Month: November 2019

Enlarge (credit: Internet Archive)

Editor's note: this article discusses a hate group's uses of racist language that may be hard to read.

Private data for Iron March, a notorious website for violent white supremacists, has been published online in a stunning leak that exposes a trove of detailed information on as many as 1,000 or more members. The 1GB SQL database appears to contain the entirety of the site's information, including user names, private messages, public posts, registered email addresses, and IP addresses.

The leak was posted on the Internet Archive on Wednesday by an anonymous individual using the handle antifa-data. A list of domains used in email registrations shows two from US universities. Private messages show some members discussing life in the US Marines, Navy, Army, and military reserves.

A young woman believes she is being tormented by the ghost of her abusive ex-boyfriend, only to discover something far worse in The Invisible Man, Universal Pictures' rebooted adaptation of the classic science fiction novel by H.G. Wells. Judging by the trailer, it deviates considerably from the source material in some interesting ways to bring Wells' tale into the 21st century.

(Spoilers for the 1897 novel and 1933 film below.)

First serialized, then published as a book in 1897, the novel tells the story of a scientist named Griffin whose research into optics leads him to invent a means of turning himself invisible by chemically altering his body's refractive index to match that of air. Wells cited Plato's Republic as one of his influences, notably a legend involving a magic ring that renders a man invisible, which Plato used to explore whether a man would behave morally if there were no repercussions for bad behavior. The novel opens with Griffin taking a room at a village inn, clad in long coat, hat, and gloves and his face swathed in bandages. He mostly keeps to himself, performing chemistry experiments in his room, but eventually his landlady discovers that he is invisible beneath the heavy clothing.

Enlarge / WHITE PLAINS, WESTCHESTER, United States - Oct. 10, 2019: Protesters holding banners outside the courthouse. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

A federal bankruptcy judge on Wednesday extended "extraordinary" protections for the mega-rich Sackler family amid a call from legal experts for a special examiner to investigate the family's finances and role in the opioid crisis.

The Sacklers own and control OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, which has largely been blamed for helping to spark the opioid crisis that now kills 130 people in the United States each day. The Sacklers and Purdue face around 2,000 lawsuits from states, cities, and municipalities, all alleging that they aggressively marketed their opioids and misled regulators, doctors, and patients about the drugs' addictiveness.

Purdue filed for bankruptcy in September as part of a tentative settlement agreement with over 2,600 plaintiffs. But the Sacklers—who have an estimated worth of $13 billion— have not filed for bankruptcy. Moreover, state attorneys general have accused the family of quietly siphoning some of Purdue's $35 billion from OxyContin sales into their own pockets and out of reach from litigation.

Enlarge / iOS 13 on an iPhone 11 Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple released a minor update for the operating systems running on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Labeled iOS 13.2.2 (or iPadOS 13.2.2 for the iPad), the key bullet point in this update is a fix for a widely reported (and apparently RAM-management-related) bug in iOS 13 that saw apps quitting and losing their state while running in the background.

All the other changes listed for this update are bug fixes as well. Issues addressed include multiple problems with cellular service and reception, corrupted emails when using S/MIME encryption, a charging problem when using YubiKey accessories, and a bug involving Kerberos authentication in Safari.

Here are Apple's release notes for iOS 13.2.2. The iPadOS release notes are the same, except they omit the bullet point about fixing a cellular data bug:

Enlarge / Comedian Hasan Minhaj in 2019. (credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)

As 2019 began, Netflix suppressed an episode of comedian Hasan Minhaj's show Patriot Act for the Saudi Arabian market, sparking outcry from some Western critics. In a Wednesday interview, CEO Reed Hastings shrugged off those concerns.

"We're not in the news business," he said during an event sponsored by The New York Times. "We're not trying to do 'truth to power.' We're trying to entertain."

"We can accomplish a lot more by being entertainment and influence the conversation about the way people live, rather than being another news channel," he added.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Foster / Flickr)

Climate change is often discussed in reference to where things will be in 2100, but the story obviously doesn't end that year. Sea-level rise in particular has an impressive amount of inertia, and a very long time will pass before it has played out fully. What will our emissions have set in motion on longer time scales?

Projecting sea-level rise in the year 2100 is difficult enough, partly because the behavior of the world's ice sheets and glaciers is varied and complex, and partly because it depends in a big way on how much greenhouse gasses we continue emitting. Take future emissions off the table, though, and it's possible to think about what happens out to 2300.

The future is real

That's what a team led by Alexander Nauels did in an analysis based on a combination of our past emissions and the current Paris Agreement pledges for emissions through 2030. Nauels and his colleagues used a simple mathematical model calibrated against the results published in the most recent IPCC report. Rather than running a massive global simulation on a supercomputer, they calculated the relationship between emissions and sea-level rise in previous simulations—which projected out to the year 2300. This also allowed them to quickly process multiple variations of their question.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking about Facebook News in New York, Oct. 25, 2019. (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Facebook is facing a new round of intense scrutiny worldwide after 7,000 pages of confidential files stemming from a lawsuit were made public yesterday. Those documents are not the ones California's attorney general needs, though, so separately, the company is also facing a court challenge demanding it produce more documentation for an investigation amid allegations of stonewalling.

The piles of leaked documents, which directly reference the company's questionable position on competition, are likely to be extremely helpful to the dozens of entities currently investigating Facebook on antitrust grounds. California, however, is conducting a privacy investigation.

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra yesterday took to court seeking to have a subpoena against Facebook enforced. The petition (PDF) alleges Facebook failed to respond to repeated subpoenas and other legal requests for information related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.