandemic, the company has maintained that growth, today boasting 9,000 customers — or, as it claims, more than 250,000 individual users. Time Doctor, Teramind, and Hubstaff — which, together with ActivTrak, make up the bulk of the market — have all seen similar growth from prospective customers. These software programs give bosses a mix of options for monitoring workers' online activity and assessing their productivity: from screenshotting employees' screens to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing. Speaking to the Guardian, Juan Carloz, a digital researcher and privacy advocate with the University of Melbourne, shares a theory about why remote workers aren't pushing back against surveillance softare. "Since, rightly or wrongly, [its] being framed as a trade-off for remote work, many are all too content to let it slide."

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