harrymcc writes: In the late 1990s, lots of people were concerned that the Y2K bug could lead to power outages, financial collapse, riots, and worse when the clock rolled over to January 1, 2000. Hundreds of books about the problem and suggestions on how to respond (quit your job, move to the country, stockpile food) not only capitalized on this fear but helped to spread it.

Over at Fast Company, I marked the 20th anniversary of the "crisis" with a retrospective on the survival guides and what we can learn from them.
The article calls them "an eternally useful guide to how not to give people advice about technology and its role in their lives... They provided a brief layperson's guide to the origins of the problem, and then segued into nightmare scenarios."
They had scary titles like Time Bomb 2000 and The Millennium Meltdown. Their covers featured grim declarations such as "The illusion of social stability is about to be shattered... and nothing can stop it" and garish artwork of the earth aflame and bombs tumbling toward skylines. Inside, they told readers that the bug could lead to a decade or more of calamity, and advised them to stockpile food, cash, and (sometimes) weapons. There were hundreds of these books from publishers large and small, some produced by people who turned the topic into mini-media empires...

Spoiler alert: When January 1, 2000, rolled around, nothing terrible happened. By then, techies had spent years patching up creaky code so it could deal with 21st-century dates, and the billions invested in the effort paid off. Some problems did crop up, but even alarming-sounding ones -- such as glitches at nuclear power plants -- were minor and resolvable.
On December 31st, 1999, Roblimo posted a call for comments from Slashdot readers, writing "This thread ought to make an interesting chronicle of Y2K events -- or non-events, as the case may be."

But NBC had even filmed a made-for-TV Y2K disaster movie (which Jon Katz called "profoundly stupid and irresponsible.")

And one survivalist videotape even featured an ominous narration by Leonard Nimoy.

In 1962, 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming -- and 57 years later, he's still working on it. But he's finally released The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 5: Mathematical Preliminaries Redux; Introduction to Backtracking; Dancing Links.

An anonymous reader writes: On his personal site at Stanford, 81-year-old Donald Knuth promised this newly-released section "will feature more than 650 exercises and their answers, designed for self-study," and he shared an excerpt from "the hype on its back cover":

This fascicle, brimming with lively examples, forms the first third of what will eventually become hardcover Volume 4B. It begins with a 27-page tutorial on the major advances in probabilistic methods that have been made during the past 50 years, since those theories are the key to so many modern algorithms. Then it introduces the fundamental principles of efficient backtrack programming, a family of techniques that have been a mainstay of combinatorial computing since the beginning.

This introductory material is followed by an extensive exploration of important data structures whose links perform delightful dances. That section unifies a vast number of combinatorial algorithms by showing that they are special cases of the general XCC problem --- "exact covering with colors." The first fruits of the author's decades-old experiments with XCC solving are presented here for the first time, with dozens of applications to a dazzling array of questions that arise in amazingly diverse contexts...

Knuth is still offering his famous hexadecimal reward checks (now referred to as "reward certificates," since they're drawn on the imaginary Bank of San Serriffe) to any reader who finds a technical (or typographical) error. "Of course those exercises, like those in Fascicle 6, include many cutting-edge topics that weren't easy for me to boil down into their essentials. So again I'm hoping to receive 'Dear Don' letters...either confirming that at least somebody besides me believes that I did my job properly, or pointing out what I should really have said...."

And to make it easier he's even shared a list of the exercises where he's still "seeking help and reassurance" about the correctness of his answers. "Let me reiterate that you don't have to work the exericse first. You're allowed to peek at the answer; indeed, you're encouraged to do so, in order to verify that the answer is 100% correct."

In August of last year, NASA sent a spacecraft hurtling toward the inner Solar System, with the aim of getting some answers about the mysterious star at the center of our cosmic neighborhood. Now more than a year later, that tiny robot has started to decode some of the mysteries surrounding our Sun's behavior, after venturing closer to our parent star than any human-made object has before. From a report: That spacecraft is NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized vehicle designed to withstand temperatures of more then 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Its various instruments are protected by an extra hardy heat shield, designed to keep the spacecraft relatively cool as it gets near our balmy host star. Already, the Parker Solar Probe has gotten up close and personal with the Sun, coming within 15 million miles of the star -- closer than Mercury and any other spacecraft sent to the Sun before. "We got into the record books already," Adam Szabo, the mission scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for Parker Solar Probe, tells The Verge.

Before the spacecraft's launch, researchers were particularly interested in learning more about what's coming out of the Sun. Energetic particles and plasma are continuously streaming from the Sun at all times -- a phenomena that's been dubbed solar wind. This highly energized material makes its way to Earth, causing the dazzling display of the aurora borealis. If we get too much of this stuff, it can sometimes muck up our spacecraft in orbit and even mess with our electric grid. There's still a lot we don't know about solar wind, such as what is accelerating this material so much that it can break free from the Sun. Learning the origins of the wind could help us better predict how it will impact us here on Earth.

From a report: When the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, calling it "just wildly imaginative." Mark Zuckerberg recommended it to his tens of millions of Facebook followers; George R.R. Martin blogged about it. Publishers around the world chased after translation rights, which eventually sold in 26 languages, including Turkish and Estonian. It won the 2015 Hugo Award, one of the genre's most prestigious honors, making Liu Cixin the first Asian author to win the prize for best novel. It was also the first time a novel in translation had won the prize. The book and its two sequels went on to sell nearly nine million copies worldwide. Now, Liu Cixin says, he recommends that Chinese sci-fi fans who speak English read Ken Liu's translation of "The Three-Body Problem" rather than the Chinese version. "Usually when Chinese literature gets translated to a foreign language, it tends to lose something," he says. "I don't think that happened with 'The Three-Body Problem.' I think it gained something."

The success of "The Three-Body Problem" not only turned Liu Cixin into a global literary star; it opened the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction. This, in turn, has made Ken Liu a critical conduit for Chinese writers seeking Western audiences, a literary brand as sought-after as the best-selling authors he translates. (Among Chinese sci-fi authors and fans, he is often referred to affectionately as Xiao Liu, Little Liu, to distinguish him from Liu Cixin, who is known as Da Liu, Big Liu.) Liu's translations have reshaped the global science-fiction landscape, which has long been dominated by American and British authors. Over the past decade, he has translated five novels and more than 50 works of short fiction by dozens of Chinese authors, many of whom he has discovered and championed himself.

A new project aims to make LibGen, which hosts 33 terabytes of scientific papers and books, much more stable. From a report: It's hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research huddle behind paywalls unread by those who could benefit. But over the last few years, two sites -- Library Genesis and Sci-Hub -- have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers. The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two "Pirate Bays of Science." Library Genesis (LibGen) contains 33 terabytes of books, scientific papers, comics, and more in its scientific library. That's a lot of data to host when countries and science publishers are constantly trying to get you shut down.

Last week, redditors launched a project to better seed, or host, LibGen's files. "It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index -- it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down," user shrine said on Reddit. Shrine is helping to start the project. Two seedbox companies (services that provide high-bandwidth remote servers for uploading and downloading data), Seedbox dot io and UltraSeedbox, stepped in to support the project. A week later, LibGen is seeding 10 terabytes and 900,000 scientific books thanks to help from Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lacking any of the necessary willpower to go back to my work, I spiraled further into a procrastination hole and clicked on the link. "Working on something hard? Distracted? Overwhelmed? Imagine a place where you know you'll get your work done," the landing page read. I didn't believe such a place really existed, outside of maybe a plane at 35,000 feet before the advent of inflight Wi-Fi. But I was feeling preoccupied and stressed, and I wanted this mythical destination to be real, so I signed up for one of the company's sessions last month. That's how I found myself inside a drab office building in downtown San Francisco, feeling more like I was on my way to a dentist appointment than to experience the latest productivity solution to come out of Silicon Valley. Focused has a deceptively simple premise: What if you could pay someone to help you accomplish undistracted work for a couple of hours?

For $40 a pop, cofounders Nodira Khoussainova, 32, and Lee Granas, 40, put on a study hall of sorts, perfect for a certain breed of multitasking, multi-side-hustle, 21st-century adult. (They do also offer financial aid.) The company has two newly opened offices, one in San Francisco and one in nearby Oakland, where clients show up with laptops and one or more daunting tasks they hope to cross off their to-do lists. The startup feels, in some ways, like a natural outgrowth of a culture that's obsessed with optimization and an economy in which more people work remotely than ever. It caters to the same type of person that productivity apps, books, and gurus do, but it also provides access to what's essentially a coworking space. Yet unlike other products and services that promise to help you get more things done, Focused doesn't treat procrastination like a personal moral failing. Its founders believe that people probably can't do everything they want to alone -- they need a real, live human supporting them, even if it's someone they pay.

The San Diego Public Library system just wiped out overdue fines for 130,000 people. It's part of a growing trend, reports NPR: The changes were enacted after a city study revealed that nearly half of the library's patrons whose accounts were blocked as a result of late fees lived in two of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "I never realized it impacted them to that extent," said Misty Jones, the city's library director.

For decades, libraries have relied on fines to discourage patrons from returning books late. But a growing number of some of the country's biggest public library systems are ditching overdue fees after finding that the penalties drive away the people who stand to benefit the most from free library resources. From San Diego to Chicago to Boston, public libraries that have analyzed the effects of late fees on their cardholders have found that they disproportionately deter low-income residents and children. Acknowledging these consequences, the American Library Association passed a resolution in January in which it recognizes fines as "a form of social inequity" and calls on libraries nationwide to find a way to eliminate their fines....

Lifting fines has had a surprising dual effect: More patrons are returning to the library, with their late materials in hand. Chicago saw a 240% increase in return of materials within three weeks of implementing its fine-free policy last month. The library system also had 400 more card renewals compared with that time last year. "It became clear to us that there were families that couldn't afford to pay the fines and therefore couldn't return the materials, so then we just lost them as patrons altogether," said Andrea Telli, the city's library commissioner. "We wanted our materials back, and more importantly, we wanted our patrons back..."

in San Diego, officials calculated that it actually would be saving money if its librarians stopped tracking down patrons to recover books. The city had spent nearly $1 million to collect $675,000 in library fees each year.

The authors of a 2017 study which found that reading science fiction "makes you stupid" have conducted a follow-up that found that it's only bad sci-fi that has this effect: a well-written slice of sci-fi will be read just as thoroughly as a literary story. From a report: Two years ago, Washington and Lee University professors Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson published a paper in which they revealed that when readers were given a sci-fi story peopled by aliens and androids and set on a space ship, as opposed to a similar one set in reality, "the science fiction setting triggered poorer overall reading" and appeared to "predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading -- or what we might term non-literary reading." But after critics suggested that merely changing elements of a mainstream story into sci-fi tropes did not make for a quality story, Gavaler and Johnson decided to revisit the research. This time, 204 participants were given one of two stories to read: both were called "Ada" and were identical apart from one word, to provide the strictest possible control. The "literary" version begins: "My daughter is standing behind the bar, polishing a wine glass against a white cloth." The science-fiction variant begins: "My robot is standing behind the bar, polishing a wine glass against a white cloth."

PC Magazine recently interviewed Janelle Shane, the optics research scientist and AI experimenter who authored the new book "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place."

At one point Shane explains why any "black box" AI can be a problem: I think ethics in AI does have to include some recognition that AIs generally don't tell us when they've arrived at their answers via problematic methods. Usually, all we see is the final decision, and some people have been tempted to take the decision as unbiased just because a machine was involved. I think ethical use of AI is going to have to involve examining AI's decisions. If we can't look inside the black box, at least we can run statistics on the AI's decisions and look for systematic problems or weird glitches... There are some researchers already running statistics on some high-profile algorithms, but the people who build these algorithms have the responsibility to do some due diligence on their own work. This is in addition to being more ethical about whether a particular algorithm should be built at all...

[T]here are applications where we want weird, non-human behavior. And then there are applications where we would really rather avoid weirdness. Unfortunately, when you use machine-learning algorithms, where you don't tell them exactly how to solve a particular problem, there can be weird quirks buried in the strategies they choose.
Describing a kind of worst-case scenario, Shane contributed to the New York Times "Op-Eds From the Future" series, channeling a behavioral ecologist in the year 2031 defending "the feral scooters of Central Park" that humanity had been co-existing with for a decade.

But in the interview, she remains skeptical that we'll ever acheive real and fully-autonomous self-driving vehicles: It's much easier to make an AI that follows roads and obeys traffic rules than it is to make an AI that avoids weird glitches. It's exactly that problem -- that there's so much variety in the real world, and so many strange things that happen, that AIs can't have seen it all during training. Humans are relatively good at using their knowledge of the world to adapt to new circumstances, but AIs are much more limited, and tend to be terrible at it.

On the other hand, AIs are much better at driving consistently than humans are. Will there be some point at which AI consistency outweighs the weird glitches, and our insurance companies start incentivizing us to use self-driving cars? Or will the thought of the glitches be too scary? I'm not sure.
Shane trained a neural network on 162,000 Slashdot headlines back in 2017, coming up with alternate reality-style headlines like "Microsoft To Develop Programming Law" and "More Pong Users for Kernel Project." Reached for comment this week, Shane described what may be the greatest danger from AI today. "For the foreseeable future, we don't have to worry about AI being smart enough to have its own thoughts and goals.

"Instead, the danger is that we think that AI is smarter than it is, and put too much trust in its decisions."

A new article at Motherboard remembers when the MIDI file format became the main way music was shared on the internet "for an incredibly short but memorable period of time..." [I]n the hunt for additional features, the two primary developers of web browsers during the era -- Microsoft and Netscape -- added functionality that made audio files accessible when loading websites, whether as background music or as embedded files with a dedicated player. Either way, it was one of the earliest examples of a plug-in that much of the public ran into -- even before Flash. In particular, Microsoft's Internet Explorer supported it as far back as version 1.0, while Netscape Navigator supported it with the use of a plug-in and added native support starting in version 3.0. There was a period, during the peak of the Geocities era, where loading a website with a MIDI file was a common occurrence.

When Geocities was shut down in 2019, the MIDI files found on various websites during that time were collected by The Archive Team. The Internet Archive includes more than 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection. The list of songs, which can be seen here, is very much a time capsule to a specific era. Have a favorite song from 1998? Search for it in here, sans spaces, and you'll probably find it...! They sound like a musical time capsule, and evoke memories of a specific time for many web surfers of the era. "Even in an age of high-quality MP3s, the chintzy sounds of MIDI files resonate on the Web," writer Douglas Wolk wrote for Spin in 2000, immediately adding the reason: "They play on just about anything smarter than a Tupperware bowl, and they're also very small...." The thing that often gets lost with these compositions of popular songs done in MIDI format is that they're often done by people, either for purposes of running a sound bank (which might come in handy, for example, with karaoke), or by amateurs trying to recreate the songs they enjoy or heard on the radio.... [I]ts moment in the sun reflected its utility during a period of time when the demand for multimedia content from the internet was growing -- but the ability for computers to offer it up in a full-fat format was limited. (Stupid modems....) MIDI is very much not dead -- far from it. Its great strength is the fact that a MIDI-supporting iPad can communicate with some of the earliest MIDI-supporting devices, such as the Commodore 64.
Using a browser plugin called Jazz-Plugin, their writer even re-discovered John Roache's Ragtime MIDI Library. "[I]t occurred to me that I should spend more time writing about one of the things that makes the Web so special -- labors of love. Unlike any medium before it, the Web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts -- and with folks like me who just happen to drop by."

When it comes to many of Apple's latest services, iPhone users in China are missing out. From a report: Podcast choices are paltry. Apple TV+ is off the air. News subscriptions are blocked, and Arcade gaming is nowhere to be found. For years, Apple made huge inroads in the world's most populous nation with hardware that boasted crisp displays, sleek lines and speedy processors. It peddled little of the content that boxed U.S. internet giants Google and Facebook out of the country. But now that Apple is becoming a major digital services provider, it's struggling to avoid the fate of its rivals.

Apple services such as the App Store, digital books, news, video, podcasts and music, put the company in the more precarious position of information provider (or at least overseer), exposing it to a growing online crackdown by China's authoritarian government. While standard iPhone services like iMessage work in China, many paid offerings that help Apple generate recurring revenue from its devices aren't available in the country. That includes four new services that Apple announced this year: TV+ video streaming, the Apple Card, Apple Arcade and the News+ subscription. Other well-known Apple services can't be accessed in the country either, including the iTunes Store, iTunes Movie rentals, Apple Books and the Apple TV and Apple News apps. Over the past year, Apple's Weather app lost its ability to show air quality index, or AQI, data for Chinese cities -- regardless of the user's location, the report adds. (Though this was due to a business dispute with Weather Channel.)

The operator of the Wayback Machine allows Wikipedia's users to check citations from books as well as the web. From a report: The reason people rely on Wikipedia, despite its imperfections, is that every claim is supposed to have citations. Any sentence that isn't backed up with a credible source risks being slapped with the dreaded "citation needed" label. Anyone can check out those citations to learn more about a subject, or verify that those sources actually say what a particular Wikipedia entry claims they do -- that is, if you can find those sources. It's easy enough when the sources are online. But many Wikipedia articles rely on good old-fashioned books. The entry on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, cites 66 different books. Until recently, if you wanted to verify that those books say what the article says they say, or if you just wanted to read the cited material, you'd need to track down a copy of the book. Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number.

You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks -- much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library. (Some groups of authors and publishers have challenged the archive's practice of allowing users to borrow unauthorized scanned books. The Internet Archive says it seeks to widen access to books in "balanced and respectful ways.") So far the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries in various languages into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.

Rei writes: After two profitable quarters last year, Tesla was hit by a perfect storm of filled U.S. backlog, S/X cannibalization by Model 3, a botched international launch, and price cuts due to U.S. tax credit phaseouts, leading to a very poor Q1 showing. While cashflow went positive in Q2, profits remained elusive, and -- relying on lower-cost Model 3 variants with minimal U.S. tax credits -- expectations for Q3 weren't much better.

Instead, Tesla posted a blowout quarter: $5.3 billion record cash on hand, profits ($143M GAAP, $342M non-GAAP), margins rising from 18.9% to 22.8%, and sizeable growth in both solar and storage. Across the board, the company ran ahead of schedule: volume production of Model Y is pulled forward to next summer; Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai is producing cars and awaiting final sales certification after being built up from a muddy field in 10 months at a third the capital cost per vehicle; Semi (previously suggested as slipping to 2021) is back to 2020 production; and the production version of the solar roof tiles will be launching at an event on Thursday. The new, shipping crate-format Megapack energy storage products start being installed this quarter. As for vehicles, the company continues to be production constrained, with significant wait times on new orders in all markets; annual production and sales guidance of 360-400k was reiterated. Model S/X production is being raised to make up for new demand for the "Raven" update. On the self-driving front, while the company launched Smart Summon at the end of Q3, only $30 million of revenue was recognized because of it; half a billion dollars of unrecognized Full Self Driving (FSD) revenue remains on the books for future quarters. The company reiterated guidance of FSD being "feature complete" (handling all driving from driveway to destination, with supervision) by the end of this year at least as a limited prerelease, and capability for unsupervised driving by the end of next year, limited by the rate of regulatory approvals. Also announced as upcoming in the next few weeks: OTA upgrades for range on new Model S/X vehicles, a 3% OTA performance improvement to S/X, and a 5% performance improvement for Model 3.

During the earnings call, Musk credited the surge in progress in Tesla's non-core divisions to being able to dedicate more engineering and financial resources to them after stabilizing Model 3 production rates and costs. Tesla's stock surged 20% in aftermarket trading, equivalent to the company's second-highest percentage gain ever, and its highest in absolute terms. Electrek, The Financial Times, and CNBC are reporting Tesla's third-quarter earnings.

Photographer Peter Adams launched a "Faces of Open Source" portrait project in 2014. This week he posted a special announcement on the web site of Bell Labs: Later this month, Bell Labs will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unix with a special two day "Unix 50" event at their historic Murray Hill headquarters. This event should be one for the history books with many notable Unix and computer pioneers in attendance...!

As I was making those photographs (which will be on display at the event), I gained much insight into Bell Labs and the development of Unix. However, it was some of the more personal stories and anecdotes that brought Bell Labs to life and gave me a feel for the people behind the code. One such time was when Ken Thompson (who is an accomplished pilot) told me how he traveled to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in order to fly in a MiG-29 fighter jet... Brian Kernighan told me about how a certain portrait of Peter Weinberger found its way into some very interesting places. These included the concrete foundation of a building on Bell Labs campus, the cover images printed onto Unix CD-ROMs, and most notably, painted on the top of a nearby water tower.

Which brings us to another important piece of Unix mythology that I learned about: the fictitious Bell Labs employee G.R. Emlin (a.k.a. "the gremlin").... A lot of this folklore (including the gremlin) is going to be on display at the Unix 50 event. The archivists at Bell Labs have outdone themselves by pulling together a massive collection of artifacts taken from the labs where Unix was developed for over 30 years. I was able to photograph a few of these artifacts last year, but so much more will be exhibited at this event -- including several items from the personal archives of some attendees.

As if that wasn't enough, the event will also showcase a number of vintage computers and a look into Bell Labs future with a tour of their Future X Labs.
The article includes some more quick stories about the Unix pioneers at Bell Labs (including "the gremlin") and argues that "the decision to freely distribute Unix's source code (to anyone who asked for it) inadvertently set the stage for the free and open source software movements that dominate the technology industry today...

"In hindsight, maybe 1969 should be called the 'summer of code.'"

This year's "International Day Against DRM" is highlighting user-disrespecting restrictions on educational materials.

An anonymous reader quotes the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design site: The "Netflix of textbooks" model practiced by Pearson and similar publishers is a Trojan horse for education: requiring a constant Internet connection for "authentication" purposes, severely limiting the number of pages a student can read at one time, and secretly collecting telemetric data on their reading habits.

Every year, we organize the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to mobilize protests collaboration, grassroots activism, and in-person actions against the grave threat of DRM. For IDAD 2019, we are calling on Pearson and similar companies to stop putting a lock on our learning, and demonstrate their alleged commitment to education by dropping DRM from their electronic textbooks and course materials. At the same time, it is our plan to show that a better world is possible by encouraging people to contribute to collaborative and DRM-free textbooks, and resist the stranglehold these publishers are putting on something as fundamental as one's education. To help us, join the Defective by Design (DbD) coalition as we organize local and remote hackathons on free culture educational materials, and an in-person protest of Pearson Education on Saturday, October 12th.
The group is joined in this year's event by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and The Document Foundation (as well as 10 other participating organizations). Here's some of the site's suggestions for ways to participate:

• In Boston, we'll be leading the way with our own demonstration on October 12th, 2019, at Pearson Education's corporate offices, followed by an evening hackathon on collaborative, freely licensed educational materials... We'll be providing activists around the world with support on how they can stage their own local in-person event, as well as how to join us online while we help improve the free and ethical alternatives to educational materials restricted by DRM.

• The easiest way to participate is to join us in going a Day Without DRM, and resolve to spend an entire day (or longer!) without Netflix, Hulu, and other restricted services to show your support of the movement. Document your experiences on social media using the tags "#idad" or "#dbd", and let us know at info@defectivebydesign.org if you have a special story you'd like us to share.

• Print and share our dust jacket design, which you can slip over your "dead tree" books (while you still have them) to warn others of the dangers of ebook DRM. Pass them out at coffee shops, libraries, and wherever readers congregate!

iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.

"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."

What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?

In 2014 consumer expert and Silicon Valley startup founder Nir Eyal wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. But five years later, the New York Times reports he's offering consumers a new book about how to resist those habits -- even while arguing that "addiction" is the wrong way to describe technology's hold on people: There was a problem, yes, but the thinking was all wrong, he decided. Using the language of addiction gave tech users a pass. It was too easy. The issue was not screens but people's own minds, and to solve the problem they had to look within. "If I call technology something that people get addicted to, there needs to be a pusher, a dealer doing it to you," Mr. Eyal said. "But if I say technology is something that people overuse, then it's, 'Oh, crap, now I need to do something about it myself....'" The solution he proposes in Indistractable is slow. It involves self-reflection. He argues that many times we look at phones because we are anxious and bad at being alone -- and that's not the phone's fault...

Mr. Eyal has written a guide to free people from an addiction he argues they never had in the first place. It was all just sloughing off personal responsibility, he figures. So the solution is to reclaim responsibility in myriad small ways. For instance: Have your phone on silent so there will be fewer external triggers. Email less and faster. Don't hang out on Slack. Have only one laptop out during meetings. Introduce social pressure like sitting next to someone who can see your screen. Set "price pacts" with people so you pay them if you get distracted -- though be sure to "learn self-compassion before making a price pact....."

"I got myself a feature phone that had no apps. I got on eBay a word processor, and all it does is let you type. I made my phone grayscale, which only ruined my pictures," he said. "I tried a digital detox, but I missed audiobooks and GPS...."
He also argues that getting hooked on social media isn't necessarily a bad thing. "For many people, social media is a very good thing and gaming is a very good thing. It's how you use it...." But he's also predicting a "post-digital" movement will emerge in 2020.

"We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking."

"In April 2013, I received via U.S. mail more than a gram of pure heroin as part of a scheme to get me arrested for drug possession," writes security reserch Brian Krebs. "But the plan failed and the Ukrainian mastermind behind it soon after was imprisoned for unrelated cybercrime offenses.

"That individual recently gave his first interview since finishing his jail time here in the states, and he's shared some select (if often abrasive and coarse) details on how he got into cybercrime and why... Vovnenko claims he never sent anything and that it was all done by members of his forum... "They sent all sorts of crazy shit. Forty or so guys would send. When I was already doing time, one of the dudes sent it...." In an interview published on the Russian-language security blog Krober.biz, Vovnenko said he began stealing early in life, and by 13 was already getting picked up for petty robberies and thefts... "After watching movies and reading books about hackers, I really wanted to become a sort of virtual bandit who robs banks without leaving home," Vovnenko recalled...

Around the same time Fly was taking bitcoin donations for a fund to purchase heroin on my behalf, he was also engaged to be married to a nice young woman. But Fly apparently did not fully trust his bride-to-be, so he had malware installed on her system that forwarded him copies of all email that she sent and received. But Fly would make at least two big operational security mistakes in this spying effort: First, he had his fiancée's messages forwarded to an email account he'd used for plenty of cybercriminal stuff related to his various "Fly" identities. Mistake number two was the password for his email account was the same as one of his cybercrime forum admin accounts. And unbeknownst to him at the time, that forum was hacked, with all email addresses and hashed passwords exposed.

Soon enough, investigators were reading Fly's email, including the messages forwarded from his wife's account that had details about their upcoming nuptials, such as shipping addresses for their wedding-related items and the full name of Fly's fiancée. It didn't take long to zero in on Fly's location in Naples. While it may sound unlikely that a guy so immeshed in the cybercrime space could make such rookie security mistakes, I have found that a great many cybercriminals actually have worse operational security than the average Internet user. I suspect this may be because the nature of their activities requires them to create vast numbers of single- or brief-use accounts, and in general they tend to re-use credentials across multiple sites, or else pick very poor passwords -- even for critical resources...

Towards the end, Fly says he's considering going back to school, and that he may even take up information security as a study. I wish him luck in that whatever that endeavor is as long as he can also avoid stealing from people.

Saturday the Guardian published a call to action by the author of the new book, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast: [W]e cannot save the planet unless we significantly reduce our consumption of animal products. This is not my opinion, or anyone's opinion. It is the inconvenient science. Animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector (all planes, cars and trains), and is the primary source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions (which are 86 and 310 times more powerful than CO2, respectively). Our meat habit is the leading cause of deforestation, which releases carbon when trees are burned (forests contain more carbon than do all exploitable fossil-fuel reserves), and also diminishes the planet's ability to absorb carbon. According to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even if we were to do everything else that is necessary to save the planet, it will be impossible to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord if we do not dramatically reduce our consumption of animal products...

There is a place at which one's personal business and the business of being one of seven billion earthlings intersect. And for perhaps the first moment in history, the expression "one's time" makes little sense. Climate change is not a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, which can be returned to when the schedule allows and the feeling inspires. It is a house on fire. The longer we fail to take care of it, the harder it becomes to take care of, and because of positive feedback loops -- white ice melting to dark water that absorbs more heat; thawing permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane -- we will very soon reach a tipping point of "runaway climate change", when we will be unable to save ourselves, no matter how much effort we make...

The four highest impact things an individual can do to tackle the planetary crisis are: have fewer children; live car-free; avoid air travel; and eat a plant-based diet... [E]veryone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change. Furthermore, of those four high-impact actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.... We cannot keep eating the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, and that fraught.
Beef has the biggest "greenhouse gas impact," according to a recent article in the New York Times (followed by lamb and then "farmed crustaceans.") While there's also some impact from pork, poultry, farmed fish and even eggs, their table suggests it's a small fraction when compared to the climate impact of beef and lamb.

Facebook for most of the past decade was Silicon Valley's 800-pound gorilla, squashing rivals, ripping off their best ideas or buying them outright as it cemented its dominance of social media. Now the knives are coming out [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: A number of Facebook's current and former competitors are talking about the company's hardball tactics to investigators from the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its broader antitrust investigation into the social-media giant's business practices, according to people familiar with the matter. One of them is Snap, where the legal team for years kept a dossier of ways that the company felt Facebook was trying to thwart competition from the buzzy upstart, according to people familiar with the matter. The title of the documents: Project Voldemort.

The files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children's books, chronicled Facebook's moves that threatened to undermine Snap's business, including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app, the people said.