An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australia's High Court, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that Facebook users are responsible for the content of complete strangers who post defamatory comments on their posts. The ruling upholds a June 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, home to Australia's largest city of Sydney. And it runs counter to how virtually everyone thinks about liability on the internet. The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."

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Luke Plunkett, writing at Kotaku: Back in 2018, The Verge released a guide to building a new PC that was, well, from where I was sitting it was not ideal. From where some angry PC nerds were sitting, though, it was an outrage. How bad was the video? It has its own knowyourmeme page, that's how bad. The guide was full of glaring omissions and bizarre tips, from a strange obsession with power usage to the most liberal use of thermal paste you've ever seen. The original video guide was eventually removed by The Verge (though you can see it here, and the written portion remains online), with the site claiming that it didn't meet their "editorial standards." Things took a turn for the worse when folks' initial bemusement with the guide quickly morphed into outright harassment from others, with author Stefan Etienne receiving a ton of racial abuse and The Verge issuing takedown notices on a couple of videos critical of the situation. Anyway, that was 2018. We're not here to drag up bad old content and the ramblings of internet shitheads, we're here for the redemptive arc in this tale. That comes in the form of this new Linus Tech Tips video, where the host gets Etienne on to "fix" his old build, going through the same basic overall process as the original, making some changes (or just adding some extra information) at stops along the way. Etienne is a great sport throughout (and interestingly claims that The Verge's editorial basically threw him under the bus with the video section of the guide). The pair go through the original guide point by point, not just explaining how they'd improve things in 2021, but also allowing Etienne to break down just what was going on during the creation of the video as well. [H/T UnknowingFool.]

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Matt Levine, writing at Bloomberg: Oh, sure, yes, absolutely. The rule in the U.S. is that an "investment contract," meaning "the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others," is a security, and generally can't be sold to the public without registering it with the Securities and Exchange Commission, delivering a prospectus with audited financial statements, etc. A Bitcoin lending program -- in which (1) a bunch of people pool their Bitcoins, (2) some manager or smart contract lends those Bitcoins to borrowers who pay interest, and (3) some or all of the interest is paid back to the people in the pool -- is pretty straightforwardly an investment contract and thus a security. I have been saying this for months, though that's only because the SEC has also been saying it for months. But I admit that the SEC hasn't been saying it in a particularly clear way. There's not an SEC press release saying "FYI crypto lending programs are obviously securities." And I gather that there are a lot of crypto lending programs -- they're a staple feature of decentralized finance platforms -- and roughly none of them are registered with the SEC. The SEC and state regulators have brought enforcement actions against a few of them -- we've talked about BitConnect and BlockFi and Blockchain Credit Partners -- but I suppose each of those is distinctive in its own way, and there are about a zillion others that haven't been sued by the SEC. So you could reasonably look around and be like "oh sure we can pool people's Bitcoins and lend them and pass along the interest, that's not a security that should involve the SEC." You'd be wrong, but I get where you're coming from. [...] Look, I get it. From the perspective of Coinbase, and of its customers, and frankly of most normal people interested in crypto: People would like to lend their Bitcoins. It doesn't feel like a security. It's kind of annoying and archaic that a 1946 Supreme Court case says that it is? But look at it from the SEC's perspective: The SEC really doesn't like crypto. The SEC is a regulatory agency that has a general tendency to want to do more regulating. Popular tokens like Bitcoin and Ether are not securities and so not subject to SEC regulation, which leaves the SEC feeling antsy. But crypto lending programs are pretty clearly securities subject to SEC regulation. So for the SEC to say "crypto lending programs are securities and need to be regulated" serves the dual purposes of (1) expanding SEC jurisdiction over crypto and (2) stopping those programs. Also it's pretty clearly justified by a 1946 Supreme Court case.

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The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian. From a report: Copies of the "field interview cards" that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in "investigations, arrests, and prosecutions," and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete. The documents, which were obtained by the not-for-profit organization the Brennan Center for Justice, have raised concerns about civil liberties and the potential for mass surveillance of civilians without justification. "There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips," said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, a deputy director at the Brennan Center, noting that the information was probably stored in a database that could be used for a wide range of purposes. The Brennan Center conducted a review of 40 other police agencies in the US and was unable to find another department that required social media collection on interview cards (though many have not publicly disclosed copies of the cards). The organization also obtained records about the LAPD's social media surveillance technologies, which have raised questions about the monitoring of activist groups including Black Lives Matter.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has severely set back the fight against other global scourges like H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, according to a sobering new report released on Tuesday. From a report: Before the pandemic, the world had been making strides against these illnesses. Overall, deaths from those diseases have dropped by about half since 2004. "The advent of a fourth pandemic, in Covid, puts these hard-fought gains in great jeopardy," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization promoting H.I.V. treatment worldwide. The pandemic has flooded hospitals and disrupted supply chains for tests and treatments. In many poor countries, the coronavirus crisis diverted limited public health resources away from treatment and prevention of these diseases. Many fewer people sought diagnosis or medication, because they were afraid of becoming infected with the coronavirus at clinics. And some patients were denied care because their symptoms, such as a cough or a fever, resembled those of Covid-19. Unless comprehensive efforts to beat back the illnesses resume, "we'll continue to play emergency response and global health Whac-a-Mole," Mr. Warren said. The report was compiled by the Global Fund, an advocacy group that funds campaigns against H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis. Before the arrival of the coronavirus, TB was the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming more than one million lives each year. The pandemic has exacerbated the damage. In 2020, about one million fewer people were tested and treated for TB, compared with 2019 -- a drop of about 18 percent, according to the new report. The number of people treated for drug-resistant TB declined by 19 percent, and for extensively drug-resistant TB by 37 percent. Nearly 500,000 people were diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in 2019.

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Options for creativity are in the edge cases.

The Netflix movie Worth got great reviews, and it stars Michael Keaton so I got out the popcorn and sat down to watch with great expectations and came away not liking the movie. That was almost a week ago, and I've had some time to reflect on why it was so bad.

• Interestingly, the score on Metacritic for Worth has gone down by 20 points since I looked late last week. Now it gets a 66, "generally favorable" which is not great. But I left the first paragraph alone.

First, Keaton is a great actor, and this was an unusual role for him, playing a lawyer whose job it was to save the economy from being sued to oblivion by the families of victims of 9/11 by giving them money.

Now I'm going to spoil the plot, but it's kind of funny -- you might not even realize this was the plot, esp the second part, after you watched the whole movie, that's how poorly done it was. So here goes.

1. The families wanted their dead relatives' stories told, they cared less about how much money they got, although the money was important to some.
2. The families of rich people who died scammed the regular people and they took a lot more of the money from the settlement, and there was nothing Michael Keaton could do about it.
3. But the most important part of the plot was that Keaton started out as a stiff and heartless lawyer and came out the other end as a champion of the people. Only we never saw the process by which this transformation took place.

The conclusion I came to, after giving this enough time, was that it should have been an 6 to 10-part series. Netflix should have done for the families what they wanted Keaton's character to do. Tell their stories. That's where the juice was. If you want to make Keaton the central thread, that's a good way to do it. But we just got tiny little glimpses of the families here and there, and no understanding of who actually died in the 9/11 attack. And that's a shame, because it could be a good story. Maybe a bit like Six Feet Under.

Anyway as a movie it was imho a failure. Michael Keaton, as always, commands your attention in a good way, just to see someone who's a true artist at his craft.

NASA's long-awaited and high-powered James Webb Space Telescope won't begin observations this year after NASA and its counterpart the European Space Agency (ESA) announced another launch delay. From a report: In coordinated statements, the two agencies announced that the observatory is now targeting a launch on Dec. 18, more than six weeks after its previously set liftoff date. The highly-anticipated project has racked up consistently escalating budget and schedule overruns since development began in the 1990s. "We now know the day that thousands of people have been working towards for many years, and that millions around the world are looking forward to," Gunther Hasinger, ESA's director of science, said in an agency statement. "Webb and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle are ready, thanks to the excellent work across all mission partners. We are looking forward to seeing the final preparations for launch at Europe's Spaceport."

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The infamous criminal ransomware group behind the JBS SA cyberattack has returned to the dark web after vanishing this summer. From a report: "REvil," short for "Ransomware-Evil," is among the most prolific cyber gangs to hold data for ransom. The group operates from Russia, according to cybersecurity firms and the U.S. government, and is accused of leading a flurry of attacks this year against companies and organizations, including JBS. The giant Brazilian meat supplier eventually paid an $11 million ransom. REvil runs a website called the "Happy Blog," where it publishes samples of data stolen before locking companies out of their own networks. The attackers then try to persuade targets to pay for a digital key to restore network access. A portal REvil uses to negotiate with victims also came back online on Tuesday, according to Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, although the cybergang hasn't posted any new victims. Meyers says it appears the site was restored by the same actors running the portal before it went offline in June without explanation. "I would think this was a cool-off period," he said. "There was a lot of heat back in June/July. Maybe they rebuilt some infrastructure and invested in better operational security."

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What is was like competing with -- and dealing with the wreckage of -- the most infamous startup in the world. From a report: Theranos' collapse was as public as it gets for a Silicon Valley unicorn, beginning in 2015 with a widely read series of articles by former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who revealed that Theranos' technology was far less effective than advertised. The debacle went on to inspire the bestselling book Bad Blood by Carreyrou, an HBO documentary, and a forthcoming Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried. This week, Holmes' highly anticipated trial begins in earnest. Jurors were sworn in last Thursday, and opening statements will begin on Wednesday. Prosecutors have charged Holmes with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the ascent and operations of Theranos, though she maintains her innocence. Once famous for a supposedly innovative approach to blood testing, now infamous for allegedly faking it, the names Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes aren't fading away anytime soon. All of this has had a ripple effect for other companies that, like Theranos, were trying to make blood drawing and diagnostics easier for consumers. I spoke to five such companies recently about how they have dealt with unwelcome comparisons to Theranos, which has bedeviled the sector ever since Carreyrou's first piece on the subject. One company I reached out to expressed that it was hesitant to even appear in an article about Theranos. Even before Theranos imploded, its outsize presence was felt by other companies in the blood testing industry, for better and worse. "In the beginning, when Theranos was on its up slope, people were asking how we were ever going to compete with a company like Theranos when they've raised a billion dollars," said Daniel Levner, co-founder of Sight Diagnostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can conduct a blood count analysis from a finger prick. Yet when Carreyrou's pieces began appearing in the Journal, comparisons to Theranos became a curse for its peers. "In pretty much every conversation we had for a year, Theranos would come up," said John Lewis, founder and CEO of Nanostics, a biotech company that sells a device that can use a very small amount of blood to diagnose and predict diseases. "Most people recognized that Theranos was mostly just bad founders, but it certainly was on everybody's mind." Lewis recounts that his company, which had only existed for a year and a half at the time, was in a pitch competition right as the Theranos scandal was coming to light. The very first question they got at the event was how the Nanostics product compared to Theranos'. From there, Nanostics took pains to distinguish itself from Theranos, down to the smallest details. For instance, the company in its promotional materials tried to stay away from Theranos' famous selling point of diagnosing diseases from a single drop of blood. "Our initial plan was to go out saying that we can detect disease signatures with a single drop of blood, but that was literally just when Theranos was going down for stating that they could do that when they couldn't," Lewis recalled. "So in our texts we said, 'two drops of blood.'"

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Amazon is bringing its cashierless "Just Walk Out" technology to two new Whole Foods locations next year, the company has announced. From a report: One of the stores will be in Washington, DC, while the second will be in Sherman Oaks, California. When they're open, customers will have the option of paying at a traditional self-checkout or customer service booth, or having the new technology automatically bill them when they leave the store. The move marks Amazon's latest step towards scaling its cashierless technology, which works by using a series of cameras and sensors to automatically detect what people pick up off shelves, into a variety of larger stores. Just Walk Out originally debuted in small Amazon Go convenience stores, before the company scaled it up to work in bigger and bigger grocery stores.

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PayPal, the U.S. fintech company, announced an acquisition of Paidy, a Japanese buy now, pay later (BNPL) service platform, for approximately $2.7 billion (300 billion yen), mostly in cash, to enhance its business in Japan. From a report: The transaction completion including the regulatory approval is expected in the fourth quarter of 2021. After the acquisition, the Japan-based company will continue to operate its existing business and maintain the brand while the leaders, Paidy's president and CEO Riku Sugie and founder and executive chairman of Paidy Russel Cummer, keep their positions. Japan is the third largest e-commerce market in the world, and so this is a significant move by PayPal to gain more market share both in the country and the region, specifically in the area of providing deferred payment services as an alternative to credit cards.

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When you recommend a podcast please say a little about what it is and why you recommended it. Typically to find out what a podcast actually is takes hours of listening. and usually they're disappointing or too boring, or have a 1/2 hour commercial at the start.

Google is announcing even more Workspace features today, part of an increased cadence of changes to the company's office and communications software suite over the past year or so. From a report: Today's announcement is a bit of a milestone, however. Although there is still the smattering of small and coming-soon updates, the bigger change is that Gmail is getting a redesign that reveals its true nature in Google's eyes: the central hub for every Google communication app. To begin, Google is adding the ability to "ring" another Google user with Google Meet -- but inside the Gmail mobile app, not inside the Meet app. When the feature rolls out and turns on, your Gmail app will be able to be called just like any other VOIP app (in addition to being able to join Google Meet meetings). Google says the standalone Meet app will get the same ability to place calls, not just create group meetings, at some point in the future. That Gmail was the first place Google thought to put its calling feature reveals how important Gmail has become to the larger changes happening within Google Workspace.

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Who to blame for the Afghanistan debacle?

It's not nearly as complicated as journalism makes it sound.

The people who voted to re-elect Bush in 2004.

Blame yourself if you‘re one of them. We had a chance to listen to the world and use our dominance in so many areas other than blowing up Iraq.

Very limited imagination.