vik writes: According to this BBC article Tennessee just passed a bill banning the dispersion of chemicals in the air that affect weather and temperature. Sponsored by the chemtrail and anti-geoengineering crowds, if signed into law it seems it would ban atmospheric CO2 emissions:

The bill forbids "intentional injection, release, or dispersion" of chemicals into the air. It doesn't explicitly mention chemtrails, which conspiracy theorists believe are poisons spread by planes. Instead it broadly prohibits "affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight". The Republican-sponsored bill passed along party lines on Monday. If it is signed by Tennessee's governor, Republican Bill Lee, it will go into effect on 1 July.

President Joe Biden has become the first sitting U.S. president to post on a decentralized networking protocol. As reported by The Verge, President Biden's Threads account "has begun using Meta's ActivityPub integration," which allows for content, data, and followers to be ported between networks -- the basis that makes up the "fediverse." From the report: The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan. Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse -- and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts -- as those features weren't part of Threads' integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he'll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.

Thawing ice in the Arctic may open up new routes for internet cables that lie at the bottom of the ocean and carry most international data traffic. And more routes matter when underwater infrastructure is at risk of attack. From a report: Baltic Sea gas and telecoms cables were damaged last year, with a Chinese vessel a potential suspect. Red Sea data cables were cut last month after a Yemeni government warning of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Over 90 percent of all Europe-Asia traffic flows through the Red Sea route. The problem of critical data relying on only one path is clear. "It's clearly a kind of concentration of several cables, which means that there is a risk that areas will bottleneck," Taneli Vuorinen, the executive vice president at Cinia, a Finland-based company working on an innovative pan-Arctic cable, said.

"In order to meet the increasing demand, there's an increasing pressure to find diversity" of routes, he said. The Far North Fiber project is seeking to offer just that. The 14,500 kilometer long cable will directly link Europe to Japan, via the Northwest Passage in the Arctic, with landing sites in Japan, the United States (Alaska), Canada, Norway, Finland and Ireland. It would have been unthinkable until just a few years ago, when a thick, multiyear layer of ice made navigation impossible. But the Arctic is warming up at a worrying pace with climate change, nearly four times faster than the rest of the world. Sea ice is shrinking by almost 13 percent every decade.

In 2019 Los Angeles film/TV producer Brian Morrison painted Blockbuster's logo onto an old newspaper box — and then filled it up with used DVDs. "The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction," reports the New York Times — aided at times by social media — "and eventually more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain."

Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.

Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said.

Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University...

Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts).

But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register: Chinese spies exploited a couple of critical-severity bugs in F5 and ConnectWise equipment earlier this year to sell access to compromised U.S. defense organizations, UK government agencies, and hundreds of other entities, according to Mandiant.

The Google-owned threat hunters said they assess, "with moderate confidence," that a crew they track as UNC5174 was behind the exploitation of CVE-2023-46747, a 9.8-out-of-10-CVSS-rated remote code execution bug in the F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface, and CVE-2024-1709, a path traversal flaw in ConnectWise ScreenConnect that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 CVSS severity rating.

UNC5174 uses the online persona Uteus, and has bragged about its links to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) — boasts that may well be true. The gang focuses on gaining initial access into victim organizations and then reselling access to valuable targets... Just last month, Mandiant noticed the same combination of tools, believed to be unique to this particular Chinese gang, being used to exploit the ConnectWise flaw and compromise "hundreds" or entities, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Also between October 2023 and February 2024, UNC5174 exploited CVE-2023-22518 in Atlassian Confluence, CVE-2022-0185 in Linux kernels, and CVE-2022-3052, a Zyxel Firewall OS command injection vulnerability, according to Mandiant.

These campaigns included "extensive reconnaissance, web application fuzzing, and aggressive scanning for vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems belonging to prominent universities in the U.S., Oceania, and Hong Kong regions," the threat intel team noted.
More details from The Record. "One of the strangest things the researchers found was that UNC5174 would create backdoors into compromised systems and then patch the vulnerability they used to break in. Mandiant said it believes this was an 'attempt to limit subsequent exploitation of the system by additional unrelated threat actors attempting to access the appliance.'"

The guardians of the world's official geological timescale have firmly rejected a proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch, after an epic academic row. From a report: The proposal would have designated the period from 1952 as the Anthropocene to reflect the planet-changing impact of humanity. It would have ended the Holocene epoch, the 11,700 years of stable climate since the last ice age and during which human civilisation arose. The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has announced, however, that geologists have rejected the idea in a series of votes. Those objecting noted a much longer history of human impacts on Earth, including the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution, and unease about including a new unit in the geological timescale with a span of less than less than a single human lifetime, it said. Most units span thousands or millions of years.

It also acknowledged: "The Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large. As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions." The Anthropocene working group (AWG), which was formed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), in turn part of the IUGS, took 15 years to develop the proposal. It concluded that the radioactive isotopes spread worldwide by hydrogen bomb tests were the best marker of humanity's transformation of the planet. Geological time units also need a specific location to typify the unit and the Crawford sinkhole lake in Canada was chosen.

In a Threads post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With the feature enabled, Threads users will be able to cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon. The Verge reports: Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to "search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server."

There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example. Meta also can't promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on.

theodp writes: "Last year," Ian Bogost writes in Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem, "18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual -- culture moves through computation these days -- but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige."

"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."

Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer's fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...]

Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring.

The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Only seven countries are meeting an international air quality standard, with deadly air pollution worsening in places due to a rebound in economic activity and the toxic impact of wildfire smoke, a new report has found. Of 134 countries and regions surveyed in the report, only seven -- Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and New Zealand -- are meeting a World Health Organization (WHO) guideline limit for tiny airborne particles expelled by cars, trucks and industrial processes. The vast majority of countries are failing to meet this standard for PM2.5, a type of microscopic speck of soot less than the width of a human hair that when inhaled can cause a myriad of health problems and deaths, risking serious implications for people, according to the report by IQAir, a Swiss air quality organization that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world.

While the world's air is generally much cleaner than it was in much of the past century, there are still places where the pollution levels are particularly dangerous. The most polluted country, Pakistan, has PM2.5 levels more than 14 times higher than the WHO standard, the IQAir report found, with India, Tajikistan and Burkina Faso the next most polluted countries. But even in wealthy and fast-developing countries, progress in cutting air pollution is under threat. Canada, long considered as having some of the cleanest air in the western world, became the worst for PM2.5 last year due to record wildfires that ravaged the country, sending toxic spoke spewing across the country and into the US. In China, meanwhile, improvements in air quality were complicated last year by a rebound in economic activity in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the report finding a 6.5% increase in PM2.5 levels.

The most polluted urban area in the world last year was Begusarai in India, the sixth annual IQAir report found, with India home to the four most polluted cities in the world. Much of the developing world, particularly countries in Africa, lacks reliable air quality measurements, however. The WHO lowered its guideline for "safe" PM2.5 levels in 2021 to five micrograms per cubic meter and by this measure many countries, such as those in Europe that have cleaned up their air significantly in the past 20 years, fall short. But even this more stringent guideline may not fully capture the risk of insidious air pollution. Research released by US scientists last month found there is no safe level of PM2.5, with even the smallest exposures linked to an increase in hospitalizations for conditions such as heart disease and asthma.

Two investment advisors have reached settlements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly exaggerating their use of AI, which in both cases were purported to be cornerstones of their offerings. From a report: Canada-based Delphia and San Francisco-headquartered Global Predictions will cough up $225,000 and $175,000 respectively for telling clients that their products used AI to improve forecasts. The financial watchdog said both were engaging in "AI washing," a term used to describe the embellishment of machine-learning capabilities.

"We've seen time and again that when new technologies come along, they can create buzz from investors as well as false claims by those purporting to use those new technologies," said SEC chairman Gary Gensler. "Delphia and Global Predictions marketed to their clients and prospective clients that they were using AI in certain ways when, in fact, they were not." Delphia claimed its system utilized AI and machine learning to incorporate client data, a statement the SEC said it found to be false.

"Delphia represented that it used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze its retail clients' spending and social media data to inform its investment advice when, in fact, no such data was being used in its investment process," the SEC said in a settlement order. Despite being warned about suspected misleading practices in 2021 and agreeing to amend them, Delphia only partially complied, according to the SEC. The company continued to market itself as using client data as AI inputs but never did anything of the sort, the regulator said.

A Boeing quality manager for more than 30 years "learned of and exposed very serious safety problems with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner," according to his lawyers, "and was retaliated against and subjected to a hostile work environment."

After retiring in 2017 he'd filed a whistleblower retaliation case, and "was in the middle of giving deposition testimony... when he died, his lawyers, Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, told NPR." "He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on," the South Carolina-based attorneys said in a joint statement. "We didn't see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it."

Police said officers were sent to the hotel to conduct a welfare check after people were unable to contact Barnett, who had traveled to Charleston to testify in his lawsuit against Boeing. "Upon their arrival, officers discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head," police said in a statement sent to NPR. "He was pronounced deceased at the scene...."

Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Washington, and North Charleston, South Carolina, had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather than improve them, he added, managers had pressured workers not to document potential defects and problems.

"We are saddened by Mr. Barnett's passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends," Boeing said in a statement sent to NPR....

Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint against Boeing in early 2017; his case against the company was heading toward a trial this June, his family said. "He was looking forward to having his day in court and hoped that it would force Boeing to change its culture," the family said in a statement shared with NPR by his brother, Rodney Barnett. The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
"Two of his attorneys called on police to fully investigate how he had died," reports the BBC.

And for what it's worth, the New York Post says Barnett "made a grim prediction that he could potentially end up dead after raising safety concerns about the jetliner giant, allegedly telling a family friend: 'If anything happens, it's not suicide.'"

UPDATE: Fortune just published an article called "The last days of the Boeing whistleblower."

Thanks to Slashdot readers wgoodman and sinij for sharing the article.

America's National Transportation Safety Board "is investigating a fatal crash in San Antonio, Texas, involving a Ford electric vehicle that may have been using a partially automated driving system," reports the Associated Press: The NTSB said that preliminary information shows a Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV equipped with the company's partially automated driving system collided with the rear of a Honda CR-V that was stopped in one of the highway lanes.

Television station KSAT reported that the Mach-E driver told police the Honda was stopped in the middle lane with no lights on before the crash around 9:50 p.m. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed. "NTSB is investigating this fatal crash due to its continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with these technologies," the agency statement said.

Ford's Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn't fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada, Ford says.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

According to Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Canada-based AI startup DarwinAI for an undisclosed sum. Macworld reports: Apple has reportedly folded the DarwinAI staff into its own AI team, including DarwinAI co-founder Alexander Wong, an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo who "has published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, in various fields such as computational imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia systems."

According to its LinkedIn profile, DarwinAI is "a rapidly growing visual quality inspection company providing manufacturers an end-to-end solution to improve product quality and increase production efficiency." In layman's terms, that means Apple is likely interested in DarwinAI to streamline its manufacturing to be more efficient. That's something that could save Apple a ton of money in annual costs.

Far more interesting to our consumer devices, however, is Bloomberg's report that DarwinAI's tech can be used to make AI models more efficient in general. Apple has been said to want any generative AI features to run on the device rather than the cloud, so models will need to be as small as possible and DarwinAI could definitely help there. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone maker sees "incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we're currently investing significantly in this area. We believe that will unlock transformative opportunities for users when it comes to productivity, problem solving and more."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: McDonald's restaurants are suffering global IT outages that prevent employees from taking orders and accepting payments, causing some stores to close for the day. The outages started overnight and are impacting restaurants globally, including those in the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK. "We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," McDonald's said in a statement to BleepingComputer. "We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event." In an updated statement, McDonald's says that the outage was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change. "Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The polio survivor known as "the man in the iron lung" has died at the age of 78. Paul Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when he was six, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. The disease left him unable to breathe independently, leading doctors to place him in the metal cylinder, where he would spend the rest of his life. He would go on to earn a law degree -- and practice law -- as well as publish a memoir. [...] In 1952, when he became ill, doctors in his hometown of Dallas operated on him, saving his life. But polio meant his body was no longer able to breathe on his own. The answer was to place him in a so-called iron lung — a metal cylinder enclosing his body up to his neck.

The lung, which he called his "old iron horse," allowed him to breathe. Bellows sucked air out of the cylinder, forcing his lungs to expand and take in air. When the air was let back in, the same process in reverse made his lungs deflate. After years, Alexander eventually learned to breathe by himself so that he was able to leave the lung for short periods of time. Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected to survive long. But he lived for decades, long after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s all but eradicated the disease in the Western world. [...] Advances in medicine made iron lungs obsolete by the 1960s, replaced by ventilators. But Alexander kept living in the cylinder because, he said, he was used to it. He was recognized by Guinness World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung.

A Toronto Sun columnist writes that two Canadian civil liberties groups are "sounding alarms" about the proposed new Online Harms Act (C-63): The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) say while the proposed legislation contains legitimate measures to protect children from online sexual abuse, cyber-bulling and self-harm, and to combat the spread of so-called "revenge porn," its provisions to prevent the expression of hate are draconian, vaguely worded and an attack on free speech... "[D]on't be fooled," said CCF executive director Joanna Baron. "Most of the bill is aimed at restricting freedom of expression. This heavy-handed bill needs to be severely pared down to comply with the constitution."

Both the CCLA and CCF warn the bill could lead to life imprisonment for someone convicted of "incitement to genocide" — a vague term only broadly defined in the bill — and up to five years in prison for other vaguely defined hate speech crimes. The legislation, for example, defines illegal hate speech as expressing "detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals," while legally protected speech, "expresses dislike or disdain, or ... discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends." The problem, critics warn, will be determining in advance which is which, with the inevitable result that people and organizations will self-censor themselves because of fear of being prosecuted criminally, or fined civilly, for what is actually legal speech.
"Both the CCLA and the CCF say the proposed legislation, known as Bill C-63, will require major amendments before becoming law to pass constitutional muster," according to the columnist.

Some specific complains:

• The CCF argues that the Bill "would allow judges to put prior restraints on people who they believe on reasonable grounds may commit speech crimes in the future."

• The CCLA adds that the proposed bill also grants authorities "sweeping new search powers of electronic data, with no warrant requirement," according to the Toronto Sun, and also warns about the creation of a government-appointed "digital safety commission" given "vast authority" and "sweeping powers" to "interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner."

And in addition, the CCF points out under the proposed rules the Canadian Human Rights Commission "could order fines of up to $50,000, and awards of up to $20,000 paid to complainants, who in some cases would be anonymous."

"Findings would be based on a mere 'balance of probabilities' standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt... The mere threat of human rights complaints will chill large amounts of protected speech."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene — our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age — and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

"Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming." The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning — though not unexpected — rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch — some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s — isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World?
Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration." Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again...

Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...."
From the New York Times: Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing."

Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.