BuzzFeed News reports: In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of "an operational mistake." The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night. The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it "non-violating." The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting. "To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day," one Facebook worker wrote in the internal "Violence and Incitement Working Group" to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event... The internal report seen by BuzzFeed News reveals the extent to which concerned Facebook users went to warn the company of a group calling for public violence, and how the company failed to act. After BuzzFeed news published its story about Facebook's internal report, Mark Zuckerberg made the same comments in a public forum, reports CNN: The page clearly violated Facebook's rules against violent militias, Zuckerberg acknowledged in a video posted Friday to his Facebook profile, and that "a bunch of people" had even reported the page prior to the killing of two protesters, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. Just last week, Facebook announced it would crack down on militia organizations that advocated for violence or spoke about the potential for violence. But in its first week of implementation, the policy's lack of enforcement led to the spread of violent messages on the platform directly linked to the events in Kenosha, where protests erupted after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

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Krebs on Security tells the tale of Hieu Minh Ngo, who earned $3 million by selling the identity records he'd stolen from consumer data brokers (which included social security numbers and physical addresses). "He was selling the personal information on more than 200 million Americans," one secret service agent tells the site, "and allowing anyone to buy it for pennies apiece." Handling over 160,000 queries each month, Ngo's service "enabled approximately $1.1 billion in new account fraud at banks and retailers throughout the United States," according to government estimates, "and roughly $64 million in tax refund fraud with the states and the IRS..." Ngo said he wasn't surprised that his services were responsible for so much financial damage. But he was utterly unprepared to hear about the human toll. Throughout the court proceedings, Ngo sat through story after dreadful story of how his work had ruined the financial lives of people harmed by his services... "[D]uring my case, the federal court received like 13,000 letters from victims who complained they lost their houses, jobs, or could no longer afford to buy a home or maintain their financial life because of me. That made me feel really bad, and I realized I'd been a terrible person." Even as he bounced from one federal detention facility to the next, Ngo always seemed to encounter ID theft victims wherever he went, including prison guards, healthcare workers and counselors. "When I was in jail at Beaumont, Texas I talked to one of the correctional officers there who shared with me a story about her friend who lost her identity and then lost everything after that," Ngo recalled. "Her whole life fell apart. I don't know if that lady was one of my victims, but that story made me feel sick. I know now that was I was doing was just evil." The article says Ameria's secret service describes Ngo "as someone who caused more material financial harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal." "Ngo was recently deported back to his home country after serving more than seven years in prison for running multiple identity theft services. He now says he wants to use his experience to convince other cybercriminals to use their skills for good..."

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Blogger/science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) has just published How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism — a new book which he's publishing free online. In a world swamped with misinformation and monopolies, Doctorow says he's knows what's missing from our proposed solutions: If we're going to break Big Tech's death grip on our digital lives, we're going to have to fight monopolies. That may sound pretty mundane and old-fashioned, something out of the New Deal era, while ending the use of automated behavioral modification feels like the plotline of a really cool cyberpunk novel... But trustbusters once strode the nation, brandishing law books, terrorizing robber barons, and shattering the illusion of monopolies' all-powerful grip on our society. The trustbusting era could not begin until we found the political will — until the people convinced politicians they'd have their backs when they went up against the richest, most powerful men in the world. Could we find that political will again...? That's the good news: With a little bit of work and a little bit of coalition building, we have more than enough political will to break up Big Tech and every other concentrated industry besides. First we take Facebook, then we take AT&T/WarnerMedia. But here's the bad news: Much of what we're doing to tame Big Tech instead of breaking up the big companies also forecloses on the possibility of breaking them up later... Allowing the platforms to grow to their present size has given them a dominance that is nearly insurmountable — deputizing them with public duties to redress the pathologies created by their size makes it virtually impossible to reduce that size. Lather, rinse, repeat: If the platforms don't get smaller, they will get larger, and as they get larger, they will create more problems, which will give rise to more public duties for the companies, which will make them bigger still. We can work to fix the internet by breaking up Big Tech and depriving them of monopoly profits, or we can work to fix Big Tech by making them spend their monopoly profits on governance. But we can't do both. We have to choose between a vibrant, open internet or a dominated, monopolized internet commanded by Big Tech giants that we struggle with constantly to get them to behave themselves... Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it's up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control. With "free, fair, and open tech" we could then tackle our other urgent problems "from climate change to social change" — all with collective action, Doctorow argues. And "The internet is how we will recruit people to fight those fights, and how we will coordinate their labor. "Tech is not a substitute for democratic accountability, the rule of law, fairness, or stability — but it's a means to achieve these things."

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"Google is proposing a new standard called WebBundles," complains Brave's senior privacy reseacher. "This standard allows websites to 'bundle' resources together, and will make it impossible for browsers to reason about sub-resources by URL." This threatens to change the Web from a hyperlinked collection of resources (that can be audited, selectively fetched, or even replaced), to opaque all-or-nothing "blobs" (like PDFs or SWFs). Organizations, users, researchers and regulators who believe in an open, user-serving, transparent Web should oppose this standard... The Web is valuable because it's user-centric, user-controllable, user-editable. Users, with only a small amount of expertise, can see what web-resources a page includes, and decide which, if any, their browser should load; and non-expert users can take advantage of this knowledge by installing extensions or privacy protecting tools... At root, what makes the Web different, more open, more user-centric than other application systems, is the URL. Because URLs (generally) point to one thing, researchers and activists can measure, analyze and reason about those URLs in advance; other users can then use this information to make decisions about whether, and in what way, they'd like to load the thing the URL points to... At a high level, WebBundles are a way of packing resources together, so that instead of downloading each Website, image and JavaScript file independently, your browser downloads just one "bundle", and that file includes all the information needed to load the entire page. And URLs are no longer common, global references to resources on the Web, but arbitrary indexes into the bundle. Put differently, WebBundles make Websites behave like PDFs (or Flash SWFs). A PDF includes all the images, videos, and scripts needed to render the PDF; you don't download each item individually. This has some convenience benefits, but also makes it near-impossible to reason about an image in a PDF independently from the PDF itself. This is, for example, why there are no content-blocking tools for PDFs. PDFs are effectively all or nothing propositions, and WebBundles would turn Websites into the same. By changing URLs from meaningful, global identifiers into arbitrary, package-relative indexes, WebBundles give advertisers and trackers enormously powerful new ways to evade privacy and security protecting web tools... At root, the common cause of all these evasions is that WebBundles create a local namespace for resources, independent of what the rest of the world sees, and that this can cause all sorts of name confusion, undoing years of privacy-and-security-improving work by privacy activists and researchers... We've tried to work at length with the WebBundle authors to address these concerns, with no success. We strongly encourage Google and the WebBundle group to pause development on this proposal until the privacy and security issues discussed in this post have been addressed. We also encourage others in the Web privacy and security community to engage in the conversation too, and to not implement the spec until these concerns have been resolved.

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Friday night CNET reported: With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night. Some reactions from Twitter: - "The potential of #Neuralink is mind-boggling, but fuckkkk why would they use Bluetooth???" - "they're using C/C++ too lmao" But then videogame programming legend John Carmack responded: "Quality, reliable software can be delivered in any language, but language choice has an impact. For me, C would be a middle-of-the-road choice; better than a dynamic language like javascript or python, but not as good as a more modern strongly static typed languages. However, the existence of far more analysis tools for C is not an insignificant advantage. If you really care about robustness, you are going to architect everything more like old Fortran, with no dynamic allocations at all, and the code is going to look very simple and straightforward. So an interesting question: What are the aspects of C++ that are real wins for that style over C? Range checked arrays would be good. What else? When asked "What's a better modern choice?" Carmack replied "Rust would be the obvious things, and I don't have any reason to doubt it would be good, but I haven't implemented even a medium sized application in it." But then somewhere in the discussion, Elon Musk made a joke about C's lack of "class" data structures. Elon Musk responded: I like C, because it avoids class warfare But then Musk also gave interesting responses to two more questions on Twitter: Which is your fav programming language? Python? Elon Musk: Actually C, although the syntax could be improved esthetically Could Neuralink simulate an alternate reality that could be entered at will, like Ready Player One? Implications for VR seem to be massive. Essentially, a simulation within a simulation if we're already in one ... Elon Musk: Later versions of a larger device would have that potential

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Krebs on Security reports: Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks. Sendgrid's parent company Twilio says it is working on a plan to require multi-factor authentication for all of its customers, but that solution may not come fast enough for organizations having trouble dealing with the fallout in the meantime... [A] large number of organizations allow email from Sendgrid's systems to sail through their spam-filtering systems. To make matters worse, links included in emails sent through Sendgrid are obfuscated (mainly for tracking deliverability and other metrics), so it is not immediately clear to recipients where on the Internet they will be taken when they click... Rob McEwen is CEO of Invaluement.com, an anti-spam firm whose data on junk email trends are used to improve the spam-blocking technologies deployed by several Fortune 100 companies. McEwen said no other email service provider has come close to generating the volume of spam that's been emanating from Sendgrid accounts lately. "As far as the nasty criminal phishes and viruses, I think there's not even a close second in terms of how bad it's been with Sendgrid over the past few months," he said... Neil Schwartzman, executive director of the anti-spam group CAUCE, said Sendgrid's two-factor authentication plans are long overdue, noting that the company bought Authy back in 2015. "Single-factor authentication for a company like this in 2020 is just ludicrous given the potential damage and malicious content we're seeing," Schwartzman said... Schwartzman said if Twilio doesn't act quickly enough to fix the problem on its end, the major email providers of the world (think Google, Microsoft and Apple) — and their various machine-learning anti-spam algorithms — may do it for them. Krebs found an online cybercriminal selling access to more than 400 compromised Sendgrid accounts. "Accounts that can send up to 40,000 emails a month go for $15, whereas those capable of blasting 10 million missives a month sell for $400."

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"The blast was over 3,000 times bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima," reports Smithsonian magazine: Hydrogen bombs are so destructive, their impact has been described as unthinkable throughout history. Recently declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb test shows why. The 40-minute documentary, which was posted on YouTube on August 20, shows footage of the largest bomb ever detonated on Earth, Thomas Nilsen reports for the Barents Observer. Video footage shows the blast from several angles, sometimes struggling to show the entire mushroom cloud in the frame. Later, the documentary compares the ice-covered archipelago before the blast to the scorched, red and brown landscape left behind afterward. The Soviet Union tested the 50-million-ton hydrogen bomb, officially named RDS-220 and nicknamed Tsar Bomba, in late October 1961, Matthew Gault reports for Vice. This test occured during the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States competed to build the largest and most destructive nuclear weapons. "There was a megatonnage race — who was going to have a bigger bomb," atomic age historian Robert S. Norris tells the New York Times' William Broad. "And the Soviets won...." It was three times as large as the biggest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., dubbed Castle Bravo. schwit1 shares more information from Popular Mechanics: It's difficult to truly get across how powerful RDS-220 was. The mushroom cloud reached an altitude of 210,000 feet, and people observed the flash through bad weather at 621 miles. An observer felt heat from the explosion at a distance of 168 miles, and the bomb was capable of inflicting third-degree burns at 62 miles.

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Machine learning "can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you could imagine walking past on the street," reports the Verge, citing a new project by a film-industry VR specialist. Slashdot reader shirappu summarizes their report: Daniel Voshart's work on creating life-life images of Roman emperors from their statues started as a quarantine project and quickly got out of hand. His portraits of the emperors (a collection of 54 as of July) are created using generative adversarial networks, which are fed images of the emperors from statues, coins, and paintings. These are then edited and tweaked based on historical descriptions, and reworked in PhotoShop, where Voshart says he can "avoid falling down the path into uncanny valley." Voshart has written about the process himself here. The Verge writes: To help, he says he sometimes fed high-res images of celebrities into the GAN to heighten the realism. There's a touch of Daniel Craig in his Augustus, for example, while to create the portrait of Maximinus Thrax he fed in images of the wrestler André the Giant... The process, as he describes it, is almost alchemical, relying on a careful mix of inputs to create the finished product... What's more, his work is already enticing academics, who have praised the portraits for giving the emperors new depth and realism. .. As a sort of thank you to his advisers, Voshart has even used a picture of one USC assistant professor who looks quite a bit like the emperor Numerian to create the ancient ruler's portrait.

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CNBC reports: A Texas A&M professor was charged with conspiracy, making false statements and wire fraud on allegations that he was secretly collaborating with the Chinese government while conducting research for NASA, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday... "Once again, we have witnessed the criminal consequences that can arise from undisclosed participation in the Chinese government's talent program," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said in a statement. "The Department of Justice will continue seeking to bring participation in these talent programs to light and to expose the exploitation of our nation and our prized research institutions," he added. The DOJ has previously described China's Thousand Talents Plan as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party to "attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China's scientific development, economic prosperity and national security." Through this program, the Chinese government would "often reward individuals for stealing proprietary information," the DOJ said. "While 1.4 million foreign researchers and academics are here in the U.S. for the right reasons, the Chinese Talents Program exploits our open and free universities," said Ryan Patrick, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, adding that ties to the Chinese government must be disclosed. The criminal complaint accuses the professor of trying to "leverage NASA grant resources to further the research of Chinese institutions" and "gain access to the unique resources of the International Space Station."

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Tesla, Ford, Honda, Daimler, and Intel have asked America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fight a recent court ruling in favour of Qualcomm, reports the BBC: Qualcomm has a practice of requiring customers to sign patent licence agreements before selling them chips. Such practices have drawn accusations the firm is stifling competition... According to Glyn Moody, a journalist specialising in tech policy, the car industry is bothered by Qualcomm's patent practices because "cars are essentially becoming computers on wheels", as the industry continues to develop more advanced connected cars. In the future, it is hoped that connected cars will use 5G processors to connect them to the internet. Carmakers have seen this battle over 4G and are worried it will cement the firm's position as the battle for dominance over 5G technology advances. "This is a completely different world than the one [carmakers] are used to, so they're suddenly faced with dealing with computer standards and computer patents, which is a big problem for them as they don't have any. So if they have to start licensing this stuff, it's going to get expensive for them," Mr. Moody told the BBC... Prof Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School is director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He has been following Qualcomm's various court cases for several years. "Qualcomm made a commitment that it would licence its chips on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, because they wanted their chips to be included in the industry standards, and then they created a structure to avoid doing this," he said. "I think they are in fact violating the antitrust laws."

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CNET reports: Twice a year most of the U.S. stumbles around in confusion while missing appointments, resetting their clocks and grumbling about daylight saving time. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine thinks we should knock that nonsense off and just stick with standard time year-round. The AASM released a position statement this week as an accepted paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine calling for an end to daylight saving time... The professional organization represents sleep medicine professionals and accredits sleep medicine facilities. "Permanent, year-round standard time is the best choice to most closely match our circadian sleep-wake cycle," said lead author M. Adeel Rishi, a sleep specialist with the Mayo Clinic and vice chair of the AASM Public Safety Committee. "Daylight saving time results in more darkness in the morning and more light in the evening, disrupting the body's natural rhythm." Studies have pointed to health risks connected to daylight saving time and the sleep disruptions it causes. The AASM called out stroke risks, stress reactions and an increase in motor vehicles crashes, particularly in relation to the springtime clock change. "Because the adoption of permanent standard time would be beneficial for public health and safety, the AASM will be advocating at the federal level for this legislative change," said AASM president Kannan Ramar in a release on Thursday.

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An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Mozilla report in a study that web browsing histories (the lists of user visited websites) are uniquely identifying users (PDF). In their study that was the case for 99% of users. Treating web browsing histories like fingerprints, the researchers analysed how the users can be reidentified just based on the coarsened list of user-visited websites. In doing so they upheld and confirmed a previous study from 2012, prompting the author of the original study to say that web browsing histories are now personal data subject to privacy regulations like the GDPR. Sensitivity of web browsing history data questions the laws allowing ISPs to sell web browsing histories. The now-vindicated author of the 2012 study added this emphatic note in their blog post. "Web browsing histories are personal data. Deal with it."

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gollum123 shared this article from MarketWatch: Do masks really work? Ask the dozens of Starbucks customers who tested positive for COVID-19 in Seoul this month after a woman with coronavirus sat under one of the cafe's air-conditioners. According to a local news report, at least 56 coronavirus cases have been linked to that one customer. The kicker: The four masked workers avoided infection... "This speaks volumes about the role masks can play," Ma Sang Hyuk, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in South Korea, explained to Bloomberg News. "Masks may not provide 100% protection, but there's nothing out there that's as effective." Local authorities made it mandatory this week for everybody to wear masks both indoors and outdoors, as the greater Seoul area has seen a surge in coronavirus cases.

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Launching today is America's classified NROL-44 spy satellite, which German public broadcaster DW calls "a massive, open secret": NROL-44 is a huge signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellite, says David Baker, a former NASA scientist who worked on Apollo and Shuttle missions, has written numerous books, including U.S. Spy Satellites and is editor of SpaceFlight magazine. "SIGINT satellites are the core of national government, military security satellites. They are massive things for which no private company has any purpose," says Baker... "It weighs more than five tons. It has a huge parabolic antenna which unfolds to a diameter of more than 100 meters in space, and it will go into an equatorial plane of Earth at a distance of about 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles)," says Baker... Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. "The move from wired communication to digital and wireless is a godsend to governments because you can't cut into wires from a satellite, but you can literally pick up cell phone towers which are radiating this stuff into the atmosphere. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic," says Baker... Some people worry about congestion in space, or satellites bumping into each other, and the threat of a collision causing space debris that could damage other satellites or knock out communications networks. But that may have benefits, too — little bits of spy satellite can hide in all that mess and connect wirelessly to create a "virtual satellite," says Baker. "There are sleeper satellites which look like debris. You launch all the parts separately and disperse them into various orbits. So, you would have sensors on one bit, an amplifier on another bit, a processor on another, and they'll be orbiting relatively immersed in space debris." "Space debris is very good for the space defense industry," says Baker, "because the more there is, the more you can hide in it."

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An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack: While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control: Istio has introduced a new Istio steering committee. According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four "elected Community Seats" and nine "proportionally allocated Contribution Seats," a change they say "solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project." This final point is really the key to the announcement here, with them further and more explicitly clarifying later that "no single vendor, no matter how large their contribution, has majority voting control over the Istio project." To this end, they write, they have "implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee." As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election. The nine Contribution Seats will be assigned to a minimum of three different companies "in proportion to contributions made to Istio in the previous 12 months," with this year's metric being merged pull requests. But not everyone was satisfied. On Twitter AWS engineer Matthew S. Wilson called it "a crappy way to build a community," objecting to the way it's recognizing and rewarding open source contributions by company rather than by the individuals. And Knative co-founder Matt Moore called it "what you get when a company wants to 'play community', but treat its employees as interchangeable cogs."

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Heart44 writes: There is a lot of C-14 radioactive waste from graphite rods that is expensive to store. This graphite can be converted to C-14 diamonds covered in C-12 diamonds. C-14 has a half-life of 5,700 years, so such batteries would last a long time and are supposedly safe. Sounds like an April fool but... New Atlas considers the possibilities: ...what you get is a tiny miniature power generator in the shape of a battery that never needs charging — and that NDB says will be cost-competitive with, and sometimes significantly less expensive than — current lithium batteries. That equation is helped along by the fact that some of the suppliers of the original nuclear waste will pay NDB to take it off their hands. Radiation levels from a cell, NDB tells us, will be less than the radiation levels produced by the human body itself, making it totally safe for use in a variety of applications... The company claims to have completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high-powered version is projected for five years' time... NDB speaks of low- and high-power versions of the cell in development, but until we see some output figures the claims are still hazy, and until we see some proof, they're just claims, and we're still waiting to hear back from the company. We'll keep you updated.

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Two million truckers move 70% of America's goods. But hundreds of thousands of their jobs could be disrupted away, reports Jon Wertheim on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, in "a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects — Google and Tesla and other global tech firms — against small start-ups smelling opportunity." One of those startups is TuSimple, and their company's chief product officer points out that an AI driving system never gets distracted or falls asleep at the wheel: Chuck Price has unshakable confidence in the reliability of the technology; as do some of the biggest names in shipping: UPS, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks. All in, each unit costs more than a quarter million dollars. Not a great expense, considering it's designed to eliminate the annual salary of a driver; currently around $45,000. Another savings: the driverless truck can get coast-to-coast in two days, not four, stopping only to refuel — though a human still has to do that... Jon Wertheim: How far are we from being able to pick up the specific cars that are passing us? "Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license. Chuck Price: We can read license plates. So if there was an accessible database for something like that, we could... Test Driver Maureen Fitzgerald: This truck is scanning mirrors, looking 1,000 meters out. It's processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could. Most of her two million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Automated trucking threatens to jack-knife an entire $800 billion industry. Trucking is among the most common jobs for American's without a college education.... Sam Loesche represents 600,000 truckers for the teamsters. He's concerned that federal, state and local governments have only limited access to the driverless technology. Sam Loesche: A lot of this information, understandably, is proprietary. Tech companies wanna keep, you know, their algorithms and their safety data — secret until they can kinda get it right. The problem is that, in the meantime, they're testing this technology on public roads. They're testing it next to you as you drive down the road...

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ZDNet reports: In an effort to detect whether a network will hijack DNS queries, Google's Chrome browser and its Chromium-based brethren randomly conjures up three domain names between 7 and 15 characters to test, and if the response of two domains returns the same IP, the browser believes the network is capturing and redirecting nonexistent domain requests. This test is completed on startup, and whenever a device's IP or DNS settings change. Due to the way DNS servers will pass locally unknown domain queries up to more authoritative name servers, the random domains used by Chrome find their way up to the root DNS servers, and according to Verisign principal engineer at CSO applied research division Matthew Thomas, those queries make up half of all queries to the root servers. Data presented by Thomas showed that as Chrome's market share increased after the feature was introduced in 2010, queries matching the pattern used by Chrome similarly increased. "In the 10-plus years since the feature was added, we now find that half of the DNS root server traffic is very likely due to Chromium's probes," Thomas said in an APNIC blog post. "That equates to about 60 billion queries to the root server system on a typical day." Thomas added that half the DNS traffic of the root servers is being used to support a single browser function, and with DNS interception being "certainly the exception rather than the norm", the traffic would be a distributed denial of service attack in any other scenario.

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Facebook spent more money on lobbying than any single company in the first half of 2020, That's according to figures cited by the Wall Street Journal from the Center for Responsive Politics. But that's not all they did. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also began personally delivering a message last fall that TikTok "doesn't share Facebook's commitment to freedom of expression, and represents a risk to American values and technological supremacy." That was a message Zuckerberg hammered behind the scenes in meetings with officials and lawmakers during the October trip and a separate visit to Washington weeks earlier, according to people familiar with the matter. In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Zuckerberg made the case to President Donald Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said. Zuckerberg discussed TikTok specifically in meetings with several senators, according to people familiar with the meetings. In late October, Sen. Tom Cotton, R- Ark. — who met with Zuckerberg in September — and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. The government began a national-security review of the company soon after, and by the spring, Trump began threatening to ban the app entirely. This month he signed an executive order demanding that TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., divest itself of its U.S. operations. Few tech companies have as much to gain as Facebook from TikTok's travails, and the social-media giant has taken an active role in raising concerns about the popular app and its Chinese owners.

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BlenderArtists.org writes: To build and model the universe from the Planck scale to galactic scales requires an incredible number of mathematical computations to simulate particles and their interactions, yet the framework of nature and the physics of these interactions should be simple. Blender's physics engine provides a good base to begin this project, but it will take work from the community to accurately model subatomic particles. That's where "Quantum Microscope" comes in. It's a newly open sourced add-on for Blender that simulates subatomic particles and the formation of matter using classical physics. "It provides a microscopic look at molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, particles and spacetime, using the theoretical model from Energy Wave Theory," explains its web page, linking to a video summarizing some of its features. And that's just the beginning, writes Slashdot reader atomicphysics: A contest begins September 1, 2020 for developers to enhance the add-on, or create a new simulator meeting project requirements to use classical physics for the quantum realm, with at least $15,000 in prizes being awarded over the next year.

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