Last month U.S. President Biden issued "a mandate that all companies with more than 100 workers require vaccination or weekly testing," remembers the New York Times, and "also moved to mandate shots for health care workers, federal contractors and a vast majority of federal workers, who could face disciplinary measures if they refuse."

So what happened next? Until now, the biggest unknown about mandating COVID-19 vaccines in workplaces has been whether such requirements would lead to compliance or to significant departures by workers unwilling to get shots — at a time when many places were already facing staffing shortages. So far, a number of early mandates show few indications of large-scale resistance. "Mandates are working," said John Swartzberg, a physician and professor at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you define 'working' by the percentage of people getting vaccinated and not leaving their jobs in droves."

Unlike other incentives — "prizes, perks, doughnuts, beer, we've seen just about everything offered to get people vaccinated" — mandates are among the few levers that historically have been effective in increasing compliance, said Swartzberg, who has tracked national efforts to increase rates of inoculation...

[T]he pushback has been less dramatic than initially feared. At Houston Methodist Hospital, which mandated vaccines this summer for 25,000 employees, for example, only about 0.6% of employees quit or were fired. Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who is tracking employer mandates, said that, despite their propensity for backlash and litigation, mandates generally increase vaccine compliance because the knowledge that an order is coming has often been enough to prompt workers to seek inoculation before courts even can weigh in. Mandates are becoming more commonplace as several other states have imposed requirements for workers. In New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Oregon and the District of Columbia, health care workers must get vaccinated to remain employed.
The Times's article (original URL here) provides statistics from specific examples:

• "When Tyson Foods announced Aug. 3 that it would require coronavirus vaccines for all 120,000 of its U.S. employees, less than half of its workforce was inoculated. Nearly two months later, 91% of the company's U.S. workforce is fully vaccinated, said Dr. Claudia Coplein, Tyson's chief medical officer."

• "In New York, where some 650,000 employees at hospitals and nursing homes were to have received at least one vaccine dose by the start of this week, 92% were in compliance, state officials said. That was up significantly from a week ago, when 82% of the state's nursing home workers and at least 84% of its hospital workers had received at least one dose."

• "As California's requirement that all health care workers be vaccinated against the coronavirus took effect Thursday, major health systems reported that the mandate had helped boost their vaccination rates to 90% or higher."

ZDNet reports: Some of the world's largest tech giants — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce/Slack, Atlassian, SAP, and Cisco — have joined forces to establish the Trusted Cloud Principles in what they are claiming is their commitment to protecting the rights of their customers... Some of the specific principles that have been founded by the signatories include governments should seek data directly from enterprise customers first, rather than cloud providers, other than in "exceptional circumstances"; customers should have a right to notice when governments seek to access customer data directly from cloud service providers; and there should be a clear process for cloud providers to challenge government access requests for customers' data, including notifying relevant data protection authorities, to protect customers' interests.

Also outlined in the principles is the point that governments should create mechanisms to raise and resolve conflicts with each other such that cloud service providers' legal compliance in one country does not amount to a violation of law in another; and governments should support cross-border data flows. At the same time, the cloud service providers acknowledge that under the principles they recognise international human rights law enshrines a right to privacy, and the importance of customer trust and customers' control and security of their data. The signatories also said they commit to supporting laws that allow governments to request data through a transparent process that abides by human right standards; international legal frameworks to resolve conflicting laws related to data access, privacy, and sovereignty; and improved rules and regulations at the national and international levels that protect the safety, privacy, and security of cloud customers and their ownership of data...

The Trusted Cloud Principles come days after a separate data cloud framework was stood up between Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft and other major tech giants, plus the EDM Council, a cross-industry trade association for data management and analytics. Under the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework there are six components, 14 capabilities, and 37 sub-capabilities that sets out cloud data management capabilities, standards, and best practices for cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid-cloud implementations while also incorporating automated key controls for protecting sensitive data.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In late 1791 and early 1792, on the eve of the French Revolutionary Wars, Queen Marie Antoinette engaged in a secret correspondence with her confidant and rumored lover, Swedish Count Axel von Fersen. Nearly 50 letters from that exchange survive at the French National Archives. But certain passages in 15 of the letters were unreadable, obscured by redactions made with swirls of dark ink. Now, researchers have revealed the words beneath 45 of these alterations using x-ray technology. They have also discovered the censor's identity: von Fersen, himself. The idea that von Fersen made the redactions is "a revelation," says Catriona Seth, a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the work. Historians had thought the letters were censored in the second half of the 19th century -- most likely by von Fersen's great-nephew -- to protect the writers' reputations. Now, she says, scholars will need to rethink the cover-up -- and the reasons behind it.

The newly legible passages are largely sentimental, phrases like "made my heart happy," and "you that I love." Comments on politics and world events, meanwhile, remain uncensored. But even these seemingly intimate phrases don't definitively tell historians anything new about Marie Antoinette and von Fersen's relationship, Seth says. Scholars, she notes, already knew Marie Antoinette had "a very deep affection for him." Still, she adds, the letters offer "direct insight into the thoughts and feelings of Marie Antoinette." In the future, the techniques in this study could be used in combination with machine algorithms to automatically transcribe old texts, the researchers say, making it easier to understand these important documents -- and others like them. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: Some former OnlyFans support staff employees still had access to users' data -- including sensitive financial and personal information -- even after they stopped working for the company used by sex workers to sell nudes and porn videos. According to a former OnlyFans employee who asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation, some ex-employees still had access to Zendesk, a popular customer service software used by many companies including OnlyFans, to track and respond to customer support tickets, long after leaving the company. OnlyFans uses Zendesk to respond to both users who post content and those who just pay to view that content. According to the source and OnlyFans users who spoke to Motherboard, depending on what a user is seeking help with, support tickets may contain their credit card information, drivers' licenses, passports, full names, addresses, bank statements, how much they have earned on OnlyFans or spent, Know Your Customer (KYC) selfies where the creator holds up an ID next to their face for verification, and model release forms. "It's a shame that they have this large company and feel they can play with people's lives like this," the former employee said. "There are already so many things they are in trouble for and privacy should not be one of them. Everyone on that platform, especially sex workers, need to have their information be safe and it isn't."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Noises linked to mysterious injuries among US diplomats in Cuba were most likely caused by crickets -- not microwave weapons -- according to a declassified scientific review commissioned by the US State Department and obtained by BuzzFeed News. The State Department report was written by the JASON advisory group, an elite scientific board that has reviewed US national security concerns since the Cold War. It was completed in November of 2018, two years after dozens of US diplomats in Cuba and their families reported hearing buzzing noises and then experiencing puzzling neurological injuries, including pain, vertigo, and difficulty concentrating. Originally classified as "secret," the report concluded that the sounds accompanying at least eight of the original 21 Havana syndrome incidents were "most likely" caused by insects. That same scientific review also judged it "highly unlikely" that microwaves or ultrasound beams -- now widely proposed by US government officials to explain the injuries -- were involved in the incidents. And though the report didn't definitively conclude what caused the injuries themselves, it found that "psychogenic" mass psychology effects may have played a role.

"No plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects," the JASON report concluded. "We believe the recorded sounds are mechanical or biological in origin, rather than electronic. The most likely source is the Indies short-tailed cricket." The report's findings fly in the face of a medical report commissioned by the State Department and published by a National Academies of Sciences panel last year, which found that microwaves were the "most plausible" cause of the symptoms. That panel was not provided with the JASON report as part of its assessment, the NAS told BuzzFeed News.

The Supreme Court of California has thrown out Oracle's appeal against a decision to award $3 billion damages to HPE in a case which dates back a decade and relates to Big Red's commitment to develop on Itanium hardware. From a report:On Wednesday, the court denied a review of Oracle's appeal against a summary judgement, apparently without comment or any written dissents. The decision follows a ruling made in the California Court of Appeal that affirmed HPE's $3.14bn win for alleged contract violation, stating that an agreement between the firms had created a legal obligation for Oracle to support software on HPE's Itanium server. The case hinged on the companies' statements that they had a "longstanding strategic relationship" and a "mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers." The agreement stated that Oracle, for its part, "will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms" while HPE "will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware." The ruling reads: "We conclude that the second sentence, moreover, does more than declare an aspiration or intent to continue working together, as Oracle claims. It commits the parties to continue the actions specified (Oracle offering its product suite and HP supporting the products)," as it had done previously.

The Federal Trade Commission is considering strengthening online privacy protections, including for children, in an effort to bypass legislative logjams in Congress. WSJ: The rules under consideration could impose significant new obligations on businesses across the economy related to how they handle consumer data, people familiar with the matter said. The early talks are the latest indication of the five-member commission's more aggressive posture under its new chairwoman, Lina Khan, a Democrat who has been a vocal critic of big business, particularly large technology companies. Congressional efforts to assist the FTC in tackling perceived online privacy problems will also be the focus of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday. If the agency chooses to move forward with an initiative, any broad new rule would likely take years to implement.

In writing new privacy rules, the FTC could follow several paths, the people said: It could look to declare certain business practices unfair or deceptive, using its authority to police such conduct. It could also tap a less-used legal authority that empowers the agency to go after what it considers unfair methods of competition, perhaps by viewing certain businesses' data-collection practices as exclusionary. The agency could also address privacy protections for children by updating its rules under the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. And it could use its enforcement powers to target individual companies, as some privacy advocates urge.

The Wall Street Journal: More than 130 federal judges have violated U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which they or their family owned stock. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that judges have improperly failed to disqualify themselves from 685 court cases around the nation since 2010. The jurists were appointed by nearly every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump. About two-thirds of federal district judges disclosed holdings of individual stocks, and nearly one of every five who did heard at least one case involving those stocks. Alerted to the violations by the Journal, 56 of the judges have directed court clerks to notify parties in 329 lawsuits that they should have recused themselves. That means new judges might be assigned, potentially upending rulings. When judges participated in such cases, about two-thirds of their rulings on motions that were contested came down in favor of their or their family's financial interests.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: LiquidVPN's business model was a fierce one, thriving on the fence of the law. In webpages seen by Ars, the VPN company boasted itself as "the best VPN for torrenting" that would also let you "unblock ISP banned streams," otherwise restricted due to copyright takedown requests. Furthermore, LiquidVPN customers were really in for a treat with "High Quality Popcorn Time Streams" thrown into the mix. And, of course, this was all a "DMCA Free Zone," since, much like any logless VPN provider, Liquid did not have the ability to forward DMCA notices to users downloading infringing content. Except, Liquid listed all of these features on its website explicitly and glamorized all of the possibilities. And imagine doing all these things seven days of the week without the risk of getting caught by your ISP or anyone else, reassured the VPN provider with a "full-refund" guarantee. Transparency can be a good thing when presenting your product, except when your marketing claims surpass the legal gray area.

Unsurprisingly, in March this year, several filmmakers filed a lawsuit with the Florida District Court against LiquidVPN. This month, these plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a default judgment against LiquidVPN for the defendant's failure to plead or show up at the most recent court hearing. According to court documents (PDF), movie production firms argue LiquidVPN should not be extended "safe harbor" protections, as the defendant didn't establish a repeat-infringer policy or appoint a registered DMCA agent. The ask for $9,900,000 comprises the maximum statutory damage amount of $150,000 for each of the 66 works listed in the complaint. Additionally, $1,650,000 has been sought against LiquidVPN for "secondary liability as to DMCA violations." The asks don't stop there, however. The list of demands extends for LiquidVPN to permanently suspend accounts of repeat infringers, dismissing their "no log" policy. But the face of the LiquidVPN website is already nowhere to be seen. For weeks, the homepage has been unreachable, although the client area remains accessible.

Eftpos has become Australia's first accredited non-government operator of a digital identity exchange under the federal government's Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF). From a report: By becoming an accredited operator, Eftpos connectID can now facilitate online transactions requiring a digital identity from Australians. Eftpos sent connectID live in June as a fully-owned subsidiary of the organisation and as a standalone fintech company. It's been set up to act as "broker" between identity service providers and merchants or government agencies that require identity verification, such as proof of age, address details, or bank account information. It has been designed to work within the federal government's Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF) and the banking industry's TrustID framework. Although the Australian government has its own digital identity solution with myGovID, Eftpos has previously said its solution could provide a "smoother, faster, and more secure onboarding experience, including for government services." Eftpos has also assured that connectID does not store any identity data.

When America's law enforcement investigators serve tech companies with subpoenas or search warrants,"the target of the investigation has no idea their data is being seized," the Washington Post pointed out this weekend.

It's becoming surprisingly common in the U.S. "And if investigators obtain a gag order, the records must be handed over without the person's knowledge or consent — depriving the person of an opportunity to challenge the seizure in court." Every year, Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online: private messages, photos, search histories, calendar items — a potentially rich trove for criminal investigators. Often, those requests are accompanied by secrecy orders, also known as nondisclosure or gag orders, that require the tech companies to keep their customers in the dark, potentially for years...

In the last six months of 2020, Facebook received 61,262 government requests for user data in the United States, said spokesman Andy Stone. Most — 69 percent — came with secrecy orders. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received between 2,400 and 3,500 secrecy orders from federal law enforcement each year since 2016 — or seven to 10 per day — according to congressional testimony by vice president of customer security and trust Tom Burt. Google and Apple declined to disclose the number of gag orders they've received. But in the first half of 2020, Google said U.S. law enforcement made 39,536 requests for information about 84,662 accounts — with many of the requests targeting multiple accounts. Apple said it received 11,363 requests...

Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal prosecutors are required to seek digital information from tech companies, not their customers. Since then, prosecutors have routinely used gag orders to prevent the companies from spilling the beans to suspects who might destroy evidence, go into hiding or threaten someone's life. But the practice has mushroomed over the past two decades, part of a broader surveillance ramp-up following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, lawyers said. As the orders have proliferated, privacy advocates and the tech companies themselves have become increasingly concerned. Some tech company officials have accused prosecutors of reflexively requesting gag orders for routine investigations, regardless of whether the cases actually require such secrecy. And an array of company officials and legal experts argue that the practice robs tech company customers of their constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

"Across all the rest of society, it's understood that government doesn't get to take your stuff, doesn't get to come in and into your house, doesn't get to break into your file folders or your lock box at the bank without a warrant. And you get to know about that warrant and you get to exercise your legal rights," Microsoft's Burt said in an interview. "Someone cannot exercise their Fourth Amendment rights when their data has been taken in secret."
U.S. lawmakers are considering changes, the article points out. One idea? Require tech companies "to preserve digital files that are the subject of court orders and permit customers to challenge the orders in court before the information is turned over to prosecutors."

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon points out that's how wiretaps currently work — and is also drafting a measure that would finally require federal courts to publish statistics on the number of surveillance and secrecy orders they've issued.

The Record reports: The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it is preparing to retire the famous HTTPS Everywhere browser extension after HTTPS adoption has picked up and after several web browsers have introduced HTTPS-only modes." "After the end of this year, the extension will be in 'maintenance mode' for 2022," said Alexis Hancock, Director of Engineering at the EFF. Maintenance mode means the extension will receive minor bug fixes next year but no new features or further development.

No official end-of-life date has been decided, a date after which no updates will be provided for the extension whatsoever.

Launched in June 2010, the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension is one of the most successful browser extensions ever released. The extension worked by automatically switching web connections from HTTP to HTTPS if websites had an HTTPS option available. At the time it was released, it helped upgrade site connections to HTTPS when users clicked on HTTP links or typed domains in their browser without specifying the "https://" prefix. The extension reached cult status among privacy advocates and was integrated into the Tor Browser and, after that, in many other privacy-conscious browsers. But since 2010, HTTPS is not a fringe technology anymore. Currently, around 86.6% of all internet sites support HTTPS connections. Browser makers such as Chrome and Mozilla previously reported that HTTPS traffic usually accounts for 90% to 95% of their daily connections.
From EFF's announcement: The goal of HTTPS Everywhere was always to become redundant. That would mean we'd achieved our larger goal: a world where HTTPS is so broadly available and accessible that users no longer need an extra browser extension to get it. Now that world is closer than ever, with mainstream browsers offering native support for an HTTPS-only mode.

With these simple settings available, EFF is preparing to deprecate the HTTPS Everywhere web extension as we look to new frontiers of secure protocols like SSL/TLS... We know many different kinds of users have this tool installed, and want to give our partners and users the needed time to transition.
The announcement also promises to inform users of browser-native HTTPS-only options before the day when the extension reaches its final sunsetting — and ends with instructions for how to activate the native HTTPS-only features in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari, "and celebrate with us that HTTPS is truly everywhere for users."

Federal prosecutors allege that Elizabeth Holmes and the No. 2 at Theranos, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, "broke the law by deceiving investors about how well the business was doing and the capabilities of its testing machines, in addition to allegedly providing false or flawed test results to patients," reports NPR.

But they add that in Silicon Valley, the trial has launched this debate. "Since Holmes was following a playbook used by dozens of tech CEOs, why is she the only one to face prosecution when a company becomes engulfed in a scandal?" To Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, who is a vocal critic of gender discrimination in tech, sexism is partially to blame. "When you see which CEOs get to continue to wreak havoc on consumers and the market, it's people who look like the venture capitalists, who are mostly white men," Pao said. She points to Adam Neumann, who drove WeWork into the ground; former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal; and Juul's Kevin Burns, who stepped down amid questions over the company's role in stoking the youth vaping epidemic. There were lawsuits, settlements and more fallout — but notably, Pao points out, no criminal prosecutions.

"That all these people continue to lead their lives and not be held accountable for all the harm that they've caused, it does send a message," she said.

Former prosecutors who have tried white-collar crime say there are several reasons why Holmes stands out among disgraced tech CEOs. First, the allegedly fraudulent behavior was egregious: Holmes told the world she had a miracle machine that would upend laboratory science. Prosecutors say, compared with her claims, the technology barely did anything at all. Mark MacDougall, a former federal prosecutor who focused on fraud cases in the U.S. Justice Department, said Theranos' being a biotech company raised the stakes. "It allows the government to contend, with some evidence, that the health of private citizens, the health of innocent people, was put at risk," MacDougall said. Another reason Holmes was charged, according to former prosecutors, was that the government says it obtained evidence that she acted intentionally, which can be difficult to establish in fraud cases.
Prosecutors now plan to show Holmes "knowingly and intentionally" defrauded investors and patients, "something her defense team says is false," the article points out. "Proving that Holmes is guilty will turn on demonstrating her intent, since exaggerating a product's potential, missing financial forecasts and running a secretive company do not constitute federal crimes."

Pao's argument is that Holmes "was encouraged by the high-risk, high-reward culture of venture capital. That said, Pao said she is not defending Holmes, saying her behavior warranted prosecution."

"At the same time, Pao wants a broader discussion in Silicon Valley about why other CEOs accused of wrongdoing have not faced criminal consequences."

"In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder," reports Yahoo News, "spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation."

The report is based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials, "eight of whom described details of the CIA's proposals to abduct Assange." Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request "sketches" or "options" for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred "at the highest levels" of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. "There seemed to be no boundaries...."

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks' ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as "Vault 7," which the agency ultimately concluded represented "the largest data loss in CIA history." President Trump's newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied... The CIA's fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a "non-state hostile intelligence service." More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials...

There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency's WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting... In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency's plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow... In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange's Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)
One former senior official told Yahoo News that "It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards."

America's federally-owned electric utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has spent billions of dollars with nothing to show for it, reports the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

"Nearly 47 years after construction began on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Northeast Alabama, the Tennessee Valley Authority is giving up its construction permit for America's biggest unfinished nuclear plant and abandoning any plans to complete the twin-reactor facility..." Giving up the construction permit at Bellefonte signals the end of any new nuclear plant construction at TVA with only seven of the 17 nuclear reactors the utility once planned to build ever completed.... Since the 1970s, a total of 95 nuclear reactors proposed to be built by U.S. utilities have been canceled due to rising construction costs, slowing power demand and cheapening power alternatives.

The NRC now regulates 93 remaining commercial nuclear reactors at 56 nuclear power plants, including TVA's Sequoyah and Watts Bar nuclear plants in East Tennessee and the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Athens, Alabama. Collectively, those nuclear plants provide more than 40% of TVA's power and over 20% of the nation's electricity supply... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said in the past two decades, the growth in power demand in the Tennessee Valley has continued to slow as more energy efficiency measures have been adopted and the price of natural gas, solar power and additional hydroelectric generation has declined in competition with nuclear.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader The Real Dr John for sharing the story. And today the Chattanooga Times Free Press opinions editor offered this suggestion: TVA still owns the 1,600-acre site, as well as the plant that has never — and likely now will never — generate the first spark of nuclear-produced electricity. But that doesn't mean it can't make power some other way. A gas plant? Uggh. A wind field? Seems unlikely given the stillness of North Alabama. A solar plant? That could be more of a possibility. All of the transmission equipment and the electrical grid is at the ready...

By now — after siting, building, scrapping, building again, abandoning, putting up for sale, agreeing to sell for pennies on the dollar and finally going to court to defend not selling the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant — TVA ratepayers and taxpayers have lost somewhere between $6 billion (according to TVA) and $9 billion (according to a 2018 letter from five congressmen)... TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said Wednesday that TVA is making no decisions immediately. "But we're not taking anything off the table," he added...

Hopson said TVA's May 2021 "strategic intent and guiding principles" notes the utility has solar commitments to date of more than 2,300 megawatts of solar capacity expected to come online by the end of 2023. Including those projects, TVA expects to add 10,000 megawatts of solar power by 2035 — a 24-fold increase from today.

That 10,000 megawatts of solar power would be equal to more than eight would-be Bellefonte reactors.

Epik's massive data breach is already affecting lives. Today the Washington Post describes a real estate agent in Pompano Beach who urged buyers on Facebook to move to "the most beautiful State." His name and personal details "were found on invoices suggesting he had once paid for websites with names such as racisminc.com, whitesencyclopedia.com, christiansagainstisrael.com and theholocaustisfake.com". The real estate brokerage where he worked then dropped him as an agent. The brokerage's owner told the Post they didn't "want to be involved with anyone with thoughts or motives like that."

"Some users appear to have relied on Epik to lead a double life," the Post reports, "with several revelations so far involving people with innocuous day jobs who were purportedly purveyors of hate online." (Alternate URL here.) Epik, based outside Seattle, said in a data-breach notice filed with Maine's attorney general this week that 110,000 people had been affected nationwide by having their financial account and credit card numbers, passwords and security codes exposed.... Heidi Beirich, a veteran researcher of hate and extremism, said she is used to spending weeks or months doing "the detective work" trying to decipher who is behind a single extremist domain. The Epik data set, she said, "is like somebody has just handed you all the detective work — the names, the people behind the accounts..."

Many website owners who trusted Epik to keep their identities hidden were exposed, but some who took additional precautions, such as paying in bitcoin and using fake names, remain anonymous....

Aubrey "Kirtaner" Cottle, a security researcher and co-founder of Anonymous, declined to share information about the hack's origins but said it was fueled by hackers' frustrations over Epik serving as a refuge for far-right extremists. "Everyone is tired of hate," Cottle said. "There hasn't been enough pushback, and these far-right players, they play dirty. Nothing is out of bounds for them. And now ... the tide is turning, and there's a swell moving back in their direction."
Earlier in the week, the Post reported: Since the hack, Epik's security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who've marveled at the site's apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public... The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.

Google used its "huge financial muscle" to illegally hurt competitors, the Competition Commission of India found after an antitrust investigation. But now Reuters says Google is suing the commission — for leaking the results of that investigation to the press: "We cooperated fully and maintained confidentiality throughout the investigative process, and we hope and expect the same level of confidentiality from the institutions we engage with," Google's statement added...

India's antitrust authority ordered a probe in 2019, saying Google appeared to have leveraged its dominance to reduce device makers' ability to opt for alternate versions of its mobile operating system and force them to pre-install Google apps. Its 750-page report subsequently found the mandatory pre-installation of apps "amounts to imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers" in violation of India's competition law. The report, which has been seen by Reuters but which is not public, also found the company leveraged the position of its Play Store app store to protect its dominance.

EFF.org has the story: For the last month, civil liberties and human rights organizations, researchers, and customers have demanded that Apple cancel its plan to install photo-scanning software onto devices. This software poses an enormous danger to privacy and security. Apple has heard the message, and announced that it would delay the system while consulting with various groups about its impact. But in order to trust Apple again, we need the company to commit to canceling this mass surveillance system.

The delay may well be a diversionary tactic. Every September, Apple holds one of its big product announcement events, where Apple executives detail the new devices and features coming out. Apple likely didn't want concerns about the phone-scanning features to steal the spotlight.

But we can't let Apple's disastrous phone-scanning idea fade into the background, only to be announced with minimal changes down the road. To make sure Apple is listening to our concerns, EFF turned to an old-school messaging system: aerial advertising.

During Apple's event, a plane circled the company's headquarters carrying an impossible-to-miss message: "Apple, don't scan our phones!" The evening before Apple's event, protestors also rallied nationwide in front of Apple stores. The company needs to hear us, and not just dismiss the serious problems with its scanning plan. A delay is not a cancellation, and the company has also been dismissive of some concerns, referring to them as "confusion" about the new features.

Apple's iMessage is one of the preeminent end-to-end encrypted chat clients. End-to-end encryption is what allows users to exchange messages without having them intercepted and read by repressive governments, corporations, and other bad actors. We don't support encryption for its own sake: we fight for it because encryption is one of the most powerful tools individuals have for maintaining their digital privacy and security in an increasingly insecure world.

Now that Apple's September event is over, Apple must reach out to groups that have criticized it and seek a wider range of suggestions on how to deal with difficult problems, like protecting children online...

The world, thankfully, has moved towards encrypted communications over the last two decades, not away from them, and that's a good thing. If Apple wants to maintain its reputation as a pro-privacy company, it must continue to choose real end-to-end encryption over government demands to read user's communication.

Privacy matters now more than ever. It will continue to be a selling point and a distinguishing feature of some products and companies. For now, it's an open question whether Apple will continue to be one of them.

Google Photos' Locked Folder feature, which lets you hide sensitive photos and videos from your main library and secure them in a passcode- or biometric-protected folder, is coming to all devices running Android 6 and above. The Verge reports: The feature was released exclusively on newer Pixel phones in June. Google hasn't provided an exact date for when the feature is releasing more widely, noting only that it's "rolling out soon." When it announced the feature onstage at Google I/O in May, Google gave the wholesome example of the feature being used by parents hiding photos of a newly purchased puppy from their children. But I think it's fair to say that most people are going to have very different photos stored in their Locked Folder. I don't know about you, but in all the times I've had to wrench my phone out of someone's hand to stop them scrolling through my photos, it's never been because of a puppy picture.

Paul Ratner writes via Interesting Engineering: Theoretical inventions known as the "UFO patents" have been inflaming worldwide curiosity. A product of the American engineer Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, the patents were filed during his work for the U.S. Navy and are so ambitious in their scope and imagination that they continue to draw interest despite any clear evidence that they are feasible. The patents include designs for a futuristic hybrid vehicle with a radical propulsion system that would work equally well in the air, underwater, and in space, as well as a compact fusion reactor, a gravitational wave generator, and even a "spacetime modification weapon." The technology involved could impact reality itself, claims its inventor, whose maverick audacity rivals that of Nikola Tesla.

How real are these ideas? While you can read the patents for yourself, it's evident that the tech necessary to actually create the devices described is beyond our current capabilities. Yet research into many of these fields has gone on for years, which may explain why the Navy expressed an interest. Another likely influence is the fact that the Chinese government seems to be working to develop similar technology. The fantastical inventions devised by Dr. Pais largely build upon an idea that he calls "The Pais Effect." In his patent write-ups and in an interview with The Drive, he described it as "the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients." This effect amounts to the ability to spin electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. The electromagnetic energy fields would be so powerful that they could "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," writes Pais. In practical terms, this invention could lead to a veritable revolution in propulsion, quantum communications, and create an abundance of cheaply-produced energy. Certainly, an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, as posits the Sagan standard.

Despite the well-founded unease at Dr. Pais's inventions, the Navy took them seriously enough to run experiments for three years and even found some of them "operable," although the extent of that alleged operability is under debate. In the patent documents, two Navy officials seemed to assert the operability of the inventions. Furthermore, in correspondence with The Drive's "War Zone," Timothy Boulay of NAWCAD, stated that Pais's High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator was, in fact, tested from 2016 until 2019, at a cost of $508,000. The team working on the project consisted of at least 10 technicians and engineers and put in some 1,600 hours of work. But upon the conclusion of the testing, the Pais Effect "could not be proven," shared Boulay. What happened subsequently with the tested device and further investigations is not known at this point. There are indications in documents obtained by The Drive's WarZone through the Freedom of Information Act that the inventions could be moved to another research department in the Navy or the Air Force, or possibly even to NASA or DARPA, but whether that really happened is not clear. "One of the most attention-grabbing designs by Dr. Pais is the 2018 patent for a cone-shaped craft of unprecedented range and speed," writes Ratner. "Another futuristic patent with far-reaching ramifications is Pais' Plasma Compression Fusion Device. [...] Notes from researchers who worked on vetting Pais' ideas indicate that a possible outcome of the plasma fusion device and the high energy levels it may generate is the 'Spacetime Modification Weapon' (SMW). Research documents refer to it as 'a weapon that can make the Hydrogen bomb seem more like a firecracker, in comparison.'"

Pais also has a patent for an electromagnetic field generator, which could create "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." Another device conceived by Pais that could deflect asteroids is the high-frequency gravitational wave generator.