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Almost 40 million people around the world have contracted Covid-19 and more than a million have died from the virus. The devastation has rippled even further, thanks to a global recession and rising political unrest. And as all of this unfolds, new research indicates that the governments around the world have exploited the pandemic to expand their domestic surveillance capabilities and curtail internet freedom and speech. From a report: The human and digital rights watchdog Freedom House today published its annual "Freedom on the Net" report, which tracks the ebb and flow of censorship laws, net neutrality protections, internet shutdowns, and more around the world. This year's report, which covers the period from June 2019 through May 2020, encompasses not only the Covid-19 pandemic but the trade war between the US and China, which has resulted in a dramatic acceleration of the cyber sovereignty movement. Combined with numerous other geopolitical clashes that have impacted digital rights, Freedom House found that global internet freedom has been broadly curtailed in 2020. "Political leaders used the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on free expression and limit access to information," Freedom House director for democracy and technology Adrian Shahbaz told reporters ahead of the report's release. "We traced three commonly used tactics. First in at least 45 countries, activists, journalists, and other members of the public were arrested or charged with criminal offenses for online speech related to the pandemic. Second in at least 20 countries governments cited the pandemic emergency to impose vague or overly broad speech restrictions. Third, governments in at least 28 countries censored websites and social media posts to censor unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

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San Francisco-based Dropbox announced this week that it will stop asking employees to come into its offices and instead make remote work the standard practice, even after the coronavirus pandemic ends. From a report: "Remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work," the company said in a blog post. For employees who need to meet or work together in person, the company is setting up "Dropbox Studios" in San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Dublin when it's safe to do so. The company extended its mandatory work-from-home policy through June 2021. "We'll have Studios in all locations we currently have offices -- whether they're dedicated spaces in places we currently have long-term leases and a high concentration of employees (San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and Dublin to start) or on-demand spaces in other geographies," the company said. Dropbox had more than 2,800 employees as of Dec. 31, according to its latest 8K.

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The European Union has opened up the .eu internet registry for a new owner, offering a five-year contract to oversee its 3.6 million domain names from October 2022. From a report: The EC's Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies announced the rebid last week and its director of future networks, Pearse O'Donohue, has been pushing the issue to the DNS industry -- including personally contacting registry operators to encourage them to apply. It is just the latest in a series of rebids for major internet address spaces in recent years -- several of which have been shrouded in claims of corruption, backroom deals and legal threats, including Colombia's .co, India's .in and Australia's .au domains. In the worst example, Colombia's technology minister was accused of cutting a secret deal with US corporation Afilias ahead of its retender: an accusation that gained credence when the Colombian government's own documents contained unexplained references to a different Afilias contract. The government's documents also showed it has used the wrong registration figures for its own internet space and had skewed the process to favor Afilias. Afilias ended up withdrawing from the bid and the contract was re-awarded to US-based Neustar.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Whether or not you live in Massachusetts, you should be paying attention to a very important vote coming up in November's election. Not for president, or senator, or even city council -- no, Question 1 is a proposition that could dramatically strengthen or weaken the state's landmark right-to-repair law that previously forced automakers to make it easier for you to get your car fixed. Essentially, Massachusetts voters are deciding on whether or not to add "mechanical" vehicle telematics data -- realtime updates from a car's sundry sensors transmitted to an automaker's private servers -- to the list of things OEMs have to share with independent mechanics. Telematics data was purposefully excluded from the original 2013 law, but as cars have gotten more computerized over the last decade, that gap in coverage has grown more pronounced. The full information about what is appearing on the ballot can be found here. Voting "Yes" to Question 1 would expand access to wirelessly transmitted mechanical data regarding vehicle maintenance and repair. But what makes this a big deal for those outside Massachusetts is that the amendment will require automakers who want to do business in the state to make that data accessible through a smartphone app for owners starting in 2022. Remember, it was the 2013 law's passage that forced automakers to adopt a nationwide right-to-repair standard. Could the same happen with open-access telematics data, which will only grow in importance as more cars add on driver-assist features? Pro-Question 1 organization Massachusetts Right to Repair argues the amendment would futureproof the law for consumers and independent repair shops beyond the state's borders. "Voting 'No' would make no change to governing access over wirelessly transmitted vehicle data, meaning automakers would be under no obligation to provide a standard that consumers could use to analyze diagnostic information other than what is currently provided through the vehicle's OBDII port," adds The Drive. "[T]he Coalition for Safe and Secure Data has shelled out at least $25.8 million to oppose Question 1, reportedly receiving large seven-figure donations from General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda and Nissan. Go figure."

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KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available, bringing a bunch of refinements as well as some larger features. Some of the KDE Plasma 5.20 highlights include (via Phoronix): - Numerous fixes to the KWin window manager / compositor including a number of Wayland fixes. Among the Wayland work in Plasma 5.20 includes Klipper support and middle-click paste, mouse and touchpad support nearly on par to X11, window thumbnails in the task manager, crash fixes, and more. - Improved notifications. - Different redesigns and additions to the KDE System Settings from SMART monitoring to better looking interfaces. - Redesigned on-screen displays. - Various tack manager and system tray improvements. More information about KDE 5.20 is available here.

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Netflix has ended free trials for new customers in the U.S., after years of giving away the first month of its service free. CNET reports: The streaming service's U.S. sign-up page said trials are no longer available, with Netflix instead touting how it lets you cancel anytime at not cost. "We're looking at different marketing promotions in the United States to attract new members and give them a great Netflix experience," a Netflix spokeswoman said Tuesday. The end of free trials in the U.S. was reported earlier Tuesday by TV Answer Man. Netflix, the world's biggest subscription video service with more than 192 million paying members, was increasingly an outlier among its rivals by offering a month-long free trial. As a raft of new rival services have launched in the last year, many set their free trial periods at a single week, including HBO Max and NBCUniversal's Peacock. And Disney Plus, as strong growth lifted its number of subscribers above its initial projections way earlier than expected, stopped offering free trials altogether in June.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Decades before Twitter threads, Reddit forums, or Facebook groups, there was Usenet: an early-internet, pre-Web discussion system where one could start and join conversations much like today's message boards. Launched in 1980, Usenet is the creation of two Duke University students who wanted to communicate between decentralized, local servers -- and it's still active today. On Usenet, people talk about everything, from nanotech science to soap operas, wine, and UFOs. Jozef Jarosciak, a systems architect based in Ontario, had his first encounter with Usenet in 2000, when he found a full-time job in Canada thanks to a job posting there. This week, Jarosciak uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet. Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer's UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that'd be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It's currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups, according to the site -- and Jarosciak estimates it'll eventually hold close to 1 billion posts.

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According to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a man in the U.S. caught COVID-19 for a second time and had a worse bout of illness. MIT Technology Review reports: The 25-year-old man tested positive for the first time on April 18, after experiencing several weeks of symptoms including sore throat, cough, headache, nausea, and diarrhea. He felt fully recovered by April 27, and tested negative for the virus on both May 9 and 26. But just two days later, on May 28, he developed symptoms again, this time with fever and dizziness too. He tested positive on June 5 and needed to be hospitalized after his lungs were unable to get enough oxygen into his body, causing hypoxia and shortness of breath. He had no underlying health conditions. The man has now recovered. Being infected once does not mean you're protected from being infected again, even if such cases are still vanishingly rare, with just five identified out of nearly 40 million confirmed cases worldwide. That means people who have had covid-19 still need to stay vigilant, following the advice on social distancing, wearing face masks, and avoiding crowded, poorly ventilated spaces. This was not altogether unexpected: coronavirus experts warned us that other coronaviruses, such as the common cold, are seasonal. However, there are still many questions that researchers are racing to answer. How much protection does having covid-19 confer? Is that mainly through antibodies or T cells? How long does protection last? What does it mean for the medical treatments that are being developed, or for vaccines? Will we all require a yearly shot rather than a one-off vaccine, for example? If nothing else, this new case is a reminder of how much about this virus we still don't know.

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If you're one of the Google Drive users who is taking advantage of unlimited storage for $12 per month on G Suite, beware. Workspace is replacing G Suite and offers more features for those who do, but you might not want to switch: unlimited storage on Workspace will cost you at least $20 a month. Jaron Schneider reports via PetaPixel: Currently G Suite business subscribers (which do not need to be actual businesses, but any individuals looking for greater storage capacity) can access unlimited storage on Drive for just $12 a month. For photographers with considerable backlogs of photos, this was a relatively inexpensive cloud storage backup solution. Google states in its plans that groups using this particular plan with four or fewer members are supposed to be only eligible for 1 TB of storage each, but in testing by Android Police and others have shown that Google has never enforced that limit. Unfortunately, this appears to be changing with the transition to Workplace. According to the company's list of plans, which you can view here, there is a limit of 2 TB for individual Business Standard users and 5 TB per person on its new Business Plus plan. To get more, you will have to go to the Enterprise level which Google says requires you to work directly with a Google sales representative (this appears to actually be the case), but Google does promise they can offer as much storage "as you need" in this category. That doesn't explicitly say unlimited, but should realistically operate as such for now. Pricing in that Enterprise level will cost you $20 per month ($30 per month on Enterprise Plus), nearly double the previous price for the same amount of storage. For now, G Suite customers will be able to stick with their current plans if they do not switch to Workplace, but Google is intending to transition all users over to the new system eventually.

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ttyler writes: As MacRumors reports, Apple's new HomePod Mini supports Thread networking technology. "Thread is a low-power IP-based networking technology for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering a secure, mesh-based system that makes it easy to build an ecosystem of devices," reports MacRumors. "While Thread is essentially agnostic to the application layers that run on top of it, it can support multiple layers and may play a role in Project Connected Home over IP, the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant." In a footprint on the specs page, Apple says that HomePod mini's Thread support is limited to HomeKit devices, "so the technology can't yet be leveraged cross-platform and it remains to be seen how Apple will embrace Thread going forward," adds MacRumors.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Netflix is killing its most interesting shows in their infancy and it could be the streaming giant's downfall. In the seven years that Netflix has produced original content, the world of TV streaming has dramatically changed. Now Netflix is getting left behind in the race it started. Many of its unique and ambitious shows have been canceled before they could reach their full potential. And Netflix keeps churning out more shows each year, without replicating the breakout success of 2016's "Stranger Things." Statements from executives have described the cancellations as the result of a cost analysis that tells Netflix a longer-running show won't lead to new subscribers. Still, with syndicated shows such as "The Office" and "Friends" leaving its platform and a string of disappointing cancellations, including "Glow," Netflix has set itself up for a disaster when it comes to its reputation as a TV-watcher's must-have service. In 2020 alone, Netflix has canceled 18 original series. Of those, 14 had only one season. [...] TV lovers in these fandoms can only be burned so many times before they stop investing. Why should a Netflix subscriber spend 10 hours watching a new show if there's a decent chance they'll never see it end?

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Facebook will ban anti-vaccine ads in an effort to combat misinformation and support public health experts, the social media platform announced in a statement on Tuesday. Axios reports: The company now says it doesn't want these ads on its platform, but the policy does not apply to influencers who experts say drive a significant amount of organic misinformation about vaccines. "Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts," the social media platform said. "We already don't allow ads with vaccine hoaxes that have been publicly identified by leading global health organizations." "Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we'll reject it. Enforcement will begin over the next few days." "Ads that advocate for or against legislation or government policies around vaccines -- including a COVID-19 vaccine -- are still allowed."

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Apple has announced a new version of its HomePod smart speaker, the $99 HomePod mini -- a smaller version of the speaker that shrinks down the original model into a more compact size. The Verge reports: Like the full-size HomePod, the HomePod mini still features a mesh fabric exterior in both black and white colors, along with a small display on top to show the Siri waveform and volume controls. The new model is more of a short, spherical shape, however, instead of the oblong design of the original. The HomePod mini features one main driver, two passive radiators, and an "acoustic waveguide" on the bottom. The new HomePod mini also features an Apple S5 chip, which Apple says allows for "computational audio" processing to adjust how your music sounds 180 times per second. Multiple HomePod mini speakers can play music in sync and "intelligently" create stereo pairing when placed in the same room. Apple is also using the U1 chips that it debuted in last year's iPhones to create a better Handoff experience later this year. Apple said third-party support is coming later this year for Pandora, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. There's also a new "Intercom" feature that allows for customers with multiple HomePod devices in different rooms to communicate throughout the house. "Intercom messages will also appear on connected iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches (although they won't immediately play out loud like they do on the HomePod mini)," adds The Verge. Preorders for the HomePod Mini start on November 6th and shipping begins on November 16th.

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Over a video call, Finnish start-up Soletair Power showed Ars Technica their machine that converts office-air carbon dioxide into fuel. Scott K. Johnson reports: The value proposition for the first part of the device is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide accumulates in buildings full of people, and higher CO2 concentrations may impact your ability to think clearly. The usual way to manage that is to introduce more outside air (which may need to be heated/cooled). Another could be to selectively filter out CO2. This device could do the latter for you. That CO2 could simply be vented outside or used to produce an unwieldy amount of seltzer. Instead, what makes Soletair's idea more interesting is that the rest of its device turns the CO2 into fuel. The configuration the company demonstrated makes methane but could be swapped for a liquid fuel process. Depending on the source of the energy running the machines, these fuels could be carbon-neutral since the carbon comes from the air. Whether it's economically viable is another question. The CO2 capture technique they're using is a scaled-down version of those designed for combustion power plants. Air goes through a chamber full of small granules that contain amines -- compounds that bind with CO2 molecules. Periodically, the granules are cycled through a heating step. The temperature only needs to rise to shy of 120C, Soletair's Petri Laakso and Cyril Bajamundi told Ars, so steam from the local heat system and/or an electric heating element is sufficient. This makes the amine granules release the CO2 they're holding, which accumulates in a storage tank. The granules are then ready to absorb more CO2. The other two-thirds of the machine, which measures about 2 meters tall, 5 meters long, and 1 meter wide, deal with turning that CO2 into a usable fuel. First, there's an electrolyzer that splits water to make hydrogen gas. Then hydrogen is combined with CO2 in a methanation reactor to produce pure methane gas.

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A network of scientists is chasing the pandemic's holy grail: an antibody that protects against not just the virus, but also related pathogens that may threaten humans. From a report: Dozens of companies and academic groups are racing to develop antibody therapies. Already Regeneron and the drug company Eli Lilly have requested emergency use authorizations for their products from the Food and Drug Administration. These drug companies have the long experience and deep pockets needed to win the race for a powerful antibody treatment. But some scientists are betting on a dark horse: Prometheus, a ragtag group of scientists who are months behind in the competition -- and yet may ultimately deliver the most powerful antibody. Prometheus is a collaboration between academic labs, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and a New Hampshire-based antibody company called Adimab. The group's antibody is not expected to be in human trials until late December, but it may be worth the wait. Unlike the antibodies made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, which fade in the body within weeks, Prometheus's antibody aims to be effective for up to six months. "A single dose goes a long way, meaning we can treat more people," said Kartik Chandran, a virologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the group's leader.

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Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude. From a report: Inside a lab at Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy, there are a half dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets designed to kill batteries as fast as they can. Each holds around 100 lithium-ion cells secured in trays that can charge and discharge the batteries dozens of times per day. Ordinarily, the batteries that go into these electrochemical torture chambers would be found inside gadgets or electric vehicles, but when they're put in these hulking machines, they aren't powering anything at all. Instead, energy is dumped in and out of these cells as fast as possible to generate reams of performance data that will teach artificial intelligence how to build a better battery. In 2019, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the Toyota Research Institute used AI trained on data generated from these machines to predict the performance of lithium-ion batteries over the lifetime of the cells before their performance had started to slip. Ordinarily, AI would need data from after a battery had started to degrade in order to predict how it would perform in the future. It might take months to cycle the battery enough times to get that data. But the researchers' AI could predict lifetime performance after only hours of data collection, while the battery was still at its peak. "Prior to our work, nobody thought that was possible," says William Chueh, a materials scientist at Stanford and one of the lead authors of the 2019 paper. And earlier this year, Chueh and his colleagues did it again. In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Many experts think fast-charging batteries will be critical for electric vehicle adoption, but dumping enough energy to recharge a cell in the same amount of time it takes to fill up a tank of gas can quickly kill its performance. To get fast-charging batteries out of the lab and into the real world means finding the sweet spot between charge speed and battery lifetime. The problem is that there is effectively an infinite number of ways to deliver charge to a battery; Chueh compares it to searching for the best way to pour water into a bucket. Experimentally sifting through all those possibilities to find the best one is a slow and arduous task -- but that's where AI can help.

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With the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro models no longer shipping with a power adapter, Apple has started selling the 20W USB-C power adapter that was first introduced with the iPad Air on a standalone basis for $19. From a report: The 20W power adapter is included in the box with the iPad Air, but those who want one for use with the new iPhone models will need to shell out $19. All of the new iPhone 12 models and older iPhone models ship only with a USB-C to Lightning cable, with customers expected to provide their own power adapters. Most people likely have several USB-C power adapters on hand from past device purchases, but this will be an inconvenience for those who have few power adapters available already.

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Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons. But there is one subject that employees avoid at all costs: antitrust. The New York Times: They don't address it in emails. They don't bring it up in big company meetings. They are regularly reminded that Google doesn't "crush," "kill," "hurt" or "block" the competition. And if you hope to land an executive job at the internet company, do not bring up the A-word in the interview process. As the Justice Department, a coalition of state attorneys general and a congressional subcommittee have investigated Google for monopoly behavior over the last year, there has been little discussion internally about antitrust concerns. Now, as the department prepares to file a lawsuit against the company, the usual forums where Google employees debate anything and everything have been startlingly subdued about what may be an existential threat to it. That's because Google's leaders have made it clear that antitrust is not a topic to be trifled with.

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Virginia's voter-registration website went offline Tuesday on the state's last day to register before the Nov. 3 election, in what officials attributed to an accidental cutting of a fiber-optic cable. From a report: The Virginia Information Technologies Agency said that the Verizon cable was inadvertently struck during work for a roadside utilities project and that several agencies were affected. The Virginia Department of Elections didn't immediately respond to a request asking if the deadline to register, originally set for the end of Tuesday, would be extended once service was restored. Voters can also register using a paper application. In recent weeks, voter-registration websites in Florida and Pennsylvania, both considered potentially decisive swing states for the presidential election, crashed due, officials said, to glitches. Florida extended the deadline to register to vote after its registration website malfunctioned. The state's secretary of state cited unprecedented traffic to the site as the cause.

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At a virtual event on Tuesday, Apple unveiled the new iPhone lineup: the iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max. The new iPhones feature recent generation iPad Pro-like design. They all support 5G. The iPhone 12 mini, the most affordable handset in the new lineup, starts at $699. The iPhone 12 Pro Max, the most expensive, starts at $1,099. The company said it is also lowering the price of last year's iPhone 11, which not starts at $599. More details: Apple debuts iPhone 12 family, focusing on 5G and 5nm chips. Apple brings back MagSafe, sparks interest in magnetic phone charging. Apple cuts iPhone XR and iPhone 11 prices by $100, kills iPhone 11 Pro.

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