ByteDance ordered its employees to end their day by 7 p.m., becoming one of the first tech companies in China to officially mandate shorter working hours. From a report: Staff in China should only work from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Mondays to Fridays and will need to seek permission to stay beyond those hours at least one day in advance, according to an internal document on Monday that was seen by Bloomberg News. The country's grueling work pace -- known as "996" because employees often labor from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week -- was long celebrated by tech billionaires from Alibaba's Jack Ma to JD founder Richard Liu. But it's come under renewed scrutiny this year, fueled by deaths associated with overwork and a growing chorus of social media complaints. With President Xi Jinping calling on the country to work toward "common prosperity," authorities have stepped up warnings against employers to refrain from unreasonable overtime and other violations.

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A team of researchers built a machine learning system to scan satellite images for solar energy-generating facilities greater than 10 kilowatts and then deployed the system on over 550 terabytes of imagery "using several human lifetimes of computing." Team-member Lucas Kruitwagen, a climate change/AI researcher at Oxford, reveals what they learned. "We searched almost half of Earth's land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations." In total we detected 68,661 solar facilities. Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of 423 gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of 2018. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency's (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period. Our study shows solar PV generating capacity grew by a remarkable 81% between 2016 and 2018, the period for which we had timestamped imagery. Growth was led particularly by increases in India (184%), Turkey (143%), China (120%) and Japan (119%). Facilities ranged in size from sprawling gigawatt-scale desert installations in Chile, South Africa, India and north-west China, through to commercial and industrial rooftop installations in California and Germany, rural patchwork installations in North Carolina and England, and urban patchwork installations in South Korea and Japan... Using the back catalogue of satellite imagery, we were able to estimate installation dates for 30% of the facilities. Data like this allows us to study the precise conditions which are leading to the diffusion of solar energy, and will help governments better design subsidies to encourage faster growth. Knowing where a facility is also allows us to study the unintended consequences of the growth of solar energy generation. In our study, we found that solar power plants are most often in agricultural areas, followed by grasslands and deserts. This highlights the need to carefully consider the impact that a ten-fold expansion of solar PV generating capacity will have in the coming decades on food systems, biodiversity, and lands used by vulnerable populations. Policymakers can provide incentives to instead install solar generation on rooftops which cause less land-use competition, or other renewable energy options. A note at the end of the article adds that the researchers' code and data repositories have been made available online "to facilitate more research of this type and to kickstart the creation of a complete, open, and current dataset of the planet's solar energy facilities."

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The Associated Press reports: Companies in China would need government approval to transfer important data abroad under proposed rules announced Friday that would tighten Beijing's control over information and might disrupt operations for international corporations... President Xi Jinping's government sees information about China's 1.4 billion people as a potential security risk in private hands. It has issued a flurry of rules tightening control over how companies gather and handle information... Companies that want to transfer important data abroad would have to report on how much and what type of information is involved and security measures, according to the CAC. Regulators would decide within a week whether to accept that or conduct their own review, which could last up to 60 days. The rules would apply to transfers that involve "sensitive personal information" of at least 10,000 people or any company that handles information on more than 1 million people... Rules imposed earlier prohibit companies from storing information about Chinese citizens abroad. That prompted complaints that global companies are put at a disadvantage because they can't combine information from China with other countries, while Chinese competitors can collect all their data at their headquarters... Unlike data protection laws in Western countries, the Chinese rules say nothing about limiting government or ruling Communist Party access to personal information.

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For the first interview of its new series on "The New World of Work," Harvard Business Review asked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella what team collaboration will look like in workplaces of the future. And Nadella begins by arguing that this tail-end of the pandemic brings "real structural changes" — and two megatrends for the future workplace: One is the trend around hybrid work, which is a result of the changed expectations of everyone around the flexibility that they want to exercise in when, where, and how they work. And then the second mega trend is what Ryan Roslansky, who is the CEO of LinkedIn, termed, which I like, which is the great reshuffle. Not only are people talking about when, where, and how they work, but also why they work. They really want to recontract, in some sense, the real meaning of work and sort of asking themselves the question of which company do they want to work for and what job function or profession they want to pursue... I think we should sort of perhaps just get grounded on what are we seeing in the expectations. For example, when we see all of the data, the reality is close to 70% of the people say they want flexibility. At the same time, 70% also want that human connection so that they can collaborate. So therein lies that hybrid paradox. Interestingly enough, if you look at the other sort of confounding piece of data: 50-odd percent of the people say they want to come into work so that they can have focus time. Fifty-odd percent also want to stay at home so that they can have focus time. So the real thing I would say is right now, it's probably best not to be overly dogmatic. Because I don't think we have settled on the new norms... [W]e are taking what I would call a much more organic approach right now. What I would say is what we want to practice and what we want to evangelize is empowering every manager and every individual to start coming up with norms that work for that team, given the context of what that team is trying to get done. In some sense, we are really saying, let's just use an organic process to build up through empowerment new norms that work for the company to be productive. "Nobody quits companies," Nadella says at one point. "They quit managers." And towards the end, when he's asked what's the greatest source of innovation, he answers: empathy. To me, what I have sort of come to realize, what is the most innate in all of us is that ability to be able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and see the world the way they see it. That's empathy. That's at the heart of design thinking. When we say innovation is all about meeting unmet, unarticulated, needs of the marketplace, it's ultimately the unmet and articulated needs of people, and organizations that are made up of people. And you need to have deep empathy. So I would say the source of all innovation is what is the most humane quality that we all have, which is empathy.

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"Is carbon capture here?" asks a headline from the New York Times. A Swiss company named Climeworks "is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock." [Stephan] Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world's biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik. As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another. Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance. When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy water. Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock. Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks' DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie. It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere. Orca is billed as the world's first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft. The rock band Coldplay recently joined those companies in paying Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions. The firm hopes to one day turn a profit by getting its costs below the selling price of those credits. Current cost: about $600 to $800 per metric ton.

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"Internal documents show that Facebook has been actively hiring employees to build products that target children as young as 6 to expand its user base," reports NBC News — apparently within just the last six months. "Our company is making a major investment..." begins an internal Facebook blog post seen by NBC. The blog post announces that the company was dedicating a team "to make safer, more private, experiences for youth..." It goes on to point out this marked a new direction for Facebook, since "For many of our products, we historically haven't designed for under 13." Further down the post adds that "Our work prioritizes the best interests of the child..." Diagrams illustrate proposed new target age groups, ranging from kids 6 to 9 years old and tweens 10 to 12 years old — along with existing targets of early teens from 13 to 15 years old, late teens from 16 to 17 years old, and adults... Critics of the company say these documents are part of a long-standing pattern of Facebook attempting to attract younger users as early as possible. "Facebook and Instagram have repeatedly shown that they simply can't be trusted when it comes to the well-being of children and teens," said James Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that researches the relationship between children and the digital world. "They need to focus on cleaning up their existing platforms instead of trying to hook more children to their addictive platforms at younger and younger ages...." The post came just one week before a coalition of 35 organizations and 64 individual experts, coordinated by Fairplay, formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a Boston-based nonprofit, raised concerns about privacy, screen time, mental health, self-esteem and commercial pressure in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "These documents make clear that instead of working to make its existing platforms less harmful to teens, Facebook's priority was to ensnare younger children and create a pipeline of lifetime users of Facebook products," Fairplay's executive director Josh Golin told NBC News. "Despite Facebook's claims that their motivation for Instagram for Kids is to create a safer experience for preteens, it's clear the real reason is Facebook is fixated on kids to drive growth. Facebook products aren't safe for younger children, and a company that consistently puts profits ahead of young people's well-being has no business building platforms for kids."

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Today the iconic Bitcoin white paper "celebrates thirteen years of financial disruption," notes Cointelegraph, "after being first published on Oct. 31, 2008, by an anonymous person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto." (Here's a 2013 story from Slashdot about version 0.3.) Cointelegraph writes: The white paper, titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, foresaw the need for a peer-to-peer online payment system that is self-governing, secure and limited in quantity. The Bitcoin network was launched on Jan. 3, 2009, with each Bitcoin priced at $0.0008.... Today, Bitcoin maintains a stable trading value well above $60k after experiencing a gradual appreciation of 7,749,999,900% since its launch. Cointelegraph celebrated the anniversary by embedding a video of the original bitcoin white paper being read by comedian Gilbert Gottfried — but they weren't the only ones. Entrepreneur/investor Anthony Pompliano celebrated with the return of what he describes as a decentralized pizzeria" named Bitcoin pizza. (An interactive online map shows participating locations around the U.S.A. where pizzas can be ordered with cash or with 0.0003 BTC — either through the web site or through the Uber Eats app.) "If you want to pay for your pizza in bitcoin, I will gladly take your bitcoin," Pompliano says in a video posted to Twitter. "I don't think that you should use your bitcoin to buy the pizza — but we now accept bitcoin." The five available topping combos even have bitcoin-themed names like "No Keys, No Cheese" and "Satoshi's Favorite" — and the pizzas are all delivered in a special commemorative bitcoin-themed pizza box. "Every single dollar that I make from this, I donate to bitcoin developers," Pompliano explains in the video. "I make zero dollars from Bitcoin Pizza." "And we're going to keep building this until eventually we are the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States. And then after we become the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States, we're going to turn around, and then we're going to go international."

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The U.S. Copyright Office "is expanding a legal shield for fixing digital devices," reports the Verge, "including cars and medical devices." Earlier this week the office "submitted new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars breaking software copy protection. The resulting rules include a revamped section on device repair, reflecting renewed government pressure around 'right to repair' issues." [T]his latest rulemaking adopts repair-related proposals from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and other organizations. The Librarian of Congress adopted the recommendations in a final rule that will take effect [Thursday]. The exemptions replace an itemized list of repairable devices with broad protections for any consumer devices that rely on software to function, as well as land and sea vehicles and medical devices that aren't consumer-focused. The rulemaking doesn't rewrite the exemption to cover all non-consumer devices, and it doesn't cover all "modification," only "diagnosis, maintenance, and repair." For video game consoles specifically, repair only covers repairing the device's optical drives and requires reenabling any technological protection measures that were circumvented afterward. The Verge notes that Acting General Counsel Kevin Amer told reports the exemption should prove useful, adding that their decision had been influenced by an earlier executive order from the Biden administration supporting third-party and consumer repair work. The article also notes other U.S. agencies are also moving on the issue. "The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, has pledged to fight business practices that lock out independent repair shops. "This copyright rulemaking doesn't address those practices, but it helps lift a legal threat hanging over technicians and consumers."

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"NASA scientists have just published a commentary article in Nature calling for a framework for reporting extraterrestrial life to the world," reports Cosmos magazine (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Tesseractic): "Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth," write NASA Chief Scientist James Green and colleagues. "With this privileged potential comes responsibility. As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalised..." Green and colleagues argue that...we should reframe such a discovery, so it isn't presented as a single moment when aliens are announced to the world. Instead, it should be seen as a progressive endeavour, reflecting the process of science itself. "If, instead, we recast the search for life as a progressive endeavour, we convey the value of observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasise that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific process," they write. This will involve scientists, technologists and the media talking to each other to agree firstly on objective standards of evidence for life, and secondly on the best way to communicate that evidence. This, they say, should preferably be done now before a detection of life is made, rather than scramble to put it together in the aftermath. "The team kickstarts the conversation by proposing a 'confidence of life detection' (CoLD) scale, which contains seven steps taking us from first exciting potential detection of life to definitive confirmation," Cosmos points out. (With the stages including the discoveries of unquestionable biosignatures, a habitable environment, and then corroborating evidence.) Cosmos argues that "This is an increasingly important conversation to have — because experts think that the odds aliens exist are high." And they close their article by quoting NASA's team. "Whatever the outcome of the dialogue, what matters is that it occurs. In doing so, we can only become more effective at communicating the results of our work, and the wonder associated with it."

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"In a world of inequality, we are well accustomed to rich, powerful, connected people getting preferential treatment..." argues an opinion piece in the Washington Post. "The notable exception is Wikipedia." There, VIPs have been shouting "Do you have any idea who you are dealing with?!" for years, only to be told either, not really, or, don't care, and then instructed...to take their objections to a Talk page where the community can weigh in... One reason the project is different from other digital platforms for VIPs is the absence of a mechanism for "escalating the case to leadership," as one internal Facebook memo, recently published by the Wall Street Journal, euphemistically described the process of Facebook's giving special treatment... The closest approximation to a Wikipedia power player would be Jimmy Wales, the chairman emeritus of the foundation that supports Wikipedias in more than 250 languages and the face of the project for its 20 years of existence. But Wales is not actually in control of anything. When he gets personally involved in helping a petitioner, a crowd of editors track his movements to ensure that he not hold special influence. This tradition began way back in Wikipedia's history, when Wales insisted that the birth date on his own article, and his birth certificate, was wrong. The editors did not take his word for it... With no bigwig to enlist, people who object to what appears on their article page try to navigate Wikipedia on their own, an often-treacherous experience. In the early days of Wikipedia, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins edited the article about him to correct an error. He confirmed in an email to an editor, Alienus, that "yes, the person who purported to be me is indeed me! But thank you very much for checking. I am bowled over by how good Wikipedia generally is." That same editor followed up, however, by questioning a change Dawkins had made to his article to reduce the number of journals he edits from four to two and to remove any mention of one, Episteme Journal. "Do you have any citations to support this change?" Dawkins was flabbergasted: "It is unreasonable to ask for a positive citation to demonstrate that I did NOT found a journal called Episteme. I am telling you that I never founded a journal called Episteme. I didn't even know that a journal called Episteme existed." Turned out an editor had made an error; the sentence was removed permanently. The article — by Wikipedia editor Noam Cohen — opens with the story of John C. Eastman, a lawyer advising president Trump, and his argument with Wikipedia editors over his biography (an argument still archived on the biography's "Talk" page). Eastman complains that their supporting references — which included the New York Times — were biased against him, and yet rather than allowing him to delete them "I had to ask permission from some unknown twentysomething."

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"New Android malware can root infected devices to take complete control and silently tweak system settings, as well as evade detection using code abstraction and anti-emulation checks," reports BleepingComputer. Cybersecurity company Lookout said on its blog that they'd spotted the malware on Google Play "and prominent third-party stores such as the Amazon Appstore and the Samsung Galaxy Store.... To protect Android users, Google promptly removed the app as soon as we notified them of the malware." We named the malware "AbstractEmu" after its use of code abstraction and anti-emulation checks to avoid running while under analysis. A total of 19 related applications were uncovered, seven of which contain rooting functionality, including one on Play that had more than 10,000 downloads... This is a significant discovery because widely-distributed malware with root capabilities have become rare over the past five years. As the Android ecosystem matures there are fewer exploits that affect a large number of devices, making them less useful for threat actors... By using the rooting process to gain privileged access to the Android operating system, the threat actor can silently grant themselves dangerous permissions or install additional malware — steps that would normally require user interaction. Elevated privileges also give the malware access to other apps' sensitive data, something not possible under normal circumstances... AbstractEmu does not have any sophisticated zero-click remote exploit functionality used in advanced APT-style threats, it is activated simply by the user having opened the app. As the malware is disguised as functional apps, most users will likely interact with them shortly after downloading... By rooting the device, the malware is able to silently modify the device in ways that would otherwise require user interaction and access data of other apps on the device. "Apps bundling the malware included password managers and tools like data savers and app launchers," reports BleepingComputer, "all of them providing the functionality they promised to avoid raising suspicions..." Lookout's blog post said they'd spotted people affected by the malware in 17 different countries.

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The Oracle JDK "is available free of charge for production use again," reports InfoQ, under a new "Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions" license. The move, announced in mid-September, "reverses a 2018 decision to charge for Oracle JDK production use and does not affect Oracle's OpenJDK distribution," they write, noting that the new license "applies to the recently released version 17 of Oracle JDK and future versions." Donald Smith, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, explained the reason for this decision in a recent blog post, writing: "Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request." Smith explicitly stated that the No-Fee Terms and Conditions license "includes commercial and production use" [although the license does not seem to highlight this fact] and stated that "redistribution is permitted as long as it is not for a fee."

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From the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In 1947, more than 4 million Americans owned $3.4 billion in saving deposits held not by a bank or credit union, but by the United States Postal Service. It's a largely forgotten part of American banking (and postal) history that the USPS ran the Postal Savings System for 56 years, from 1911 to 1967... [T]o this day postal services around the world provide small-scale financial services, from check cashing to savings accounts to e-commerce solutions, such as allowing refunds for returned goods to be deposited directly into a consumer's postal account. In September, the U.S. Postal Service took the first steps toward restoring its place in Americans' financial lives: At four East Coast post offices, customers can now get paychecks or business checks worth up to $500 cashed for a flat fee of $5.95.... Postal banking has the potential to reorient the American financial landscape for the benefit the most vulnerable. A fifth of Americans are considered "unbanked" or "underbanked," often relying on unscrupulous payday lenders because they lack the week-to-week security to set even a little aside in a traditional account. According to a 2014 USPS report, in 2012 alone these "alternative financial services" wrung $89 billion in interest and fees out of the poorest Americans... Postal banking also has a bipartisan pedigree. While it has most recently been a centerpiece of the progressive platforms of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., it has also been promoted by reformist conservatives as a way to get and keep capital in local communities, rather than having it held in the coffers of multinational conglomerates. And finally, an expansion into basic financial services may be essential to the very survival of the U.S. Postal Service. As Amazon and private shipping companies continue to press their advantage, the Postal Service can press its own: thousands of locations in every nook and cranny of the country, along with broad community trust. This modest pilot "is the foundation for more expansive contemplated postal banking services that could include bill-paying services, ATM access and money-order and wire-transfer capabilities," argues a follow-up piece in the same newspaper: Local bank branches are shuttering in communities all across our country, and mainstream banks are failing to offer financial services that meet the needs of many communities... Robust postal banking, which should ultimately include checking and savings accounts as well as loan options, could step into the breach and provide equitable, accessible and affordable financial services to people who lack access to traditional bank services and would otherwise have to turn to high-cost and low-value fringe financial institutions... Underbanked households have an average annual income of $25,000 and typically spend approximately 10% of their income on fees and interest to fringe financial institutions simply to access their money — an amount equal to what the average household spends on food annually... Postal banking provides an economic lifeline to countless Americans living in banking deserts. The Postal Service's 34,000 facilities service every ZIP code in the country. More than two-thirds of the census tracts that have a post office do not have a bank branch. Postal banking also provides transparent and equitable services and costs. Traditional bank fees and requirements — such as minimum balance requirements, activity fees and overdraft charges — exclude low-income and small-balance customers... Postal banking is a key pathway from poverty to economic mobility for millions of Americans and also produces significant revenue and opportunities for the Postal Service to flourish and expand its business model.

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