Late Night Snark: Guns, Gaetz & ‘Ghanistan Edition

"The system of policing isn’t broken. It's doing exactly what it's meant to do in America. We're not dealing with 'bad apples.' We're dealing with a rotten tree. … America is a country where white people can storm the Capitol and be given the benefit of the doubt, but Black people just going about their lives are treated like they're about to storm the Capitol."
—Trevor Noah

"If there’s one thing America is good at, it’s multi-tasking racisms. Look, Americans: there are better ways to deal with our issues than by being racist. Try therapy, interpretive dance, or yelling at your TV. You could yell at me—I can take it."
—Samantha Bee

Continued...

According to app developer Kosta Eleftheriou, Apple's App Store hosted a kid's game that's actually a front for gambling websites. "The secret password isn't one you'd be likely to guess: you have to be in the right country -- or pretend to be in the right country using a VPN," writes Sean Hollister via The Verge. "But then, instead of launching an ugly monkey-flipping endless runner game filled with typos and bugs, the very same app launches a casino experience." From the report: The app, "Jungle Runner 2k21," has already disappeared from the App Store, presumably thanks to publicity from Gizmodo and Daring Fireball, who each wrote about Eleftheriou's finding earlier today. It's not the only one, though: the same developer, "Colin Malachi," had another incredibly basic game on the App Store called "Magical Forest - Puzzle" that was also a front for gambling. [...] I accessed them from a VPN server in Turkey; While Daring Fireball notes that users in other non-US countries like Italy also seem to have been able to access the gambling sites, I tried them with a number of other locations including Italy without success. Unlike the multi-million dollar App Store scams that Eleftheriou uncovered earlier this year, it's not hard to see why Apple's App Store review program might have missed these -- they largely look like your typical shovelware if you don't know the trick, with only a handful of tells... like the fact that Jungle Runner uses a Pastebin for its privacy policies. It's not necessarily clear to me that they'd be violating very many of Apple's App Store policies, either. Gambling apps are permitted by Apple, as long as they're geo-restricted to regions where that gambling is permitted by law, and you could maybe argue that's exactly what this developer did by checking your IP address.

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The White House caused a furor early Friday among members of its own party when it issued a directive capping the number of refugees entering the country this fiscal year at 15,000, breaking an earlier pledge to set the cap at more than 60,000. The backlash from progressive Democrats and human rights activists came fast and furious and, by day's end, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement saying the refugee cap would be revised upward next month.

"The President’s directive today has been the subject of some confusion," read the statement. "We expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15."

Rumors have been strongly suggesting that Apple will adopt LTPO displays in the iPhone 13 this year, which will enable higher refresh rates up to 120Hz. Although some reports have assumed that only a single model of the iPhone 13 will feature this new technology, analyst Ross Young believes that this will not be the case.

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Liberty University has accused Jerry Falwell Jr. of hoodwinking them into an employment agreement with a very generous severance package by covering up the sex scandal he knew was brewing.

The sordid Falwell Jr. saga, you may recall, began when he posted on Instagram a photo of himself, holding close a woman who is not his wife, the two of them with their pants unzipped and Falwell Jr. holding a glass of dark liquid that looks like liquor.

Falwell sounded drunk when he offered a bizarre, rambling “explanation” on a morning radio show and said he’d try to be “a good boy” in the future.

But things got even more sordid when details of his wife’s sexcapades with “poolboy” Giancarlo Granda, which Falwell Jr. allegedly enjoyed watching, became public.

Falwell resigned from Liberty, only to sue the university a few months later for – get this – “damaging his reputation.” He dropped that lawsuit shortly thereafter.

Now, Liberty’s suing him.

TPM explains:

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Making the jump to a new carrier can often sound appealing whether it’s the incentives, the hopes of better coverage, pricing, or all of the above. However, the reality is that switching can be a commitment (even without contracts) and it’s no fun to make the move only to realize you’ve made a mistake. Let’s look at some tips and tricks to test carrier coverage with iPhone before committing to switching.

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Facebook has reached a key environmental goal early: The social media company now purchases enough renewable energy to run all of its operations around the world, it announced this week. CBS News reports: Facebook joins a handful of tech companies that have committed to ambitious green energy goals, including Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Over the past few years, Facebook has cut its greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Since 2017, carbon emissions from the company's operations have fallen by 94%, surpassing its goals of reducing emissions by three-quarters, according to its sustainability report. Emissions were cut primarily by focusing on the massive data centers that power the servers running Facebook's services, as well as its office locations. "Data centers for us are the primary sources of electricity consumption and the primary footprint we've been thinking about," said Urvi Parekh, the company's director of renewable energy. Cutting down emissions meant "making our data centers as efficient as possible and reducing the amount of electricity that's consumed" as well as purchasing enormous amounts of wind and solar power to run those centers. Last year, when most of its employees started working remotely, Facebook said it purchased enough clean energy to match the amount used by employees working at home. The company still emits some carbon from its construction activity and natural-gas use in some locations where it has no other energy options, Parekh said. Last year, that was the equivalent of 38,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (or about as much carbon as is emitted from 8,900 cars driving for one year). Facebook is offsetting those emissions by investing in reforestation and other carbon-removal projects, Parekh said. The company has set a new goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its entire supply chain by 2030.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-020-00273-3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26839781

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

If you're looking for a sweet deal to take you into the weekend, we've got you covered. For a limited time, you can get this JLab Audio Talk Go USB microphone for just $29. It's super portable, offers professional-grade sound, and it connects via USB-C.

Article URL: https://trekhleb.dev/blog/2021/content-aware-image-resizing-in-javascript/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26839692

Points: 19

# Comments: 1

It’s your last chance to enter to win Apple’s 12.9″ iPad Pro courtesy of ALOGIC. You can also get 30% off the company’s new Rapid USB-C Wall Chargers on Amazon for a limited time. Head below for more on the new ALOGIC chargers and to enter the giveaway now.

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Article URL: https://blog.uidrafter.com/engineering/architecture-of-a-desktop-alike-spa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26839535

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Throughout December, someone was setting fires at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church, a "predominately Black" congregation located in Springfield, Massachusetts. An FBI affidavit claims that the last of these fires, set on Dec. 28, "essentially destroyed" the building -- burning away large parts of the interior. During this period, the same person is suspected of having carried out a "series of tire-slashings" targeted at vehicles near or around the church -- a majority of which were owned by Black individuals. Now, 44-year-old Maine resident Dushko Vulchev has been arrested in connection to the crimes. He was charged in a federal court in Springfield on Thursday, a release from the U.S. Justice Department shows, and is potentially facing decades behind bars. Court documents illustrate how state, local and federal authorities used a variety of surveillance footage and data collection to piece together Vulchev's whereabouts and place him at or near these crimes. In particular, the vandal slipped up when he allegedly slashed the tires of a Tesla located not far from the church. Authorities say one of the car's many pre-installed security cameras caught blatant images of the culprit as he damaged the tires, then later returned to steal them along with the vehicle's rims. "Based on my training and experience and this investigation, I am aware that the Tesla mentioned above is equipped with cameras at various points around the body," said the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit. "I have reviewed video footage retrieved from the Tesla showing an individual that I can identify as Vulchev...The video footage from the Tesla shows Vulchev at a close distance crouching near the Tesla and using a tire iron to remove the wheels." Using other data collected and a variety of local surveillance footage, law enforcement was able to build a case against Vulchev.

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Microsoft this week updated its Remote Desktop client for macOS, which allows users to access their computer through another device remotely. The latest update brought native support for the M1 chip, as well as some new features.

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Yes, even Robocop.

Article URL: https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-post-story-black-lives-matter-founder-patrisse-cullors-real-1584050

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26839354

Points: 97

# Comments: 21

For a couple decades now, roughly two-thirds of Americans haven't believed American corporations were paying their fair share in taxes according to Gallup polling dating back to 2004. Naturally, Republicans took that as a mandate to cut corporate tax rates even further in 2017, from 35% to 21%, in a bill that ultimately proved to be wildly unpopular among the public.

“In 2017, Republicans slashed corporate tax rates, which decimated corporate tax receipts,” Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told The Washington Post's Greg Sargent. “U.S. corporations avail themselves of the benefits of the U.S. economy — infrastructure, workforce and the like — but contribute very little to it.”

Today's Psaki bomb recipient was Newsmax "reporter" Emerald Robinson, who asked if President Biden would fire UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield for noting that racism is written into our nation's founding. Robinson chose to use her White House press access to complain about Amb. Thomas-Greenfield's statement to "a group," that "essentially said that white supremacy is woven into our founding documents and principles."

Me? I'd shrug and say the ambassador's not wrong. Not the Nazis at Newsmax.

Robinson continued, "This statement is getting widely criticized as essentially parroting Chinese Communist Party talking points. So is the President going to remove her from her position as the representative before that body to promote United States values?"

oH nOeS doN'T aGrEe wItH sOmeThiNg a cHinEsE pErSoN seD

Robinson is right in that telling the truth about our history and its shameful, disgusting racism has not typically been one of our values as a nation, but I see no reason why we can't change and improve, starting right now with Amb. Thomas-Greenfield's statements. Psaki also took this view, and the opportunity to shove Robinson's own racism down her throat.

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The Google Project Zero security team has updated its vulnerability disclosure guidelines to add a cushion of 30 days to some security bug disclosures, so end-users have enough time to patch software and prevent attackers from weaponizing bugs. From a report: This week's changes are of particular importance because a large part of the cybersecurity community has adopted Project Zero's rules as the unofficial methodology for disclosing a security bug to software vendors and then to the general public. Prior to today, Google Project Zero researchers would give software vendors 90 days to fix a security bug. When the bug was patched, or at the end of the 90 days time window, Google researchers would publish details about the bug online (on their bug tracker). Starting this week, Project Zero says it will wait 30 days before publishing any details about the bug. The reasoning behind the extra time window is to allow users of the affected products time to update their software, an operation that can usually take days or weeks in some complex corporate networks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A list of the best cases for iPad mini you can buy in 2021, ranging in style, design, and prices.