Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol on Sept. 1, 2021, in Austin, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post )

Epik, the domain registrar for controversial sites such as Gab and Parler, says that the Texas abortion-whistleblower website violates its terms of use.

The Texas Right to Life group's prolifewhistleblower.com website was booted by GoDaddy on Friday for violating its rules, including one that prohibits sites from using GoDaddy to "collect or harvest... non-public or personally identifiable information" without people's prior written consent. The website switched its domain registration from GoDaddy to Epik and switched its name servers from GoDaddy to hosting provider Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean quickly cut off service, and the abortion-whistleblower site's domain records now list Epik as both the registrar and name servers.

But the website—which encouraged people to report violations of the restrictive new anti-abortion law in Texas—is offline, and the domain now redirects to Texas Right to Life's homepage. The group says it plans to get the site back online.

Enlarge / Windows 11 sports built-in Microsoft Teams integration that may have brought down the desktop and taskbar in a recent preview build. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft released a new build of Windows 11 to Windows Insiders late last week as it prepares for the operating system's release on October 5, but the first testers to install the new build quickly ran into problems—the taskbar, desktop, Settings app, and other core OS components were refusing to load. Microsoft quickly published a registry edit that resolved the problem, but the company didn't go into more detail on what went wrong.

The most thorough examination of the problem comes from developer Daniel Aleksandersen's Ctrl blog. As he explains, the "IrisService" mentioned in Microsoft's registry edit is part of the Windows Spotlight service, which is responsible for fetching new lock screen wallpapers and other suggestions and advertisements. In Aleksandersen's own words:

Based on the Microsoft-provided workaround, I narrowed the problem down to a registry key that contained a serialized JSON blob. The blob contained an advertisement for Microsoft Teams. The messaging and imagery in the promotion were identical to the panel you get when you press the Windows key + C on a Windows account not already set up with Teams.

In other words, it looks like an ad for one of Windows 11's built-in apps went wrong, and most of the operating system's user interface stopped working as a result.

Enlarge / Tablets of ivermectin. (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

An Ohio judge has overturned an order by one of his colleagues that required a Cincinnati hospital to give the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin to a critically ill COVID-19 patient.

The order to force the use of ivermectin—dubbed "unethical" and "extraordinarily dangerous" by experts— was the result of a lawsuit brought by the patient's wife, Julie Smith, on August 20.

In a September 6 ruling overturning the order to use ivermectin, Butler County Judge Michael Oster Jr. wrote, "While this court is sympathetic to the Plaintiff and understands the idea of wanting to do anything to help her loved one, public policy should not and does not support allowing a physician to try "any" type of treatment on human beings."

Enlarge / TikTok headquarters in Culver City, California. (credit: AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

The bite-sized video site TikTok is gaining on Google's video juggernaut, YouTube. A new report from the BBC says that TikTok has overtaken YouTube in average watch time per user in the US and UK. While YouTube is still the bigger video site in terms of users and total video watched, the average US TikTok user watches more video than the average US YouTube viewer. The youths are addicted.

The BBC cites numbers from App Annie, an app analytics firm. These numbers are only from Android phones, but there's no reason to think the situation would be different on iOS devices. App Annie lists TikTok as the most downloaded app last year (though pre-loaded Android Google apps like YouTube don't need to be downloaded) and says the average TikTok watch time per user passed that of YouTube in April.

YouTube has been doing its best to fight off TikTok. YouTube's TikTok clone, YouTube Shorts, launched in the US in May, offering 60-second video clips in a mobile-first, swipeable interface. Firing up the photocopier is always YouTube's go-to move when an upstart video service comes along. To compete with Twitch, Google rolled out livestreaming and chat features under "YouTube Gaming," and the auto-expiring videos of "YouTube Stories" were Google's answer to Snapchat.