Month: June 2020

Enlarge / Thousands of peaceful demonstrators holding banners gather in front of the White House for the fifth consecutive day to protest the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after being pinned down by a white police officer in Minneapolis, on June 2, 2020 in Washington, DC, United States. (credit: Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images)

As enormous protests in support of black communities and against police brutality continue to sweep across the United States, Facebook is facing a protest of its own. The company and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are facing criticism from users, competitors, civil rights organizations, and even employees for allowing racist content and hate speech to proliferate on the platform, amplified by President Donald Trump.

Facebook on Tuesday removed some accounts affiliated with white supremacist groups after some members advocated bringing weapons to current protests, Reuters reports. It also removed accounts falsely claiming to be affiliated with antifascist groups that advocated stirring up trouble. Over the weekend, Twitter similarly removed accounts that were purporting to represent antifascist organizations but were in fact linked to a white nationalist group.

What Facebook has not taken action against, however, are statements by Trump or other public officials that also call for violence or stoke racism. Specifically, Facebook has declined to act against a post from May 29 in which Trump called protesters demonstrating following Minneapolis's police killing resident George Floyd "thugs." In the same post, the president added, "Any difficulty and we will assume control, but when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

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  "Sabrina," the new Android TV dongle. Yes, it looks like a big Chromecast. [credit: XDA Developers ]

It looks like Google will finally sell an Android TV dongle to the masses. XDA Developers has leaked promo images of a device codenamed "Sabrina." The device looks like a slightly bigger Chromecast with a remote control, and it runs Android TV.

The device is very much in the mold of an Amazon Fire Stick or Roku Stick—it's a tiny HDMI stick that gives you all the benefits of a set-top box in a wall-mount-friendly form factor. The remote offers basic navigation, volume control, and voice commands through the Google Assistant.

9to5Google first reported on the existence of "Sabrina," saying it would be "a second-generation Chromecast Ultra" that comes with a remote and runs Android TV. The Chromecast "Ultra" is the version of a Chromecast with 4K compatibility and currently costs $69. A report from Protocol says Sabrina will cost "around or below $80."

Enlarge / Don't worry, the fire isn't real. (credit: Getty Images | RapidEye)

Broadband and TV providers can keep charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers own themselves until December 2020, thanks to a Federal Communications Commission ruling that delays implementation of a new law.

A law approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in December 2019 prohibits providers from charging device-rental fees when customers use their own equipment, and it was originally scheduled to take effect on June 20. As we've written, this law will help Frontier customers who have been forced to pay $10 monthly fees for equipment they don't use and, in some cases, have never even received. But the law gave the FCC discretion to extend the deadline by six months if the commission "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension," and the FCC has done just that.

The FCC ruling on April 3, which we didn't notice at the time, extends the deadline to December 20 and says that providers need more time to comply because of the coronavirus pandemic:

Enlarge / The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Along with other retailers big and small, Apple Stores have been subject to looting by opportunists amidst the ongoing protests around the United States. In response, Apple has again closed all of its stores in the US. Stores had only recently reopened after closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

But looters who brought stolen iPhones home, or people who end up buying those phones in person-to-person transactions, are in for what may be a surprise: it appears that the stolen iPhones don't work, and may even be tracked by Apple or authorities. This could pose a challenge for regular consumers who buy second-hand iPhones—as well as repair shops—in the coming weeks and months.

Individuals with iPhones allegedly looted from Apple stores found that the phones were automatically disabled and had messages like the following (via Twitter) displayed on-screen:

Enlarge / Penguins and sharks, living together in perfect harmony—what a wonderful world it will be! (credit: FreeNAS / Ars Technica)

To the surprise—and likely consternation—of BSD fans everywhere, FreeNAS vendor ixSystems is building a new version of its core product, TrueNAS, on top of Debian Linux.

This week's TrueNAS Scale announcement builds on the company's March announcement that its commercial project TrueNAS and its community project FreeNAS would be merging into a common base. Effectively, all the NAS projects from ixSystems will be TrueNAS variants moving forward, with the free-to-use version being TrueNAS Core, the new Debian-based project becoming TrueNAS Scale, and the commercial project remaining simply TrueNAS.

The company is still being coy about the overall goals of the new project, with the major clue being that "SCALE" is used as an acronym. Morgan Littlewood, ixSystems' senior vice president of project management and business development, expanded on this to Ars a little further in an email exchange today:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In the past, Twitter has said that incitements to violence from world leaders like President Donald Trump should be treated differently from those made by the rest of us. This week, that policy was shown to clear effect when the social media network banned the @SuspendThePres account and ordered it to delete a tweet. Its crime? Tweeting the exact same words used by Trump a day earlier.

The experiment began on May 29 when a Twitter account was repurposed as a bot with a single mission: to copy Trump's tweets verbatim and see how long it would take to get banned.

This account will tweet what the President tweets. Let’s see if it gets suspended for violating twitters TOS. Follow along with this social experiment. Report any tweets that violate the rules. Thank you.

— Will they suspend me? (@SuspendThePres) May 30, 2020

The next thing the account tweeted was a copy of Trump's infamous "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" missive. When the president issued that tweet, it was, in fact, sufficient for Twitter's moderation to kick in. Trump's tweet is still viewable behind a "click to view" barrier. But three days after repeating that same call to shoot at protestors, @SuspendThePres got a Twitter timeout, along with an order to take down the offending message: