Musings

By Kate Cox He's tired of "dogmatic announcements that lawful access simply cannot be done." Elijah Nouvelage | Getty Images Graffiti urging people to use Signal, a highly encrypted messaging app, is spray-painted on a wall during a protest on February 1, 2017 in Berkeley, California. US Attorney General William Barr accused tech firms of "dogmatic" posturing, saying lawful backdoor access "can be and must be" done, adding, "We are confident that there are technical solutions that will allow lawful access to encrypted data and communications by law enforcement, without materially weakening the security provided by encryption." More at Ars Technica Opinion: His guy is a total nut case. Another fine example of the American education system. Don't stop where the ink does.

@Instagram A screen shot of @Instagram’s social media feed. Instagram’s recent decision to remove its “like” counter from its platform in select geographic regions is an interesting, perhaps long overdue, measure. Although recently users in Canada reported seeing the “like” counter back on for a day, the counter is currently off. The roll-out is a techno-social experiment, and there are advantages — and a few unintended consequences — of such an action. More at The Conversation

By Sam Machkovech Data and Seven of Nine return to help Picard shepherd a new cast into space. CBS "Engage!" Yes, that's what Sir Patrick Stewart says in this moment, and yes, it's as delightful in action as that sounds. All eyes were on San Diego Comic Con's Star Trek panel this year, as anticipation continues to build for Star Trek: Picard, the first Trek entry to feature Sir Patrick Stewart since the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis. And on Saturday, the series' handlers at CBS didn't disappoint. More at Ars Technica

By Jim Salter Data brokers like Facebook, Google, and Oracle might know more than you think. Thought using Incognito mode might keep such searching private? Facebook, Google, and even Oracle have more of your Web usage in their sights than you might think. The paper, set to be published in the journal New Media & Society, does an excellent job of backing up the claim that porn usage ends up being tracked by Google and Facebook. Authors Elena Maris, Timothy Libert, and Jennifer Henrichsen used open source tool webxray to analyze more than 22,000 porn sites, discovering tracking code for Google on 74% and for Facebook on 10% of the sites analyzed. Software giant Oracle's Web tracking code also showed up, appearing on 24% of those sites. More at Ars Technica

By Eli Glasner · CBC News · Software engineer Ben Feist restored 11,000 hours of audio as historic mission control room becomes museum Eli Glasner Ben Feist, seen smiling in the centre, gazes at the large monitors displaying the lunar surface in the newly restored mission control More at CBC News

By Bennett Cyphers The latest release of Privacy Badger gives it the power to detect and block a new class of evasive, pervasive third-party trackers, including Google Analytics. More at Electronic Frontier Foundation

By Zack Zwiezen Today, developers have a huge variety of ways to create and manage enemy AI. However, back in the 90s it was much more difficult to create sophisticated enemy AI. It was even harder to do so on the N64 due to its limited power and resources. But Rare, the developers behind GoldenEye, pulled it off and did such a great job that after playing GoldenEye, developers at Valve actually changed the then-unreleased Half-Life and its AI. More

By Shaun Nichols in San Francisco Scrambling addresses can't always hide you from stalkers, say eggheads David Strobinski, David Li, and Johannes Becker at Boston University told The Register how they found that the MAC randomization system of Bluetooth LE, designed to thwart the tracking of devices, transmits packages of data that can still be used to uniquely identify, and thus track the location of a mobile phone or PC. More at The Register

By Peter Atwood Community member Cities We live in an incredibly complicated and interconnected world. Networks stretching across land, sea, and air let us travel and share goods and ideas around the world. More

By Timothy B. Lee "I don't understand how this is possible," an expert said of Facebook's approach. Getty / Aurich Lawson Libra's future remains murky. Facebook is months away—at least—from actually launching a network. The documents Facebook released in June left a lot of unanswered questions about how the network will actually work—and in particular, how the network will deal with the wide range of legal and regulatory requirements that apply to payment networks. More at Ars Technica

By Dan Goodin Researchers detect 4.6 million attempts over 2 months in Brazil alone. source unclear, GNU Free Documentation License. D-Link's DI-514 802.11b router. It was a perfectly cromulent router for its time... but those were dark days, friend, dark days indeed. source unclear, GNU Free Documentation License. Website driveby attacks that try to boobytrap visitors’ routers are alive and well, according to antivirus provider Avast, which blocked more than 4.6 million of them in Brazil over a two-month span. The attacks come from compromised websites or malicious ads that attempt to use cross-site request forgery attacks to change the domain name system settings of visitors’ routers. When successful, the malicious DNS settings redirect targets to websites that spoof Netflix and a host of banks. Over the first half of the year, Avast software detected more than 180,000 routers in Brazil that had hijacked DNS settings, the company reported. More at Ars Techni...

By Cory Doctorow Everyone in the tech world claims to love interoperability—the technical ability to plug one product or service into another product or service—but interoperability covers a lot of territory, and depending on what's meant by interoperability, it can do a lot, a little, or nothing at all to protect users, innovation and fairness. More at Electronic Frontier Foundation

By Simon Dubé, Dave Anctil Shutterstock Advances in sex robots and technologies have applications in health care, education and research. Science fiction films such as Blade Runner (1982), Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and Her (2013) explore the advent of human-machine relationships. And in recent years, reality has met fiction. More at The Conversation

By Ron Amadeo "I expect this will be fixed in a future board revision," says co-creator. Raspberry Pi The Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 4 was announced two weeks ago as a major new upgrade to the line of cheap single-board hobbyist computers. The Pi 4 featured a faster CPU, options for up to 4GB of RAM, and a new, modern USB-C port for power delivery. The Pi 4 was the Raspberry Pi Foundation's first ever USB-C device, and, well, they screwed it up. More at Ars Technica

By Julie Muncy Walt Disney Studios Mulan’s ready to fight. The first trailer for Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan is here, and it’s gorgeous. In a sweeping ninety seconds, the trailer showcases big, beautiful settings and an attention to detail that makes the remake look more like a period film than a Disney adaptation. Mulan, played by Yifeu Lu, goes from quiet daughter to epic warrior. The trailer teases really sweeping fights, too, real Wuxia-type stuff, and you can absolutely see that stylistic influence on the shooting here. More at io9 - Gizmodo

By Haydn Watters · CBC News · Wade Anderson hopes to cover 32 states, 5 provinces and territories in 2 months Haydn Watters/CBC Wade Anderson is in the middle of an epic two-month road trip to extreme points around North America in his Tesla. He hopes to hit 32 states and five provinces and territories. The Tucson, Ariz., man is three weeks into a two-month road trip around the continent in his electric car, a Tesla Model 3. He left from Tucson last month and has already hit the southernmost and eastermost points in the continental U.S. — with many more "extremes" in his sights. More at CBC News

By Yessenia Funes Benjamin Currie (G/O Media) Summertime is officially here, baby. You know what that means: long days, beach tans, and wild ass energy bills. Keeping cool don’t come cheap—not for your pocket and definitely not for the planet. More at Earther - Gizmodo

By Catherine Hours E-scooters touted as zero-carbon urban transport are flooding city streets worldwide, but just how green they are remains an open question. The companies—from multinationals to local start-ups—distributing them insist the omnipresent two-wheel vehicles are a boon for the environment and a curb on global warming. More at Phys.org

By Kyle Rankin What happens when you're locked in to a vendor that's too big to fail, but is on the opposite end of a trade war? Vendor lock-in isn't new, but until the last decade or so, it generally was thought of by engineers as a bad thing. Companies would take advantage the fact that you used one of their products that was legitimately good to use the rest of their products that may or may not be as good as those from their competitors. People felt the pain of being stuck with inferior products and rebelled. More at Linux Journal

By Hazel Ward Electric scooters first hit the streets of Paris in June 2018 and now there are an estimated 20,000 of them across the city Cheap, widely available and easily unlocked with a smartphone app, e-scooters checked all the boxes, becoming wildly popular overnight. More at Phys.org