Japan's Fair Trade Commission will investigate whether Apple and Google are leveraging their dominance in the smartphone operating system market to eliminate competition and severely limit options for consumers. From a report: The study will involve interviews and surveys with OS operators, app developers and smartphone users, commission Secretary-General Shuichi Sugahisa told reporters Wednesday. The initiative will explore market conditions not only for smartphones, but for smartwatches and other wearables. The antitrust watchdog will compile a report outlining OS market structure and the reason why competition has remained static. The commission will work with the central government's Digital Market Competition Council, which is moving forward with its own market probe. Practices found to be anticompetitive will be itemized in the report, along with possible violations of Japan's law against monopolies. In February, the government implemented the Act on Improving Transparency and Fairness of Digital Platforms. If officials decide that the law applies to the OS market, OS operators will be told to submit regular reports on transactions to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. In Japan, Apple's iOS commands a nearly 70% share among smartphone operating systems while Android's share stands at 30%. Any developer of apps -- whether they specialize in music, streaming videos, e-books or mobile games -- need to match the software with specifications of the operating systems if they want to appear on smartphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The largest public library system in the country has become the latest to eliminate all late fees. Effective immediately, the New York Public Library system will not charge fines on overdue materials, and all library card holders have had their accounts cleared of any prior late fees or fines, including replacement fees for lost materials, the NYPL announced on Tuesday, in what it called a change intended to level the playing field for all library patrons and encourage use of library resources. Fines are "an antiquated, ineffective way to encourage patrons to return their books; for those who can afford the fines, they are barely an incentive," New York Public Library President Anthony W. Marx said in a news release. "For those who can't afford the fines -- disproportionately low-income New Yorkers -- they become a real barrier to access that we can no longer accept. This is a step towards a more equitable society, with more New Yorkers reading and using libraries, and we are proud to make it happen." The Boston Public Library system implemented similar policies in April. California's Burbank Public Library also recently announced that it would no longer charge late fees and wiped all patron accounts clean.

A couple years ago the San Diego Public Library scrapped fines, along with the Chicago Public Library. "After the policy change, Chicago public libraries saw an increase in returned materials as well as library card renewals," reports NPR, citing a previous report.

Amazon has been successful in nearly every industry it has entered, from books and grocery shopping to cloud computing and movie streaming. So it has been puzzling to many that success in the lucrative video game business has eluded the tech giant. On Tuesday, Amazon gave producing its own video games another try. From a report: After more than a year of delays, it released New World, an online multiplayer game in which players join factions, fight monsters, fight one another and colonize a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The $40 computer game, which received generally positive reviews as players tested early versions over the past few months, arrives at a crucial time for the tech giant's disappointing gaming efforts.

After spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars, neither of the other two big-budget games that Amazon announced it was producing in 2016 alongside New World exists today. Some of its top gaming hires have departed over the years without putting out any notable titles. Last year, the company also removed another game from storefronts after a poor reception. New World "has to be our breakthrough game -- there's no doubt about it," said Christoph Hartmann, the vice president of Amazon Games. "Just for morale of people, at some point you want to see some success." Amazon's biggest accomplishment in the gaming industry so far has been the acquisition of Twitch, the livestreaming video site, which the company bought in 2014 for about $1 billion. Amazon has also forged ahead with a new gaming subscription service, Luna, and recently announced a new development studio in Montreal.

"2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop," writes PC Magazine. "No, really..." Walk into any school now, and you'll see millions of Linux machines. They're called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it's an amazing feat.... Linux found its real niche — not as a political statement about "free software," but as a practical way to enable capable, low-cost machines for millions...

Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don't have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they're descended from Linus Torvalds' original work. Chromebooks are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys. IDC points out that Canalys' estimates of 12 million Chromebooks shipped in Q1 2021 are only a fraction of the 63 million notebooks sold that quarter, but once again, they're where the growth is. Much of that is driven by schools, where Chromebooks dominate now. Schoolkids don't generally need a million apps' worth of generic computing power. They need inexpensive, rugged ways to log into Google Classroom. Linux came to the rescue, enabling cheap, light, easy-to-manage PCs that don't have the Swiss Army Knife cruft of Windows or the premium price of Macs...

One great thing about open-source hacker projects is that they can be taken in unexpected directions. Linux isn't controlled, so it can adapt, Darwinian-style. It was a little scurrying mammal in the time of the dinosaurs, and then the mobile-computing asteroid hit. Linux could evolve. Windows couldn't. When you're building something that fits in your hand and has to sip battery, you can't just keep throwing processors and storage at it. Microsoft had a tough time adapting its monstrous megakernel OS to the new, tiny world. But *nix platforms thrive there: Android (based on Linux) and iOS.
"Android and Chrome water down the Linux philosophy," the article argues, "but they are Linux..."

Does this make any long-time geeks feel vindicated? In the original submission wiredog (Slashdot reader #43,288) looks back to 1995, remembering that "my first Linux was RedHat 2.0 in the beige box, running the 0.95(?) kernel and the F Virtual Window Manager...

"It came with 2 books, a CD, and a boot floppy disk."

Amazon said Thursday it will offer to pay 100% of college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees. From a report: The e-commerce giant is following the lead of other large U.S. companies who are dangling perks like education benefits or more pay to woo workers in a tight job market. Starting in January 2022, Amazon said it will cover the cost of college tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly employees in its operations network after 90 days of employment. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, GEDs and English as a second language certifications for employees. Operations workers include employees in Amazon's sprawling network of warehouses and distribution centers.

The benefit will apply to hundreds of education institutions across the country, Amazon said. Amazon previously offered to pay for 95% of tuition, fees and textbooks for hourly associates through its career choice program. Rival retailers, including Walmart and Target, have also beefed up their education benefits in recent months. Target in August rolled out a program that covers the cost of associate and undergraduate degrees at select schools. Walmart in July said it would pay 100% of college tuition and books costs for associates of Walmart and Sam's Club.

Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. From a report:Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks -- i.e., "digital content." In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as "heart-wrenching stories" from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: "The responsible thing to do -- and the best way to serve our patrons right now -- is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19." The library added, "We will continue to offer access to e-books."

The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries -- they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.

Long-time Slashdot reader flogger shares Amazon Prime's first trailer for its upcoming Wheel of Time series. GameSpot reports: The first three episodes will arrive on Friday, November 19, with new episodes arriving every Friday afterward, leading to the Season 1 finale on December 24.

The Wheel of Time is based on the best-selling fantasy novels by Robert Jordan, which sold more than 90 million books... The original book series was made up of 15 novels published between 1990 and 2013. Jordan died in 2007 while working on the 12th book, and left behind notes intended to help someone else finish the series. Brandon Sanderson took up the role, and now serves as a consulting producer on the Amazon series...

The series is co-produced by Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television. The first three episodes of season one will premiere together on Friday, November 19, with new episodes available each Friday following. The season finale will air on December 24.
Here's how Variety summarizes the story. The power Aes Sedai organization and "a group of other adventurers head off on a journey across the world. However, one of the members of the group is the Dragon Reborn, who will save humanity or destroy it.

For a fraction of a second, 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power were produced this month by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet explains what might happen next: The aim of these experiments is — for now — to show proof of principle only: that energy can be generated. The team behind the success are very close to achieving this: they have managed a more than 1,000-fold improvement in energy release between 2011 and today. Prof Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London, said last month that "The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kickstart the process...."

Many recent advances have been made with a different type of fusion device, the tokamak: a doughnut-shaped machine that uses a tube of magnetic fields to confine its fuel for as long as possible. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) set another world record in May by keeping fuel stable for 100 seconds at a temperature of 120m degrees celsius — eight times hotter than the sun's core. The world's largest ever magnetic fusion machine, Iter, is under construction in the south of France and many experts think it will have the scale needed to reach net energy gain. The UK-based Joint European Torus (Jet), which holds the current magnetic fusion record for power of 67%, is about to attempt to produce the largest total amount of energy of any fusion machine in history. Alternative designs are also being explored: the UK government has announced plans for an advanced tokamak with an innovative spherical geometry, and "stellarators", a type of fusion device that had been consigned to the history books, are enjoying a revival having been enabled by new technologies such as superconducting magnets.

This is a lot of progress, but it's not even the biggest change: that would be the emergence of private sector fusion firms. The recently formed Fusion Industry Association estimates that more than $2bn of investment has flooded into fusion startups. The construction of experimental reactors by these firms is proceeding at a phenomenal rate: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has its origins in MIT research, has begun building a demonstration reactor in Massachusetts; TAE Technologies has just raised $280m to build its next device; and Canadian-based General Fusion has opted to house its new $400m plant in the UK. This will be constructed in Oxfordshire, an emerging hotspot for the industry that is home to private ventures First Light Fusion and Tokamak Energy as well as the publicly funded Jet and Mast (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade devices run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority...

For now, publicly funded labs are producing results a long way ahead of the private firms — but this could change.
"Whether commercial fusion energy is ready in time to help with global warming or not depends on us as a society and how badly we want — no, need — star power on our side," the author concludes.

He also calls fusion energy "the only feasible way we can explore space beyond Earth's immediate vicinity."

Alphabet's drone company Wing delivered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs and 1,200 roast chickens to customers in Logan, Australia, over the last year, the company said Wednesday in a blog post outlining its progress. CNBC reports: Wing was launched in 2019 in Australia, following a series of drone tests that began in 2014. The service, which was initially part of Alphabet's experimental research division, allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch. Wing hopes to one day deliver products to people all over the world without having to rely on drivers or delivery trucks like other companies.

The company works with more than 30 partners globally, including local coffee shops and national brands such as Walgreens, according to a February blog post. Local businesses can also reach out directly to the company to get involved. In 2020, Wing partnered with a Virginia school district to deliver library books during the pandemic.

"According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies," reports the Guardian, "with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit..." As the chief of Stanford University's dual diagnosis addiction clinic (which caters to people with more than one disorder), Lembke has spent the past 25-plus years treating patients addicted to everything from heroin, gambling and sex to video games, Botox and ice baths... Her new book, Dopamine Nation, emphasises that we are now all addicts to a degree. She calls the smartphone the "modern-day hypodermic needle": we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet. Since the turn of the millennium, behavioural (as opposed to substance) addictions have soared. Every spare second is an opportunity to be stimulated... "We're seeing a huge explosion in the numbers of people struggling with minor addictions," says Lembke.

That has consequences. Although we have endless founts of fun at our fingertips, "the data shows we're less and less happy," she says. Global depression rates have been climbing significantly in the past 30 years and, according to a World Happiness Report, people in high-income countries have become more unhappy over the past decade or so. We've forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We're forever "interrupting ourselves", as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow. For many, the pandemic has exacerbated dependence on social media and other digital vices, as well as alcohol and drugs.

Addiction is a spectrum disorder: it's not as simple as being an addict or not being an addict. It's deemed worthy of clinical care when it "significantly interferes" with someone's life and ability to function, but when it comes to minor digital attachments, the effect is pernicious. "It gets into philosophical questions: how is the time I'm spending on my phone in subtle ways affecting my ability to be a good parent, spouse or friend?" says Lembke. "I do believe there is a cost — one that I don't think we fully recognise because it's hard to [see it] when you're in it...."

"It's very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress," says Lembke. "We're losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms."
The solution, according to the article, is dopamine fasts — "the longer, the better...to reset our brain's pathways and gain perspective on how our dependency affects us," eventually attaining the lost art of moderation.

Apple TV+ has released a nearly three-minute long trailer for its upcoming series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.

Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning." A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life...

The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire...

The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.

For years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time? Vulture: On the spectrum of cyberattacks, this one wasn't very complex. There was no malicious software or actual hacking involved. Some of the earliest victims used Gmail accounts for work, which were easy and free to spoof. Registering an alternate domain and setting up an email server was only slightly more involved, and the possibilities were endless: t's became f's (@wwnorfon.com), q's replaced g's (@wylieaqency.com), r's and n's cornbined to make m's (@penguinrandornhouse.com). The domains suggested someone who liked to play with words as much as code. Books became bocks, unless the company was Dutch, in which case boek was Anglicized to book.

What did seem sophisticated was the thief's knowledge of the business. The culprit wrote like someone in publishing, abbreviating to "MS" for manuscript and "WEL" for world English-language rights, while exchanging insider chatter, telling one victim that a publisher was pitching a book as a comp to Pachinko and expressing surprise to another that a novel had recently sold for a shocking amount. The thief sent messages in the wake of announcements on Publishers Marketplace, a subscription website that tracks deals, but they also asked about books that the thief's marks didn't even know existed. The mimicry wasn't always perfect -- an assistant at the talent agency WME realized her boss was being impersonated because she would never say "please" or "thank you" -- but the impression was good enough.

What's more, the thief seemed to have a strong grasp of the rarefied world of international publishing. The first emails, in the fall of 2016, traveled almost exclusively among the small group of people who handle the flow of manuscripts between countries, including a foreign-rights manager in Greece, an editor in Spain, and an agent selling international writers in the Chinese market. In the attempted "Millennium" heist, only a few dozen people in the world knew the book was being shared with foreign publishers and that Mork and Altrov Berg controlled access to it.

theodp writes: By purchasing items from hundreds of teachers' Wish Lists this back-to-school season," Amazon explained in a Monday corporate post, "Amazon is working to ensure teachers can fill their classrooms with the items they need, from essential school supplies like pencils and markers to books to help stock up the classroom library. [...] If you are an educator who needs help fulfilling your list, or if you know someone who does, share your Amazon Wish List on social media and tag @amazon with #ClearTheList."

In a Twitter post last week, Amazon called on its 3.7 million followers to "learn about our Amazon Future Engineer Teacher of the Year award recipients and help them #ClearTheList." Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) is "a comprehensive childhood-to-career program aimed at increasing access to computer science education for children and young adults." Explaining the importance of #ClearTheList school funding in a video shared with Amazon's 29.2 million Facebook followers, one AFE Teacher of the Year explains, "You can't teach 21st century skills without 21st century funding, so supplies are super important for classrooms." A second AFE Teacher of the Year also endorsed #ClearTheList funding in Amazon's Monday post, explaining that ""When teachers have all their classroom supplies, they can focus on nurturing their students' curiosity." Each of the 10 AFE Teachers of the Year 2021 received a $30,000+ prize package from Amazon in June, which should clear their lists.

Medium's technology blog OneZero provides a great example of the new field of "digital humanities": Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There's something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It's as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the "continuous sense of menace" and "horror" that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes. For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.

Then a clever bit of data analysis in 2014 uncovered the reason... It turns out that Macbeth uncanny flavor springs from the unusual way that Shakespeare deploys one particular word, over and over again. That word?

"The...."

As Hope and Witmore note, you'd expect Macbeth to refer to "my hand" and "my eye". By writing it as "the hand" and "the eye", Shakespeare neatly evokes the way Macbeth is beginning to be tormented by his own decisions; he disassociates from his own body. In a few acts he'll be a totally unravelled mess...

[T]his is one of my favorite examples of using data analysis to ponder literature. The field of the "digital humanities" — which often involves using data analysis to study books — can get a bad rap sometimes... But what's so delightful about Hope and Witmore's work is how it's genuinely a cyborg, centaur piece of literary analysis... They started by pondering a phenomenon that has puzzled Shakespeare fans for centuries. They did some data analysis that pointed to the word "the". But to figure out why "the" was so key, they had to go back and reread the play closely, engaging in a very rich line-by-line literary analysis. The computation existed as a set of fresh alien eyes, telling the humans where to direct their attention. But it was up to the humans to find the meaning.

Alvy Ray Smith cofounded Pixar. He was the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm and the first graphics fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contributions to digital movie-making technology.

This week he shared "The Real Story of Pixar," in an article in IEEE Spectrum that Slashdot reader Tekla Perry says "corrects some of the things legend got wrong, and gives a fast tour of computer graphics history, as he talks about the key computer graphics breakthroughs that led up to Pixar and how Moore's Law saved the company." Its starts in 1980 when Smith is part of a team hired by Lucasfilm to create its Computer Division: This division was charged with computerizing editing, sound design and mixing, special effects, and accounting for the company's books, as if this fourth challenge would be as difficult as the other three. Ed Catmull, who led the Computer Division, made me head of the Computer Graphics Group, which was tasked with the special-effects project. At Lucasfilm, we continued to develop the software needed for three-dimensional computer-generated movies. And we worked on specialized hardware as well, designing a computer, called the Pixar Image Computer, that could run its calculations four times as fast as comparable general-purpose systems — but only for pixels. We were still waiting for Moore's Law to get general computers to where we needed them — it did, but this strategy gave us a boost for a few years.

We didn't get one of our fully computer-generated movie sequences into a major motion picture until 1982, with our one-minute "Genesis" sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It showed a bare planet catching on fire, melting, and then forming mountains and seas and green forests. We followed that groundbreaking piece of a movie with a brief sequence in Return of the Jedi in 1983, featuring a "hologram" of the Death Star... But then our Computer Graphics Group, now numbering 40 people, got the news that the Computer Division was on the chopping block.
Then Smith continues the story with an excerpt from his new book, "A Biography of the Pixel." ("We did have a prototype special-purpose computer, the Pixar Image Computer. So Ed and I wrote up a business plan to build and sell Pixar Image Computers, calling them 'supercomputers for pixels'...") 35 venture capital firms turned them down, as did 10 corporations where they'd proposed a "strategic partnership." Finally, they made a desperate pitch to Steve Jobs: Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed...

Pixar was a lousy hardware company. We failed several times over our first five years. That's failure measured the usual way: We ran out of money and couldn't pay our bills or our employees. If we'd had any other investor than Steve, we would have been dead in the water. But at every failure — presumably because Steve couldn't sustain the embarrassment that his next enterprise after the Apple ouster would be a failure — he'd berate those of us in management . . . then write another check. And each check effectively reduced employee equity. After several such "refinancings," he had poured about $50 million (half of the fortune he had made from Apple) into Pixar. In today's money, that's more than $100 million. On March 6, 1991, in Pixar's fifth year, he finally did buy the company from the employees outright.
The company was still in financial trouble — but expanding computing power eventually made it possible to render an entire full-length movie, and Disney financed the years of production necessary for the 1995 movie Toy Story. But even before its release, Steve Jobs "took Pixar public on November 29, 1995, on nothing more than the promise of Toy Story.

"It salvaged his reputation and made him a billionaire."

The article's subheading? "How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio."

68-year-old technology writer Charles Petzold wrote about Windows programming for 25 years, including several books published by Microsoft Press. In 1994 he was one of seven "Windows Pioneers" honored in a special ceremony (with an award presented by Bill Gates), and the company has also recognized him with their "Most Valuable Professional" award.

Petzold just wrote a blog post titled "Screw you, Microsoft Edge" when the browser spontaneously decided to advise him of a discount at Walmart. Recently while searching for a book on Bookshop.org, I was interrupted by a popup apparently generated by Microsoft Edge advising me of an alternative... Excuse me?

The assumption that I need help buying a book is the biggest insult I've encountered on Windows since the days of Clippy.

A further insult is the implication that I make buying decisions based solely on price... I might prefer a retailer that focuses solely on books, or a retailer that is not a large chain. More generally, I might make a decision based on the company's carbon footprint, or perhaps their reputation in paying fair wages, or what political candidates and movements they support, or whether the CEO uses his wealth to launch himself into space.

Of course, these concepts are entirely beyond the scope of Edge's braindead algorithm that apparently knows only whether one number is larger than another.
In November Microsoft had described the upcoming popups announcing better prices as "a proactive price comparison experience that meets you where you shop. When you're shopping, Microsoft Edge will check prices at competing retailers to let you know if a lower price is available elsewhere..."

Promising there'd be even more shopping experiences coming, they'd added, "we'd love to hear what you think of them so far!"

"Part of the reason that misinformation about vaccines is so intractable is that it can be very lucrative," argues a new article in Slate: For years anti-vaccine figures have made money publishing books and giving speeches, and only in the past couple of years have major sites like YouTube started preventing anti-vaxxers from directly earning revenue from advertising. During the pandemic, as the coronavirus created new markets for health hoaxes, conspiracy theorists have been able to make money online by using the misinformation that they publicize on major sites like Facebook to sell supplements and books to followers via e-commerce shops. Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms — both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe — to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars...

On GiveSendGo and GoFundMe, vaccine truthers often portray themselves as little guys in a fight against the pro-vaccine tyranny of big pharma, big tech, and big government, and in doing so rake in money from thousands of sympathetic donors. They're able to do it in part because of lax standards and moderation blind spots, and in part by operating in gray areas... Over the past few months, GiveSendGo has been hosting fundraisers for causes casting doubt on vaccines that have racked up huge sums... But it isn't just GiveSendGo, though, that's facilitating donations for efforts to resist coronavirus vaccines. GoFundMe is also providing services to these causes. There, however, skeptics have a workaround: They're not raising money to oppose vaccines, per se, but to oppose vaccine mandates... [T]here are numerous other GoFundMe campaigns to support people who are choosing to leave their jobs instead of getting the vaccine.

GoFundMe does, however, appear to be placing banners with links to information from the CDC and WHO on fundraising pages that promote vaccine hesitancy, unlike GiveSendGo. "Fundraisers raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe's terms of service and will be removed from the platform," GoFundMe's senior communication manager Monica Corbett wrote in an email. "Over the last several years, we have removed over 250 fundraisers attempting to promote misinformation related to vaccines. Fundraisers for legal challenges do not violate our terms of service...." As the Daily Beast reported, users have in the past found ways to get around GoFundMe's ban on vaccine misinformation by crafting their campaigns in the name of anti-vax dog whistles like "medical freedom" and "informed consent...."

[T]he platform has tried to crack down on vaccine misinformation, finding itself walking the content-moderation tightrope that other large social media platforms are familiar with, which inevitably leaves loopholes in place that purveyors of misinformation try to exploit.

From a paper on PNAS [PDF]: Can entire societies become more or less depressed over time? Here, we look for the historical traces of cognitive distortions, thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety, in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German. We find a pronounced "hockey stick" pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions surged well above historical levels, including those of World War I and II, after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. Our results point to the possibility that recent socioeconomic changes, new technology, and social media are associated with a surge of cognitive distortions.

Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.

One of Amazon's most anticipated originals to date, a yet-unnamed Lord of the Rings original series, will officially debut on Prime Video on Friday, September 2nd, 2022. The Verge reports: Along with a premiere date, Amazon Studios released an official first image from the forthcoming series, which will be set in Middle-earth's Second Age. The series will take place thousands of years before the events chronicled in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, and it will follow characters "both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth."

The image release is tied to the series's production wrap after filming in New Zealand. Fans quickly speculated that the series will be set in Valinor, as the image depicts what appear to be the Two Trees. The untitled project is a huge investment by Amazon in its Prime Video streaming service. The series's first season alone reportedly cost around $465 million to produce. For context about what a massive creative undertaking this series has been for Amazon Studios, the final season of Game of Thrones was reported to have cost as much as $15 million per episode (though its budget was originally around $5 million per episode).

Amazon's Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The Verge reports: The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all. As Good e-Reader first noted in June, newer Kindle devices with 4G support should be fine, but for older devices that shipped with support for 3G and Wi-Fi like the Kindle Keyboard (3rd generation), Kindle Touch (4th generation), Kindle Paperwhite (4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th generation), Kindle Voyage (7th generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th generation), users will be stuck with Wi-Fi only. In its email announcement, Amazon stresses that you can still enjoy the content you already own and have downloaded on these devices, you just won't be able to download new books from the Kindle Store unless you're doing it over Wi-Fi.

Things get more complicated for Amazon's older Kindles, like the Kindle (1st and 2nd generation), and the Kindle DX (2nd generation). Since those devices relied solely on 2G or 3G internet connectivity, once the networks are shut down, the only way to get new content onto your device will be through an old-fashioned micro-USB cable. For customers affected by the shutdown, Amazon is offering a modest promotional credit (NEWKINDLE50) through August 15th for $50 towards a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, along with $15 in-store credit for ebooks. While arguably the company could do more to help affected customers (perhaps by replacing older devices entirely) this issue is largely out of Amazon's hands.