America's House of Representatives proposed a new structure for the U.S. Space Force in what's being called "the Starfleet amendment". Space News reports: Before the House passed the so-called "Starfleet" amendment, Space Force officials had been internally debating a new rank structure to set the space branch apart from its parent service the U.S. Air Force. The amendment in the House version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Space Force to use the Navy's rank structure. The proposal will be debated later this year in a House and Senate conference. The Senate would have to support the amendment for it to become law. The amendment was introduced by a former Navy SEAL (now a Republican congressman from Texas), the article reports. But more importantly, the amendment "got a prominent endorsement from the Starfleet captain himself, William Shatner." In a special editorial in Military Times, Shatner wrote: It's been captains throughout entertainment history that have gone into space and been the heroes that saved the day, the planet, the galaxy and the universe. Where in any of this rich history of inspired heroes travelling into space was there a...colonel...? "Star Trek" has borrowed so much of its iconic rank symbols from the U.S. military and NASA. When you unveiled the Space Force logo, many immediately saw it as an homage to "Star Trek" (even though our Delta was an homage to the previous military space insignias). Why not borrow back from "Star Trek" and adopt our ranks as well? We took them from the Navy for good reason, even though Gene Roddenberry was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps. They made better sense when talking about a (space) ship. So wrapping this up, I'm going to say that if you want the public to believe in heroes, that you should adopt the Navy ranks as they are the ones the public is most used to being heroes. So please reconsider and name the Space Force ranks after the U.S. Navy. Space News reports that officials from Space Force "declined to comment on Shatner's article, or on whether his views might carry any weight with lawmakers." But the site's source said there's polarized feelings inside real-world Space Force about the Starfleet amendment. "Some view the prospect of using naval ranks as an insult that would permanently turn the service into a Star Trek punchline."

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"They go by different names: ritual consultants, sacred designers, soul-centered advertisers," reports the New York Times, describing "a new corporate clergy" working as "divinity consultants" and "designing sacred rituals for corporations." They have degrees from divinity schools. Their business is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America. In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist. They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design. Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith. "We've seen brands enter the political space," said Casper ter Kuile, a co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. Citing a Vice report, he added: "The next white space in advertising and brands is spirituality...." Ezra Bookman founded Ritualist, which describes itself as "a boutique consultancy transforming companies and communities through the art of ritual," last year in Brooklyn. He has come up with rituals for small firms for events like the successful completion of a project — or, if one fails, a funeral. "How do we help people process the grief when a project fails and help them to move on from it?" Mr. Bookman said. Messages on the start-up's Instagram feed read like a kind of menu for companies who want to buy operational rites a la carte: "A ritual for purchasing your domain name (aka your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds)." "A ritual for when you get the email from LegalZoom that you've been officially registered as an LLC." The articles notes there are problems when combining the corporate with the religious. For one thing, "It's hard to exhort workers to give their professional activities transcendental meaning when, at the same time, those workers can be terminated."

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An anonymous reader quotes Psychology Today: While software development jobs sound great right out of the gate, technology roles don't always offer a great career path. The entry-level salary is fantastic, and the job is fun. But five years on, the average developer reaches a senior role, and there aren't many more rungs on the technology career ladder. An article from 1998 in the New York Times reported that six years after finishing college, only 57 percent of computer science graduates were working as programmers. After 20 years, the figure dropped to 19 percent. In contrast, the figures for civil engineering were 61 percent and 52 percent... It's not just about the money — it's at least as much about the control you have over what you do. And software developers these days have little say in what apps they build. "More than anything, what bothered me is the feeling that my work doesn't matter one way or another," said one of my friends before he quit his programming job. He continued, "You get into software thinking you'll build cool things, but instead, it's about jumping through hoops for business school people with bad ideas." Rapid changes in technology make programming one of the fastest-moving careers. Avoiding burnout is the only way to have a long and sustainable career in tech. Veteran software developers often recommend to: - Work at a place where you can grow. Constantly learning new things is a requirement in tech, but it's only sustainable if you can do it as part of the job. - Build transferable skills. Many developers find it interesting to invest in learning leadership skills and explore technical management roles — those don't change as often as programming languages do. - Have creative outlets and create a space to focus on yourself, to switch off and relax. Make sure you move enough, eat well, and spend quality time with friends and family. Of course, there's always the nuclear option: make your money and get out.

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"Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt," writes futurist Bernard Marr in Forbes, describing a technology being researched by companies like IBM, General Electric, and Cisco. "These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process. "Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real and they very well could be coming to a neighborhood near you. Whether this fact excites or strikes fear in you it's good to know what it's all about." Outfitted with miniature sensors, MEMS can detect everything from light to vibrations to temperature. With an incredible amount of power packed into its small size, MEMS combine sensing, an autonomous power supply, computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust. They can: - Collect data including acceleration, stress, pressure, humidity, sound and more from sensors - Process the data with what amounts to an onboard computer system - Store the data in memory - Wirelessly communicate the data to the cloud, a base or other MEMs Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome. The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images. The potential of smart dust to collect information about any environment in incredible detail could impact plenty of things in a variety of industries from safety to compliance to productivity. It's like multiplying the internet of things technology millions or billions of times over.

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The Guardian ran an article by the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World looking at problems with our own race for a vaccine in 2020: On 2 August, Steven Salzberg, a computational biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, suggested in Forbes magazine that a promising vaccine be rolled out to a wider pool of volunteers before clinical trials had been completed, triggering an outcry (and some sympathy) that prompted him to recant the next day. Meanwhile, a research group with links to Harvard University continues to defend its publication in July of a recipe for a do-it-yourself Covid-19 vaccine — one that only the group's 20-odd members had previously tested... The accumulation of such incidents has left many scientists feeling deeply uneasy. "I'm more and more concerned that things are getting done in a rush," says Beate Kampmann, who directs the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (and whose work email account was subject to a failed hack in July). On 13 August, the editor-in-chief of the journal Science issued a call to order. "Short cuts in testing for vaccine safety and efficacy endanger millions of lives in the short term and will damage public confidence in vaccines and in science for a long time to come," wrote H Holden Thorp. He went on to point out that the stakes are higher than with unproven therapies such as hydroxychloroquine, because a vaccine is given to healthy people. "Approval of a vaccine that is harmful or isn't effective could be leveraged by political forces that already propagate vaccine fears," he warned... Kampmann, meanwhile, feels it's important not to let the recent shenanigans in the vaccine community overshadow its huge achievements. If current forecasts are correct, a Covid-19 vaccine will be available in 2021 — smashing all records for vaccine development — and there will be many more reasons to trust it than not to. Still, those with their eye on that glittering prize should remember what is at stake. "We have to be careful," she says, "because what we do with Covid-19 could have repercussions for trust in all vaccine programs."

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The Japanese company SkyDive "has announced the successful test drive of a flying car," reports CNN: It was the first public demonstration for a flying car in Japanese history. The car, named SD-03, manned with a pilot, took off and circled the field for about four minutes... "We want to realize a society where flying cars are an accessible and convenient means of transportation in the skies and people are able to experience a safe, secure, and comfortable new way of life," CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement. The SD-03 is the world's smallest electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and takes up the space of about two parked cars, according to the company. It has eight motors to ensure "safety in emergency situations..." The success of this flight means that it is likely the car will be tested outside of the Toyota Test field by the end of the year. The company will continue to develop technologies to safely and securely launch the flying car in 2023, the news release said. No price has been announced.

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The seventh-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, turns 90 today. Famously the tycoon/philanthropist pledged to give away 90% of his wealth, founding with Bill and Melinda Gates "The Giving Pledge," a campaign urging the world's wealthiest individuals to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Over $1.2 trillion has now been pledged, with participants including Elon Musk, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul Allen. CNN reports that Gates "offered a sweet and funny video tribute to his billionaire pal," who besides drinking six cans of Coke each day is also "a notorious dessert-a-holic." Doing his best Martha Stewart impression, and with Randy Newman's "You Got a Friend" playing in the background, Gates made a delicious-looking Oreo cake, complete with Buffett's face on the top, drawn in chocolate icing. In the end of the 60-second video, Gates cuts a slice, puts it on a plate with a fork, and leaves the message "Happy 90th birthday Warren" in Oreo dust... The cake was a special tribute to Gates' friendship with Buffett. In 2016, Gates recounted a story on his blog about how he caught Buffett eating his favorite dessert for breakfast: Oreos. "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old," Gates wrote. "I remember one of the first times he stayed at our house and he opened up a package of Oreos to eat for breakfast. Our kids immediately demanded they have some too. He may set a poor example for young people, but it's a diet that somehow works for him." The editor of Forbes also joined the celebration: Next year will mark a decade for the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, our annual meeting of 150 or so of the world's biggest givers and greatest problem-solvers. The impact is enormous, and it wouldn't happen without today's birthday boy, 90-year-old Warren Buffett. In 2011, I pitched the most generous philanthropist ever the idea of turning our definitive wealth ranking from a static list into a club for good. Warren being Warren, he embraced it immediately, strategically and wholeheartedly, and the Summit was born... The highlight each year is a talk that Warren and I have, usually during lunch... For Warren's big birthday, we dug through nine years of Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy video archives to find some of his most inspiring and obscure gems, [each] edited down to 90 seconds or so. Happy Birthday, Warren!

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Yahoo News reports: On Friday, Chadwick Boseman's family posted a final tweet on his Twitter account, announcing that he had died after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Twitter confirmed on Saturday afternoon that this tweet from Boseman's account is now the most-liked tweet on Twitter of all time... "The 43-year-old's death shocked many in Hollywood who were unaware he had spent the last four years fighting colon cancer," notes the Los Angeles Times. But the tweet confirmed that the nine movies he'd filmed over the last four years — including four Marvel movies — "all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy." That tweet has now risen to over 7.1 million likes — 65% more than the previous record-holder. Variety reports: Previously, the most-liked tweet on Twitter was from former President Barack Obama, who shared the Nelson Mandela quote, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion." The tweet was posted on Aug. 12, 2017, the same day as the deadly Charlottesville, Va., car attack at a protest against white supremacists. Obama's former record-holding tweet has 4.3 million likes and 1.6 million retweets. After Boseman's death, Obama was one of the countless people to post a tribute to the actor, who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42. "Chadwick came to the White House to work with kids when he was playing Jackie Robinson," the former president wrote. "You could tell right away that he was blessed. To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years." CNET reports: Many on social media expressed both shock and admiration that the actor continued to produce films during his illness, and many were deeply touched by a video circulating widely Saturday in which Boseman speaks of Ian and Taylor, two children with terminal cancer he'd been in touch with during filming for Black Panther. The kids' parents, Boseman said in the video, relayed that Ian and Taylor were trying to hold on until the 2018 Marvel superhero film came out. We now know Boseman was waging his own cancer fight as he spoke of the children, making the footage all the more poignant. Twitter has now restored its #BlackPanther emoji for fans organizing watch parties of the 2018 movie, reports Variety, and while some remembered his commencement address at Howard or his impact on other actors, others are sharing stories closer to home: "I keep thinking about my 3-year-old in his Black Panther costume," the writer Clint Smith tweeted. "How he wore it almost every day when he got it, refused to take it off. The way he walked around saying. 'I'm the Black Panther.' How happy it made him. What Chadwick gave us was immeasurable. What an enormous loss."

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Oakland's nonprofit "Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment" housed 40,000 historic pieces of videogame memorabilia — including 11,000 playable games. In 2017 they were the ones urging America's copyright office to allow museums and libraries to circumvent DRM to preserve abandoned online games like FIFA World Cup, Nascar and The Sims. The museum's sponsors include GitHub, Google, PlayStation, and Dolby Digital. But now the MADE is "set to close its doors, with uncertainty ahead about whether it'll ever be able to reopen," reports GamesIndustry.biz: Founder and director Alex Handy said in an interview with GamesBeat that the group managing the museum couldn't reach an agreement on rent for the place during the COVID-19 crisis... 80% of its budget comes from admissions, its website says, and since it's been closed since March due to the pandemic, it's now forced to shut down and move its collections to storage. Storage will be paid for thanks to donations — still open on this page and will also go towards eventually finding a new space for the museum. "The current plan is to stay in storage for two years while we raise the funds and make plans to create our dream video game museum," the museum's website reads. "When we're ready, we will be back and better than ever, mark our words."

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iPhone users will have to opt-in to tracking starting with iOS 14. Advertisers are "crying foul," reports the Washington Post: [W]ith Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company's latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month... "This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS14 have forced this decision," Facebook said in a blog post. Some in the advertising industry see the moves as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple's access to the data becomes more valuable. "I think there's probably 30 percent truth in that they're doing it for privacy reasons and it's 70 percent that they're doing it because it's what's good for Apple," said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. "It's a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem," he said. "They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist...?" Apple says that when customers open apps, they'll be asked whether they'd like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an "ID for Advertisers," or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier... With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple... "There's been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They're saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we're going to do," said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers. "Personally, I don't see the problem here," argues Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy. The Post notes that Apple runs its own advertising business based on data gathered from its users — but Apple's director of privacy engineering "doesn't consider this data gathering 'tracking'...because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they're not using Facebook."

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An anonymous reader writes: The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that's not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash. ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world's most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark. The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides "a very cost-efficient solution...and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors."

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"Cloudflare, an internet service that is supposed to keep websites up and running, was down itself Sunday, taking dozens of websites and online services along with it," reports CNN: Hulu, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Feedly, Discord, and dozens of other services reported connectivity problems Sunday morning. Cloudflare said the problem was with a third-party "transit provider," and its service was becoming increasingly stable over the course of the day... CenturyLink, formerly known as Level 3, confirmed there was an IP outage impacting Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and that all services had been restored as of 11:15 AM ET... DownDetector, which displays reports of internet and service outages, showed that reports of internet connectivity came in across the United States and Europe Sunday morning. Anyone experiencing any connectivity issues this morning?

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Phoronix reports: As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference... To be clear though, these Rust Linux kernel plans do not involve rewriting large parts of the kernel in Rust (at least for the foreseeable future...), there would be caveats on the extent to which Rust code could be used and what functionality, and the Rust support would be optional when building the Linux kernel. C would remain the dominant language of the kernel and then it's just a matter of what new functionality gets added around Rust if concerned by memory safety, concurrency, and other areas where Rust is popular with developers. Various upstream developers have been interested in Rust for those language benefits around memory safety and security as well as its syntax being close to C. There would be a to-be-determined subset of Rust to be supported by the Linux kernel.... While the Rust code would be optional, the developers do acknowledge there are limitations on where Rust is supported due to the LLVM compiler back-ends. But at least for x86/x86_64, ARM/ARM64, POWER, and other prominent targets there is support along with the likes of RISC-V. Nothing firm has been determined yet but it's a topic that is still being discussed at the virtual LPC this week and surely over the weeks/months ahead on the kernel mailing list. There is Rust-For-Linux on GitHub with a prototype kernel module implementation. There is also the PDF slides from Thursday's talk on the matter. It's not clear to me that this is a done deal. But the article argues that "it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be..."

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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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