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China this week blocked the Wikimedia Foundation's application for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, IP, trademarks, patents and related issues. As a result of the block, the Foundation's application for observer status has been suspended and will be reconsidered at a future WIPO meeting in 2021. Wikimedia Foundation: China was the only country to raise objections to the accreditation of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official observer. Their last-minute objections claimed Wikimedia's application was incomplete, and suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was carrying out political activities via the volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. The United Kingdom and the United States voiced support for the Foundation's application. WIPO's work, which shapes international laws and policies that affect the sharing of free knowledge, impacts Wikipedia's ability to provide hundreds of millions of people with information in their own languages. The Wikimedia Foundation's absence from these meetings further separates those people from global events that shape their access to knowledge.

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Michael Ilseman, an engineer on the Swift Standard Library team at Apple, writes: In June, Apple introduced Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types. Today, I'm excited to announce that we're open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms.

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A group of high-profile Facebook critics on Friday announced the launch of what they are calling the "Real Facebook Oversight Board," an effort that aims to counter an independent board established by Facebook last year to oversee its decisions on content moderation. From a report: The opposing effort represents how political the fight between Facebook and its critics has become in the lead-up to the presidential election. The group includes leaders from the Stop Hate for Profit boycott, like Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, as well as prominent Facebook critics like Roger McNamee and some journalists and pundits. The new oversight board rival cites an "urgent threat to democracy" leading up to its launch. It criticizes the independent oversight board, funded by Facebook, for its delayed launch. The board is billing its formation as an "emergency response" to urgent issues like voter suppression, election security and misinformation. The first of its meetings -- which appear to be more like media events than deliberations on content decisions -- will be held next week, broadcast on Facebook Live, with New York Times columnist Kara Swisher hosting. The response comes just after the actual Facebook-funded appeals board announced that it would be launching earlier than expected. [...] A document obtained by Axios that appears to be a pitch deck for the project alleges that the Facebook-funded oversight board is "little more than a corporate whitewashing exercise."

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Twitter is notifying developers today about a possible security incident that may have impacted their accounts. From a report: The incident was caused by incorrect instructions that the developer.twitter.com website sent to users' browsers. The developer.twitter.com website is the portal where developers manage their Twitter apps and attached API keys, but also the access token and secret key for their Twitter account. In an email sent to developers today, Twitter said that its developer.twitter.com website told browsers to create and store copies of the API keys, account access token, and account secret inside their cache, a section of the browser where data is saved to speed up the process of loading the page when the user accessed the same site again. This might not be a problem for developers using their own browsers, but Twitter is warning developers who may have used public or shared computers to access the developer.twitter.com website -- in which case, their API keys are now most likely stored in those browsers.

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Facebook executives have sharply ramped up their criticism of Apple in recent months, contesting the iPhone maker's restrictions on gaming apps and ad targeting, as well as its cut of in-app purchases. Now, emboldened by Apple software changes that suggest it is starting to bend, Facebook wants something else: the option to make its Messenger app the default messaging tool on iPhones [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "We feel people should be able to choose different messaging apps and the default on their phone," Stan Chudnovsky, the Facebook vice president in charge of its Messenger app, told The Information. "Generally, everything is moving this direction anyway." Chudnovksy said Facebook has asked Apple over the years to consider opening up default messaging. Apple has never agreed. Apple's Messages app is a core feature of its mobile software that encourages people to keep buying its devices, and the app's encryption of messages is also a cornerstone of the company's privacy pitch to consumers. Google's rival Android mobile operating system already lets users choose their default messaging app.

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Google informed its advertisers Friday that it will broadly block election ads after polls close Nov. 3, according to an email obtained by Axios. From a report: Big Tech platforms have been under pressure to address how their ad policies will handle conflicts over the presidential election's outcome. Facebook recently said that it will no longer accept new political ads for the week leading up to Election Day, but it will not block election ads after the polls close. It will, however, reject ads from U.S. political campaigns prematurely claiming victory before results have been declared, per Fast Company. In the email, Google says that advertisers will not be able to run ads "referencing candidates, the election, or its outcome, given that an unprecedented amount of votes will be counted after election day this year." The policy, which is intended to block all ads related to the election, will apply to all ads running through Google's ad-serving platforms, including Google Ads, DV360, YouTube, and AdX Authorized Buyer.

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The U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge in San Francisco early on Friday to allow the government to bar Apple and Google from offering WeChat for download in U.S. app stores pending an appeal. From a report: The filing asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to put on hold her preliminary injunction issued Saturday. That injunction blocked the U.S. Commerce Department order which was set to take effect late on Sept. 20 and that would also bar other U.S. transactions with Tencent's WeChat, potentially making the app unusable in the United States. The Justice Department filing said Beeler's order was in error and "permits the continued, unfettered use of WeChat, a mobile application that the Executive Branch has determined constitutes a threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States." Tencent had put forward a "mitigation proposal" that sought to create a new U.S. version of the app, deploy specific security measures to protect the new apps source code, partner with a U.S. cloud provider for user data storage, and manage the new app through a U.S.-based entity, the filing said.

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New submitter kyubre writes: Seagate has unveiled CORTX, an open-source S3-compatible object storage software, today at their Datasphere virtual event. The source for this software-defined-storage (SDS) platform is hosted on Github. Seagate has also organized a group of open source researchers and developers in this space under the 'CORTX Community' moniker. As part of the Github repository, Seagate is providing a pre-built virtual machine image that enables users to get a quick start with testing. Seagate is a hardware vendor at its core, and as part of the CORTX initiative, it is also introducing the Lyve Drive Rack - a reference architecture supported by Seagate and available later this year with 20TB HAMR drives. The Lyve Drive Rack is expected to serve a variety of use-cases including backup/restore, big data and analytics, AI & ML, file sharing and synchronization, as well as video surveillance. Each rack node can support up to 106 drives, and a cluster can scale up as necessary.

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Google plans to push harder for developers to give the company a cut of in-app purchases through its Play app store, according to people with knowledge of the move. From a report: The Alphabet unit plans to issue updated guidelines as early as next week that clarify a requirement for most apps to use Google's billing service for in-app content downloads, game upgrades and subscriptions. This system gives the company a 30% cut of purchases inside of apps on Android. While this requirement has existed for years, some major developers including Netflix, Spotify, Match Group and Epic Games, have circumvented the rule. Netflix and Spotify apps prompt consumers to pay using a credit card, rather than their Play app store account, bypassing Google's fee. Last year, Match Group's Tinder dating app launched a similar payment process. More recently, Epic Games started letting players buy in-game upgrades for its Fortnite video game via a method that paid Epic directly. In response, Google and Apple pulled Fortnite from their app stores and Epic sued both tech giants.

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Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Gizmodo Australia reports: On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP. Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window's XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote 'sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked'. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent, assisting in its spread. While there is no confirmation that this code is definitely Windows XP, independent researchers have begun to pick through the source code and believe it stands up to scrutiny. The Windows XP source code is not the only code which might have leaked. A screenshot of the torrent files contains files and folders named, Xbox, Windows Research Kernel, MS DOS 6.0, Windows NT 3.5 and 4 source code, Windows Embedded and CE and many others. If true, that could spell a disaster for Microsoft because large chunks of Windows XP source code are still used in Windows 10, and as for Open Source, this leak could become a boom for Wine development because Microsoft is notorious for having a great number of internal APIs and various hacks in their APIs which make it difficult to reimplement them properly.

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EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Friday appealed a court ruling dismissing her order to iPhone maker Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in Irish back taxes, a landmark case in the European Commission's crackdown against sweetheart tax deals. From a report: The Luxembourg-based General Court in July scrapped the Commission's 2016 ruling, saying that EU competition enforcers had not met the requisite legal standard to show that Apple had enjoyed an unfair advantage. Vestager said the case was important, a sign that her drive to get multinationals pay their fair share of taxes would continue unabated. "The General Court judgment raises important legal issues that are of relevance to the Commission in its application of State aid rules to tax planning cases," she said in a statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook announced on Thursday that it has taken down three "coordinated inauthentic behavior" networks promoting disinformation that included nearly 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts along with dozens of Facebook Pages and Groups. While the efforts were seemingly run independently, and focused primarily outside of the US, each has ties to Russian intelligence -- and they collectively provide a sobering echo of the social media assault that roiled the 2016 election. The networks Facebook tackled dated back at least three years, but most had few followers at the time they were caught. They primarily promoted non-Facebook websites in an apparent effort to get around the platform's detection mechanisms, focusing on news and current events, particularly geopolitics. They targeted users in a number of countries, including Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Japan, the UK, and Belarus, as well as the United States to a lesser extent. Facebook attributed one of the disinformation distribution networks to "actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in 'DC leaks' in 2016." In other words, the actors were likely tied to Fancy Bear, also known as APT 28, the group also responsible for hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Facebook attributes the second network to "individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency," the so-called troll farm that wreaked havoc on Facebook in 2016. The company noted that it is unclear whether the IRA is still an active entity or what form it takes at this point. The third network had "links to individuals in Russia, including those associated with Russian intelligence services." None of the networks focused solely on the US. Instead, they engaged with a broad array of topics connected to Russian interests, including the war in Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the election and protests in Belarus, Russia's relationship with NATO, and politics in Turkey.

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A giant Gundam in Japan's Port of Yokohama is now able to "pick up its legs to walk, bend its knees, turn its head, and contort its fingers to mime hand signals," reports Popular Mechanics. The 60-foot robot is the largest in the world. From the report: Inspired by the fictional Japanese robot of the same name -- which has appeared in over 50 TV series and movies since 1979, as well as many manga comics and video games -- this Gundam features a staggering 24 degrees of freedom. People in Japan have caught and shared a few glimpses of the engineering marvel. Considering the Gundam weighs about 25 tons, it's pretty insane to watch it raise both arms in the air and pick itself back up after kneeling. Those efficiencies are thanks to precise engineering and design work, as outlined in a series of YouTube videos from Gundam Factory Yokohama. In one installment, the engineers give a tour of where they designed, built, and assembled the Gundam. The videos are a great way to really contextualize the size of this monster; from the metal fingertip to where the wrist will connect, for example, the hand is about 6.5 feet wide.

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Rose Pastore reporting via Gizmodo: A new way of producing powerful X-ray beams -- the brightest on Earth -- is now making it possible to create 3D images of matter at astounding resolutions. This "Extremely Brilliant Source" officially opened last month at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, and scientists are already using it to study the coronavirus behind covid-19. These X-ray beams will image the interiors of fossils, brains, batteries, and countless other interesting items down to the atomic scale, revealing unprecedented information and supercharging scientific research. A typical medical X-ray, like you would get for a broken bone, can show doctors details about your particular fracture and the tissue around it. X-rays penetrate the body and are absorbed at different rates by different tissue; once they've passed through you, they hit a detector, creating the familiar black-and-white X-ray image. The Extremely Brilliant Source produces X-rays 10 trillion times more powerful than those used in hospitals. With such a beam, scientists could create a 3D image of your broken bone so detailed that they could see the individual atoms in the blood cells surrounding your fracture. Of course, you wouldn't want to be hit with this particular beam -- the dose of radiation would be fatal. The possibilities that the Extremely Brilliant Source opens up feel endless. One area that particularly excites Francesco Sette, director general of the ESRF, is research into the structure and functioning of brains, which could eventually enable brain-like electronics. "It would be a major revolution, not only for neuroscience, but also for all those applications that are coming up to use possibly the human brain architecture for a new generation of devices," he said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more." Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

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Saad Bhamla, an undergraduate in Mumbai, India, has invented a do-it-yourself hearing aid made from inexpensive, easy-to-find parts. "At bulk rates, Bhamla says, it would cost just under $1 to make," reports Science Magazine. "But anyone with the freely available blueprints and a soldering iron can make their own for not much more -- maybe $15 or $20, Bhamla says." From the report: Inspired by his grandparents and a hearing-impaired colleague -- who is the first author on the new paper -- Bhamla and his team set out to develop a cheap hearing aid built with off-the-shelf parts. They soldered a microphone onto a small circuit board to capture nearby sound and added an amplifier and a frequency filter to specifically increase the volume of high-pitch sounds above 1000 hertz. Then they added a volume control, an on/off switch, and an audio jack for plugging in standard earphones, as well as a battery holder. The device, dubbed LoCHAid, is the size of a matchbox and can be worn like a necklace. Next, Bhamla and his colleagues tested the device. They found that it boosted the volume of high-pitch sounds by 15 decibels while preserving volumes at lower pitches. It also filtered out interference and sudden, loud sounds like dog barks and car horns. Finally, tests with an artificial ear revealed that LoCHAid might improve speech recognition, by bringing conversations closer to the quality heard by healthy individuals. It complied with five out of six of the World Health Organization's preferred product recommendations for hearing aids, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE. There are some drawbacks. The device can't be fine-tuned for individual needs, and the researchers anticipate that LoCHAid's parts will wear out after about a year and a half. It's also bulky, though a smaller version is in development. Bhamla notes that it needs to be clinically tested before his device can be sold as a "hearing aid" in the United States.

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The supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy has a shadow crescent that moves, like a dancer in the dark. From a report: Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four continents, the collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope managed to peer 53 million light-years away and look at a supermassive black hole, which is 6.5 million times the mass of the sun and sits at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The fiery historic image showed off a bright crescent of ultra-hot gas and debris orbiting the black hole's event horizon, the pitch-black central point-of-no-return that traps anything that goes over, even light. The EHT team had just made one of the most impressive achievements in the history of astronomy, but this was only the beginning. On Wednesday, members of the EHT collaboration published new findings in the Astrophysical Journal about M87's supermassive black hole (known as M87*), revealing two new major insights. First, the shadow diameter of the event horizon doesn't change over time, which is exactly what Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts for a supermassive black hole of M87*'s size. However, the second insight is that the bright crescent adorning this shadow is far from stable: it wobbles. There's so much turbulent matter surrounding M87* that it makes sense the crescent would bug out and get fidgety. But the fact that we can watch it over time means we now have an established method for studying the physics of one of the most extreme kinds of environment in the entire universe.

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MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090, which just launched this morning, is the single most powerful graphics card money can buy currently (almost). It sits at the top of NVIDIA's product stack, and according to the company, it enables new experiences like smooth 8K gaming and seamless processing of massive content creation workloads, thanks in part to its 24GB of on-board GDDR6X memory. A graphics card like the GeForce RTX 3090 isn't for everyone, however. Though its asking price is about a $1,000 lower than its previous-gen, Turing-based Titan RTX counterpart, it is still out of reach for most gamers. That said, content creation and workstation rendering professionals can more easily justify its cost. In performance testing fresh off the NDA lift, versus the GeForce RTX 3080 that arrived last week, the more powerful RTX 3090's gains range from about 4% to 20%. Versus the more expensive previous generation Titan RTX though, the GeForce RTX 3090's advantages increase to approximately 6% to 40%. When you factor in complex creator workloads that can leverage the GeForce RTX 3090's additional resources and memory, however, it can be many times faster than either the RTX 3080 or Titan RTX. The GeForce RTX 3090 will be available in limited quantities today but the company pledges to make more available directly and through OEM board partners as soon as possible.

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Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that claimed the company collected and stored facial templates for its users between June 7, 2011, and Aug. 19, 2020, when the settlement was approved. "Individuals could be eligible for cash payouts of $200 to $400," reports Patch. From the report: In 2015, lawsuits were filed against Facebook over its use of "face tagging" feature. Plaintiffs claimed that Facebook was collecting biometric information ("face prints") without getting proper consent required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Facebook disputed the allegations. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Donato gave preliminary approval to a $650 million settlement, out of which class members can claim money. Facebook has also agreed to change its practices. It's not known how much individual class members will receive, but Edelson PC predicts an individual will get $200 to $400. A household with four eligible people could receive as much as $800 to $1,600. To participate in the settlement, a person need only have been a Facebook user located in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored biometric information after June 7, 2011. Eligible participants must submit a claim form by Nov. 23, 2020. It takes under two minutes to fill out a claim form online or send it in. More information is forthcoming.

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Amazon appears to be making good on its effort to keep tightening privacy for its Alexa-powered devices, even after the hot-button issue has cooled down this year. From a report: The most notable change is a new option to automatically delete your voice recordings immediately after they are processed by Alexa. A written transcript of these recordings will still be available for 30 days but can be deleted anytime you want. This feature, which is available starting Thursday, builds on Amazon's other auto-delete functions, which let a customer delete Alexa voice recordings on a rolling three-month or 18-month basis. Both those options were announced at Amazon's launch event last year.

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