Putin signs bill tightening government grip on the Russian Internet

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks on April 27, 2019, in Beijing. (credit: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a controversial “Internet sovereignty” bill that strengthens the government’s control over the Russian Internet.

Back in March, we reported on Putin signing two other bills that gave the Russian government the power to punish people for online publication of fake news and insults to public officials. The latest bill focuses lower on the technology stack.

The New America Foundation published a detailed analysis of the bill back in February:

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Facebook Bans Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan and Others From Its Services

The move, which critics said was a long time coming, is an escalation of the social media company’s enforcement of its content policies.
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Suicide’s “contagiousness” is complicated—studies on 13 Reasons Why proves it

Enlarge / Katherine Langford, Derek Luke, Dylan Minnette, Alisha Boe, Miles Heizer, and Brian Yorkey attend #NETFLIXFYSEE Event For “13 Reasons Why” Season 2 – Inside at Netflix FYSEE At Raleigh Studios on June 1, 2018 in Los Angeles, Calif. (credit: Getty | Presley, Ann)

A study out this week suggests that the release of the first season of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why series in 2017 led to a small but notable uptick in teen suicides. The finding seems to confirm widespread apprehensions among mental health experts and advocates that a suicide “contagion” could spread from the teen drama, which centers around a 17-year-old girl’s suicide and includes graphic details. But the study contains significant caveats, and the findings should be interpreted cautiously.

The study was published online by the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and conducted by a research team led by epidemiologist Jeff Bridge at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. The researchers analyzed monthly suicide rates in the four years prior to the show’s March 31, 2017 release, plus post-release suicide rates through December 31, 2017.

The researchers concluded that in the month following the show’s initial release in April 2017, there was a 28.9 percent increase in suicides among 10- to 17-year-olds that would not have otherwise been predicted. They also found elevated rates in June and December of 2017, which they attributed to the show as well.

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Ex-YouTube engineer reveals how video site worked to kill off Internet Explorer 6

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The year is 2009. YouTube, four years old, has become the Web’s leading video site. Though Internet Explorer 6 was far from current—it had been superseded by versions 7 and 8—it nonetheless made up some 18 percent of YouTube’s traffic. These were, after all, the dark days of Windows XP; corporations had overwhelmingly stuck with Windows XP in spite of the release of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 was still some months from release. Many organizations still running XP appeared to be wishing for a kind of computational stasis: they wanted to be able to run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 forever, unchanging, which would greatly simplify their maintenance and support costs.

But Internet Explorer 6 was nearly eight years old and seriously showing its age. On its release, the browser had a legitimate claim to be the best, fastest, most standards compliant, and most stable mainstream browser around. But those days were long gone. Compared to the alternatives—Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 8, and Google’s Chrome—it was slow, unstable, and riddled with proprietary, non-standard behaviors. This was causing the team developing YouTube considerable pain, with weeks of extra work each development cycle to ensure that the site still worked correctly in the old browser.

Internet Explorer 6 showing the sneaky end-of-life banner.

According to former YouTube developer Chris Zacharias, this pain prompted the YouTube team to take renegade action to drive users away from Internet Explorer 6 and onto something newer and better. Though YouTube had been under Google’s ownership for about three years, YouTube’s engineers were suspicious and wary of being integrated into Google’s corporate machine. They had their own special set of permissions named “OldTuber,” and anyone with OldTuber permissions could freely modify the YouTube site without going through Google’s usual change management process of code reviews, testing, adherence to coding standards, and so on. It was cowboy territory, where developers could do as they liked. Only the risk of breaking things—and hence losing OldTuber permissions, if not their job—kept them on the straight and narrow.

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Google unveils auto-delete for location, Web activity, and app usage data

Enlarge / Mountain View, Calif.—May 21, 2018: Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos)

Google will soon let users automatically delete location history and other private data in rolling intervals of either three months or 18 months.

“Choose a time limit for how long you want your activity data to be saved—3- or 18-months—and any data older than that will be automatically deleted from your account on an ongoing basis,” Google announced yesterday. “These controls are coming first to Location History and Web & App Activity and will roll out in the coming weeks.”

Google location history saves locations reported from mobile devices that are logged into your Google account, while saved Web and app activity includes “searches and other things you do on Google products and services, like Maps; your location, language, IP address, referrer, and whether you use a browser or an app; Ads you click, or things you buy on an advertiser’s site; [and] Information on your device like recent apps or contact names you searched for.”

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Tesla Seeks to Raise $2 Billion in Sale of Stock and Debt

The plan, disclosed in a regulatory filing, comes after the carmaker announced a surprisingly sharp quarterly loss.
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Pitchford promises no “free-to-play junk” for Borderlands 3

Enlarge / Four new classes that you’ll have to level up the old fashioned way… for the most part.

Yesterday’s rollout of the first public gameplay footage for Borderlands 3 went about how you’d expect, with all the requisite guns, explosions, and colorful characters that have been standard for the series from the jump. But some confusingly worded comments about the game’s post-launch monetization have required a bit of clarification from Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford and others in the company.

During yesterday’s streamed presentation, Pitchford announced that “we’re gonna do some kickass campaign DLC, and I’m sure we’re going to do all kinds of fun customizations like heads and skins. But we’re not doing any of that free-to-play junk. There’s not going to be any microtransactions, there’s not going to be any of that nonsense.”

That specific wording led Game Informer to tweet out an article clarifying that the cosmetic items Pitchford mentioned (i.e. “fun customizations like heads and skins”) are indeed being sold via microtransactions (i.e. small payments). That means Pitchford’s statement that “there’s not going to be any microtransactions” isn’t technically accurate.

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With cash dwindling, Tesla seeks to raise $2 billion in debt and equity

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

For the last year, Elon Musk has insisted that Tesla can reach sustained profitability without raising additional cash from investors. But the company is now tacitly admitting that it was wrong, filing papers to raise another $2 billion by selling a mix of debt and equity.

Tesla is seeking to raise money just a few days after reporting an unexpectedly large loss in the first quarter of 2019. That release showed Tesla with dwindling cash in the bank—from $3.7 billion at the start of the year to $2.2 billion on March 31.

The lower cash balance primarily reflected one-time events—paying off a $920 million loan and having a bunch of cars in transit to customers at the end of the quarter. Still, having only $2.2 billion in the bank is a precarious situation for a company that has been known to lose more than $700 million in a single quarter.

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Spot the not-Fed: A day at AvengerCon, the Army’s answer to hacker conferences

Enlarge / Participants in AvengerCon III, held at the McGill Training Center at Fort Meade, Maryland, on November 27 take part in a lock pick village put on by TOOOL (The Open Organisation of Lockpickers). (credit: US Army)

FORT MEADE, Maryland—Late last year, I was invited to a relatively new hacker event in Maryland. Chris Eagle, a well-known researcher in the field of malware analysis and author of The IDA Pro Book, keynoted it. There were a number of really good talks at all levels of expertise, a couple of “Capture the Flag” (CTF) hacking challenges, and all the other typical hallmarks of a well-run hacker conference.

But this event, AvengerCon III, proved to be distinct in a number of ways from the BSides conferences and other events I’ve attended. The first difference was that keynote: Eagle, a senior lecturer at the Navy Postgraduate School, shared some news about an upcoming release of an open reverse engineering tool by referring to its “unclassified cover name.” (The tool was Ghidra, a public reverse-engineering tool developed by the National Security Agency.) There were also a lot more people in camouflage than at most hacker events, and my CTF teammates were military intelligence agents. Perhaps the biggest giveaway that this wasn’t any old hacker event? AvengerCon III was being held on Fort Meade and hosted by the US Army’s 781st Military Intelligence Battalion (Cyber).

Part of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, the 781st was once known as the Army Network Warfare Battalion. It was the first Army unit formed to create a “cyberspace operations capability” within the Army—conducting offensive and defensive operations and intelligence collection in support of US forces around the world. So technically, AvengerCon is not a conference. It’s a “training event,” in Army parlance, intended to bring the hacker learning culture to the Army’s cyber warriors.

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Dealmaster: Get Fitbit’s best smartwatch, the original Versa, for just $180

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster returns with another batch of deals and savings to share. Topping our list today is a deal on Fitbit’s Versa smartwatch—now you can get Fitbit’s best smartwatch for just $179.95, which is $20 off its original price of $200.

We’re excited to see this deal on the original Versa because it makes it a better option when compared to Fitbit’s Versa Lite. The company debuted the pared-down smartwatch earlier this year—at $159, the Versa Lite was designed to be a more affordable alternative to the $200 Versa. While it’s a decent smartwatch for its price, it demands quite a few sacrifices. The Versa Lite doesn’t have an altimeter, which tracks floors climbed, it doesn’t have onboard storage for music, it cannot track swim laps, and it cannot show on-screen workouts from Fitbit Coach.

However, the original Versa has all of those features and does everything you’d expect a Fitbit smartwatch to do. It tracks all-day activity, workouts, and sleep, it has a built-in heart rate monitor and connected GPS capabilities, it can automatically track activities with Fitbit’s SmartTrack technology, and it can run apps and show multiple watch faces using Fitbit OS. It also has a battery life of at least four days, so you can leave it on all day long and while you sleep for nearly one week before charging up again.

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