If you want to sell books during a pandemic, it turns out that one of the best places to do it is within easy reach of eggs, milk and diapers. From a report: When the coronavirus forced the United States into lockdown this spring, stores like Walmart and Target, which were labeled essential, remained open. So when anxious consumers were stocking up on beans and pasta, they were also grabbing workbooks, paperbacks and novels -- and the book sales at those stores shot up. "They sell groceries, they sell toilet paper, they sell everything people need during this time, and they're open," said Suzanne Herz, the publisher of Vintage/Anchor. "If you're in there and you're doing your big shop and you walk down the aisle and go, 'Oh, we're bored, and we need a book or a puzzle,' there it is." Big-box stores do not generally break out how much they sell of particular products, but people across the publishing industry say that sales increased at these stores significantly, with perhaps the greatest bump at Target. In some cases there, according to publishing executives, book sales tripled or quadrupled.

Dennis Abboud is the chief executive of ReaderLink, a book distributor that serves more than 80,000 retail stores, including big-box and pharmacy chains. He said that in the first week of April, his company's sales were 34 percent higher than the same period the year before. "With the shelter in place, people were looking for things to do," he said. "Workbooks, activity books and just general reading material saw a big increase."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fugitive executive of the embattled payment startup Wirecard was mentioned in a brazen and bizarre attempt to purchase hacking tools and surveillance technology from an Italian company in 2013, an investigation by Motherboard and the German weekly Der Spiegel found. Jan Marsalek, a 40-year-old Austrian who until recently was the chief operating officer of the rising fintech company Wirecard, seems to have taken a meeting with the infamous Italian surveillance technology provider Hacking Team in 2013. At the time, Marsalek is described as an official representative of the government of Grenada, a small Caribbean island of around 100,000 people, in a letter that bears the letterhead of the Grenada government. The documents were included in a cache published after Hacking Team was hacked in 2015. In recent days, Marsalek has been described as the 'world's most wanted man.'

It is unclear from the documents alone whether Marsalek played any role in the attempt to procure hacking tools, or whether his name was simply used. However, months before Marsalek appears to have contacted with Hacking Team, several websites with official sounding names such as StateOfGrenada.org were registered under the name of Jan Marsalek, as Der Spiegel reported last week. Some of the sites were registered with Marsalek's phone number and his Munich address at the time, and the servers were apparently operated from Germany. Wirecard provided digital payment services and was considered one of the most important companies in the financial tech industry. Wirecard offered a mobile payment app called Boon, which was essentially a virtual MasterCard card, it also offered a prepaid debit card called mycard2go, and worked with companies such as KLM, Rakuten, and Qatar Airways to manage their online transactions. The company suddenly collapsed in June after German regulators raided its headquarters as part of an investigation into fraudulent stock price manipulation and 1.9 billion euros that are missing from the company's books. Marsalek is now a fugitive and a key suspect in the German investigation. He reportedly fled to Belarus, and is now hiding in Russia under the protection of the FSB, according to German news reports. In the past, he was involved in other strange dealings: he bragged about an attempt to recruit 15,000 Libyan militiamen, and about a trip to Syria along with Russian military, according to the Financial Times.

America's border-protection agency "can track everyone's cars all over the country thanks to massive troves of automated license plate scanner data, a new report reveals," reports Ars Technica.

And they didn't need to request search warrants from the courts, the article explains, since "the agency did just what hundreds of other businesses and investigators do: straight-up purchase access to commercial databases." U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been buying access to commercial automated license plate-reader databases since 2017, TechCrunch reports, and the agency says bluntly that there's no real way for any American to avoid having their movements tracked. "CBP cannot provide timely notice of license plate reads obtained from various sources outside of its control," the agency wrote in its most recent privacy assessment. "The only way to opt out of such surveillance is to avoid the impacted area, which may pose significant hardships and be generally unrealistic...."

CBP already buys cell phone location data, even though it would not legally be able to hoover it up on a wide scale directly. Police also purchase hacked and breached data from third-party vendors that they can then use to track and identify individuals in ways that otherwise might have required a warrant.

Although hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide use automated plate-scanning technology, fewer than 20 states have laws of any kind on their books governing the collection, use, and storage of automated license plate-reader (ALPR) data. Even fewer of those laws specify what private entities can collect ALPR data and what can be done with that information. The software also seems to become more granular almost by the day.

Theoretically, CBP only has authority to operate within 100 miles of the US border. The data it purchases, however, may allow it to track any given license plate basically anywhere in the country.

An anonymous reader quotes The Register: People applying for software engineering positions at companies are often asked to solve problems on a whiteboard, under the watchful eye of an interviewer, as a way to assess technical problem solving skills. But recent research suggests that whiteboard technical tests — so daunting to job seekers that there are books on how to deal with them — often fail to assess technical skill, according to new research. Instead, they're all about pressure.

In a paper to be presented later this year at the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, researchers from North Carolina State University and Microsoft in the U.S. argue that whiteboard sessions test for stage fright rather than, y'know, coding competency... "A technical interview has an uncanny resemblance to the Trier Social Stress Test, a procedure used for decades by psychologists and is the best known 'gold standard' procedure for the sole purpose of reliably inducing stress." As a consequence, whiteboard interviews may fail to assess coder competency. Rather, the researchers argue, they measure how well job candidates handle anxiety....

In essence, social anxiety took otherwise qualified job candidates out of the running because of the circumstances of the interview.

Long-time Slashdot reader sjritt00 writes: A final collection of Terry Pratchett's early stories will be published in September as The Time-Travelling Caveman. These stories appeared in the Bucks Free Press and Western Daily Press in the 1960s and early '70s and introduce many of the themes which later power his Discworld series.
The Guardian reports that the stories "range from a steam-powered rocket's flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd's discovery of the resting place of King Arthur."

In a statement Pratchett's editors said "It is very fitting that some of the first stories he wrote will be in the last collection by him to be published..."

The American Mathematical Society has announced the passing of Ronald Graham, "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years." He died July 6th at the age of 84. From the report: Graham published more than 350 papers and books with many collaborators, including more than 90 with his wife, Fan Chung, and more than 30 with Paul Erdos. In addition to writing articles with Paul Erdos, Graham had a room in his house reserved for Erdos's frequent visits, he administered the cash prizes that Erdos created for various problems, and he created the Erdos number, which is the collaboration distance between a mathematician and Erdo's. He also created Graham's number in a 1971 paper on Ramsey theory written with Bruce Rothschild, which was for a time the largest number used in a proof.

Graham received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 under the direction of D.H. Lehmer. He worked at Bell Laboratories until 1999, starting as director of information sciences and ending his tenure there as chief scientist. Graham then joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego and later became chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint operation between the university and the University of California, Irvine. [...] Graham was an AMS member since 1961. For more information, see his "special page," these video interviews by the Simons Foundation, an audio interview about the mathematics of juggling, and his page at the MacTutor website. Graham's most recent appearance on Slashdot was in 2016, when a trio of researchers used a supercomputer to generate the largest math proof ever at 200 terabytes in size. The math problem was named the boolean Pythagorean Triples problem and was first proposed back in the 1980's by mathematician Ronald Graham.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In just the last week, Google Docs has emerged as a way to share everything from lists of books on racism to templates for letters to family members and representatives to lists of funds and resources that are accepting donations. Shared Google Docs that anyone can view and anyone can edit, anonymously, have become a valuable tool for grassroots organizing during both the coronavirus pandemic and the police brutality protests sweeping the US. It's not the first time. In fact, activists and campaigners have been using the word processing software for years as a more efficient and accessible protest tool than either Facebook or Twitter.

It wasn't until the 2016 elections, when misinformation campaigns were rampant, that the software came into its own as a political tool. Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College, used it to create a 34-page document titled "False, Misleading, Clickbaity-y, and/or Satirical 'News' Sources.'" Zimdars inspired a slew of political Google Docs, written by academics as ad hoc ways of campaigning for Democrats for the 2018 midterm elections. By the time the election passed, Google Docs were also being used to protest immigration bans and advance the #MeToo movement. Now, in the wake of George Floyd's murder on Memorial Day weekend, communities are using the software to organize. One of the most popular Google Docs to emerge in the past week is "Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives," which features clear steps people can take to support victims of police brutality. It is organized by Carlisa Johnson, a 28-year-old graduate journalism student at Georgia State University.

Hong Kong's government on Monday ordered schools to review and remove any books that might breach a sweeping new security law that Beijing imposed last week on the restless city. From a report: "In accordance with the four types of offences clearly stipulated in the law, the school management and teachers should review teaching and learning materials in a timely manner, including books," the Education Bureau said. "If they find outdated content or content that may concern the four aforementioned offences, they should remove them," the bureau added. Last week China enacted a security law outlawing four national security crimes: subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces. Authorities promptly declared political views espousing independence or self-autonomy would be viewed as illegal under the new law.

Rights groups and legal analysts have warned the broad wording of the law, which was kept secret until it was passed, would have a chilling effect of political freedoms in the semi-autonomous hub. The order for schools to review and remove any contraband books comes two days after Hong Kong's libraries said they were also pulling titles deemed to breach the law for a review. Among those withdrawn from shelves was one by prominent activist Joshua Wong, another by pro-democracy lawmaker Tanya Chan and multiple other titles written by Chin Wan, a scholar who is seen as the godfather of a "localist" movement advocating greater self-determination for the city. Hong Kong has some of Asia's best universities and a campus culture where topics that would be taboo on the mainland are still discussed and written about.

British stock trader Navinder Sarao was accused of helping cause a $1 trillion stock market crash in 2010.

But the rest of his story is now being told in a new book titled Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History. "I think that he was a gamer and, for him, markets were honestly the ultimate form of game," author Liam Vaughan tells the New York Post: Sarao was more concerned with the rise of high-frequency trading, a method of buying and selling that used powerful computers and algorithms to execute trades in fractions of seconds. The speed allowed (mostly) large, monied firms to beat others to a trade, thereby securing a better price. Sarao bristled at the unfairness. He began engaging in what is known as "spoofing." He hired software developers to write programs that would allow him to place millions of dollars worth of orders, then — after other traders had reacted to his potential trade — abruptly cancel his order. The deception allowed Sarao to nudge the market higher or lower and reap the benefits.

His trading habits eventually drew scrutiny from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, earning him cautionary letters. Sarao, however, phoned the authorities and told them to "kiss my ass." Then on May 6, 2010, Sarao logged on from his bedroom and began furiously trading, attempting to capitalize on the volatility still roiling the markets after the 2008 crisis. In the final two hours before he logged off at 7:40 p.m. London time, the trader had bought and sold 62,077 e-mini contracts — with a combined value of $3.4 billion. A minute later, markets tumbled with a "velocity and intensity it never had before," Vaughan writes...

Sarao was later arrested and extradited to the United States, only the second person ever charged with spoofing. It's unclear how much his actions contributed to America's so-called "flash crash." The US government contends that he was partially responsible, while some financial experts disagree, seeing him as a Robin Hood whose actions only hurt wealthy companies.
But whatever happened to Sarao? The Post writes that he cooperated with authorities, and the answer ultimately came quietly in January, reports CNBC: Despite facing as much as eight years in prison, Federal Judge Virginia Kendall sentenced Sarao — who suffers from severe Asperger's — to just one year of supervised release. Court documents submitted by Sarao's legal team described him as a "singularly sunny, childlike, guileless, trusting person," who lived off social security payments and played hour after hour of video games in his childhood bedroom.

Sarao, who spent four months in the U.K.'s Wandsworth Prison before his extradition to the United States, has forfeited about $7.6 million in gains made from trading. U.S. authorities claimed Sarao made more than $70 million between 2009 and 2014 from his bedroom — much of it legal. However, it has been reported that he has lost almost all of his money after investing in fraudulent scams.
"I think justice was done," the new book's author tells the Post, "because the message was out there that someone shouldn't be thinking about doing what Nav was doing."

AmiMoJo shares a report from Polygon: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has acknowledged the existence of racist stereotypes in its sourcebooks, and pledged to make changes to ameliorate the issue. In a blog post published on June 17 titled "Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons," Wizards of the Coast said that depicting a diverse array of human beings -- beyond "fantasy versions of northern Europeans" -- is "one of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D." The developers noted that while they want to feature characters "who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs," the game still contains problematic depictions of fantasy races.

Among these races are the orcs, who are often characterized as a savage horde of creatures who lust for battle, and the drow, an evil dark-skinned subrace of elves who dwell in a subterranean matriarchy. Wizards of the Coast specifically addressed these two groups in laying out recent and future changes to D&D products: "We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do." They add: "Later this year, we will release a product (not yet announced) that offers a way for a player to customize their character's origin, including the option to change the ability score increases that come from being an elf, a dwarf, or one of D&D's many other playable folk. This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own." The publisher also said "it's adjusting material that maligns or stereotypes real-world ethnic groups like the Roma," reports Polygon. "The company has revised the adventure Curse of Strahd, which includes a people known as the Vistani that 'echoes some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world.'"

"In addition, the publisher said two future books will be written with a Romani consultant so as to characterize the Vistani 'in a way that doesn't rely on reductive tropes.'"

Wargames shares the official trailer of Apple's upcoming new TV series, Foundation, adapted from Isaac Asimov's seminal Foundation series of novels. Ars Technica provides more details: The original trilogy centered on a mathematician named Hari Seldon, who has developed a mathematical approach to sociology he calls "psychohistory" that enables him to predict the future of large populations -- like the Galactic Empire, which incorporates all inhabitants of the Milky Way. Unfortunately, Seldon's theory predicts an imminent collapse of the empire -- well, in 500 years, which is certainly imminent on galactic time scales. This will usher in a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years, after which a second empire will arise. The news is not well received by the members of the Committee on Public Safety, who essentially rule the empire, and Seldon is forced to stand trial for treason, along with a brilliant young mathematical protege named Gaal.

In his defense, Seldon argues that he cannot stop the collapse, but there is a way to limit those Dark Ages to just 1,000 years. He proposes creating a Foundation, a group of the most intelligent minds in the empire, charged with preserving all human knowledge in the Encyclopedia Galactica. Rather than executing Seldon, the committee decides to exile him to a remote world called Terminus, along with the members of the new Foundation, where they can begin compiling the encyclopedia. Much of the first book in the trilogy follows the establishment of the colony on Terminus and the various political machinations that shape its early history, along with a startling revelation: unbeknownst to the committee, Seldon has established a second Foundation at the other end of the galaxy. It's unclear how closely the series will follow the novels, but one of the executive producers is Robyn Asimov, the novelist's daughter.

"Harris plays Seldon, with Pace co-starring as Brother Day, current Emperor of the Galaxy. Lou Llobell plays Gaal, Leah Harvey plays a gender-swapped Salvor, warden of Terminus, and Laura Birn plays Eto Demerzel, aide to Brother Day," adds Ars. "Other listed characters include Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), the ruling family's oldest living member, and Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), the youngest member and heir apparent to Brother Day." Foundation is expected to debut on Apple TV Plus in 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: An abandoned bus in the Alaska backcountry, popularized by the book "Into the Wild" and movie of the same name, was removed Thursday, state officials said. The decision prioritizes public safety, Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner Corri Feige said. The bus has long attracted adventurers to an area without cellphone service and marked by unpredictable weather and at-times swollen rivers. Some have had to be rescued or have died. Christopher McCandless, the subject of the book and movie, died there in 1992. The rescue earlier this year of five Italian tourists and death last year of a woman from Belarus intensified calls from local officials for the bus, about 25 miles from the Parks Highway, to be removed.

The Alaska Army National Guard moved the bus as part of a training mission "at no cost to the public or additional cost to the state," Feige said. The Alaska National Guard, in a release, said the bus was removed using a heavy-lift helicopter. The crew ensured the safety of a suitcase with sentimental value to the McCandless family, the release states. It doesn't describe that item further. Feige, in a release, said the bus will be kept in a secure location while her department weighs various options for what to do with it.

Earlier this week, Apple told Basecamp, the company that makes the brand new email app called Hey, that it cannot distribute its app on the iPhone unless it makes it possible for users to sign up via Apple's own prescribed methods -- which gives Apple a 30 percent cut. Apple told Basecamp that by avoiding giving an option in its iOS app to sign up and support in-app purchases, it was violating Apple's App Store policy, 3.1.1, which says: If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, (by way of example: subscriptions, in-game currencies, game levels, access to premium content, or unlocking a full version), you must use in-app purchase. Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, etc. Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase. Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge: The key thing to know is that the text of this policy is not actually the policy. Or rather, as with any law, the text is only one of the things you need to understand. You also need to know how it is enforced and how the enforcers interpret that text. It should not surprise you to know that Apple's interpretation of its text often seems capricious at best and at worst seems like it's motivated by self-dealing. And the enforcement consequently often seems unfair.

The rule states that if you want to sell digital goods, you have to use Apple's payment system. Except that's not how 3.1.1 has been interpreted to date. It has been interpreted as allowing people to access services they paid for elsewhere on their iOS devices, but not allowing those apps to try to get around the Apple payment rules when people sign up on those devices. That's convoluted, but that interpretation is what keeps Netflix from having an account sign-up in its app. It's the policy that has enraged Spotify and keeps you from buying Kindle books on your iPhone without jumping through a million weird Safari hoops. That was already a very bad rule, if you ask me. Now, with this email app, Apple is apparently changing its interpretation to be more strict. David Pierce, in an update to his news report about Hey-Apple debacle: Apple told me that its actual mistake was approving the app in the first place, when it didn't conform to its guidelines. Apple allows these kinds of client apps -- where you can't sign up, only sign in -- for business services but not consumer products. That's why Basecamp, which companies typically pay for, is allowed on the App Store when Hey, which users pay for, isn't. One other distinction: Apple allows "Reader" apps -- things like Netflix and Kindle and Dropbox, where you're using the app to access existing subscriptions -- as long as they don't offer a way to sign up. But email, messaging, etc. don't count as Reader apps. John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: The lone instance of "consumer" refers to the "Consumer Health Records API". The price that Basecamp pays for not supporting in-app purchase in their iOS app is that they lose whatever number of users would have signed up in-app but won't sign up out-of-app. That's competition. Again, putting aside arguments that Apple should allow apps to use their own payment systems in apps, or be able to link to a website for sign up, or at the very least just tell users how to sign up -- the makers of an app should be able to say "OK, we won't even tell users how to sign up within our app; our app is only for existing customers and we'll obtain all of them outside the app." [...]

Second, how could such a distinction be made in writing? There are some apps that are definitely "business services" and some that are definitely "consumer products" (games for example), but to say that the area in between encompasses many shades of gray is an understatement. The entire mobile era of computing -- an era which Apple itself has inarguably largely defined -- is about the obliteration of distinct lines between business and consumer products. [...] At some level there's a clear distinction here -- Netflix and Kindle are clearly consumption services. But Dropbox? Dropbox is a lot closer to an email or messaging service like Hey than it is to Netflix or Kindle. The stuff in my Dropbox account is every bit as personal as the stuff in my email account. When you put Dropbox in the same bucket with Netflix and Amazon Kindle, it seems to me like the distinction is not so much between what is and isn't a "reader" app or what is or isn't a "business" app, but between companies which are too big for Apple to push around and those they can.

The rapid rise of Bookshop.org during the shutdown has been hailed as a boon for independent stores. But some booksellers worry it could become another competitor for online business. From a report: In January, when Andy Hunter, the publisher of a small press, started an online bookstore that he pitched as the indie alternative to Amazon, many in the book business had their doubts. Earlier efforts to create a portal for independent booksellers had done little to chip away at Amazon's market share, and even retailers like Barnes & Noble have struggled to compete. Mr. Hunter felt there was an unexploited opportunity. Seizing even a fraction of Amazon's sales would be a windfall for independent stores, which would receive a cut of the site's profits. Mr. Hunter told investors that within two years, his site, Bookshop, could reach $30 million in annual sales, a projection that struck some as wildly optimistic. Then, in March, the coronavirus pandemic forced bookstores across the United States to shut their doors. Hundreds of bookstore owners, many of whom couldn't enter their stores to fulfill online or phone orders, joined the new site.

Now Bookshop is on track to exceed $40 million in sales this year, blowing past the sum that Mr. Hunter initially hoped to reach by 2022. The site sold some $4.5 million of books in May, and more than $7 million in the first two weeks of June. More than 750 bookstores have joined, and Bookshop has generated more than $3.6 million for stores. The company is preparing to expand its operations to Britain later this year, where it plans to partner with the book wholesaler Gardners. "There were a number of skeptics about whether this would work," said Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics & Prose in Washington. "Bookshop has certainly worked better than anybody anticipated, because nobody anticipated a pandemic." Some wonder whether Bookshop will remain a viable player in the online retail ecosystem as stores begin to reopen, and customers who turned to the site during the shutdown revert to in-store and curbside shopping. Meanwhile, Amazon, which accounts for some 70 percent of online book sales, has strengthened its position as the world's largest online retailer. The company reported $75.5 billion in sales during its most recent fiscal quarter, a 26 percent increase from the year-ago quarter.

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it's launching two antitrust investigations into Apple's App Store rules and the Apple Pay platform. From a report: The Commission, the executive arm of the EU, said it will assess whether Apple's rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store breach EU competition rules. While companies can place their apps on the App Store at no cost, Apple charges companies 30% from in-app purchases and 30% on subscriptions for the first year, then 15% thereafter. Spotify, which competes directly with Apple Music, feels this is unfair and filed a formal complaint in March 2019. Kobo, an e-reader company that competes with Apple Books, has also filed a complaint. Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said in a statement: "Mobile applications have fundamentally changed the way we access content. Apple sets the rules for the distribution of apps to users of iPhones and iPads. It appears that Apple obtained a 'gatekeeper' role when it comes to the distribution of apps and content to users of Apple's popular devices. We need to ensure that Apple's rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers, for example with its music streaming service Apple Music or with Apple Books. I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple's App Store rules and their compliance with EU competition rules."

Six eBay employees including a former police captain in California last year engaged in a relentless campaign of harassment and cyberstalking of a Natick couple that published a newsletter critical of the online retailer, sending items including fly larvae, live spiders, and a bloody pig mask to their home and travelling to Massachusetts to conduct surveillance of the victims in an effort to get them to stop publishing, authorities alleged Monday. From a report: During a news conference, US Attorney Andrew E. Lelling said the defendants conducted a "systematic campaign fueled by the resources of a Fortune 500 company to emotionally and psychologically terrorize this middle-aged couple in Natick." Lelling's words were echoed by Joseph R. Bonavolonta, FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Boston office, who cited the suspects' "elaborate and relentless campaign to stifle the publishers of an online newsletter out of fear that bad publicity would adversely impact" the company. Court papers identify the defendants as James Baugh, David Harville, Stephanie Popp, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, and Veronica Zea. Lelling said Baugh was arrested in New York. It wasn't immediately clear when he'd make his initial appearance in US District Court in Boston. The remaining defendants, including Gilbert, the former police captain, weren't yet in custody as of noontime Monday.

According to Lellling, the now-fired eBay officials also sent items including pornography to the couple's neighbors in the couple's names, posted listings on Craigslist urging swingers and couples to come to the Natick couples' home to party every night after 10 pm, and created fake social media accounts to send messages to the couple including one that said, "do I have your attention now?" A complaint filed in the case by FBI Special Agent Mark Wilson said the "campaign included: sending anonymous, threatening communications to the Victims; ordering unwanted and disturbing deliveries to their home, including funeral wreaths and books on surviving the loss of a spouse; and BAUGH, HARVILLE, Zea, and Popp travelling to Natick to surveil the Victims at their home and in their community." It wasn't immediately clear if any of the suspects had retained lawyers to speak on their behalf. According to the complaint, two eBay officials, identified in court papers only as Executive 1 and Executive 2, followed the couple's newsletter with interest. In April 2019, Executive 2 told Executive 1 via text message, "We are going to crush this lady," referring to the woman who put out the newsletter along with her husband, the complaint said.

In 1945, after atomic bomb detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, several former Manhattan Project scientists founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Publishing continuously since 1945, its current deputy editor, science writer DanDrollette, is also a Slashdot reader, and shared one of the nonprofit magazine's thought-provoking new interviews: In 2012, author David Quammen wrote a book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, that was the result of five years of research on scientists who were looking into the possibility of another Ebola-type disease emerging. The consensus: There would indeed be a new disease, likely from the coronavirus family, coming out of a bat, and it would likely emerge in or around a wet market in China.

But what was not predictable was how unprepared we would be.

Quammen: For 15 years, scientists have said: "Watch out for coronaviruses; they could be very dangerous." And for five years, Chinese scientist Zhengli Shi at Wuhan Institute of Virology has been warning us to watch out for the coronaviruses found in Chinese bats; SARS is a coronavirus, and it came out of Chinese bats in 2003. That was very dangerous to humans, but it didn't transmit as readily as this one does. But Shi and her group saw a virus very similar to it in bats in a cave in Yunnan Province and published a paper in 2017 saying, "Watch out for these particular coronaviruses in these horseshoe bats. They necessitate the highest preparedness." That was three years ago...

Everything about this outbreak was predictable, to me and to the scientists I was listening to, 10 years ago.

Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 writes: For several years, Zipline has deployed autonomous, fixed-wing airplane drones for medical supply deliveries in Rwanda. Now they have received permission to test their aircraft in the U.S., ferrying COVID-19 supplies from a depot to a hospital in North Carolina. The practical benefit is small: the cargo is modest amounts of PPE that could have been delivered by truck in about 20 minutes. But this is a big deal, because it required a waiver from the FAA for the planes to operate fully autonomously and beyond visual line-of-sight — just launch and forget. It is happening in proximity to an airport no less.
The article notes it's America's "first drone delivery operation to be approved to fly in airspace where all air traffic is actively managed by the FAA."

But meanwhile, another headline this week at the Washington Post tells us that Google-backed drones "will drop library books so kids in Virginia can do their summer reading." Wing, a company owned by Google parent Alphabet, started delivering household goods and meals [and prescriptions] from Walgreens and local restaurants to a limited area of the southwest Virginia town that covers several thousand homes last October. The company has seen a jump in demand during the pandemic as people are increasingly staying home and avoiding crowded spaces like grocery stores, said Keith Heyde, head of Virginia operations for Wing. The company reached a high of 1,000 deliveries globally in a single week this spring, he said.
And they're not the only companies experimenting with drone deliveries, according to Forbes: UPS and CVS have also paired up with a focus on medical products. The two companies are partnering to use drones to deliver prescriptions to residents of The Villages in Florida, one of the country's biggest retirement communities. The deliveries come from a CVS store about a half mile away and mark the first paid residential deliveries by UPS's drone unit Flight Forward. The drones drop the prescriptions to a central location, where a Flight Forward employee will ferry them by golf cart to homes.
Chennai, India, and Surabaya, Indonesia have tried using drones to spray disinfectant in crowded cities. But Forbes reports that around the world, "the biggest use case has been the deployment of drones to enforce social distancing and monitor crowds."

Although at least one Paris prefect complains that there's still one problem with the drones. "Sometimes they are attacked by birds, which mistake them for rivals."

The Internet Archive's National Emergency Library is finished. The non-profit repository for digital preservation, which began offering millions of e-books for free to address the closure of libraries during the pandemic, buckled under a joint lawsuit filed by major publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins. From a report: Publishers said lending out books without compensation was "mass copyright infringement." The digital library will close next week. The archive of books was initially invite-only and only allowed a given file to be downloaded a limited number of times at once, with each rental limited to 14 days. But then the pandemic hit and libraries closed, so the Internet Archive responded by making all the books accessible to everyone, with no limits.

The Quadriga cryptocurrency exchange that saw millions of dollars disappear just as its founder died was a "fraud" and Ponzi scheme, according to the Ontario Securities Commission. CBC.ca reports: The regulator said Thursday that Vancouver-based Quadriga's late founder Gerald Cotten committed fraud by opening accounts under aliases and crediting himself with fictitious currency and crypto asset balances, which he traded with unsuspecting clients. Cotten, the OSC said in a new report, ran into a shortfall in assets available to satisfy client withdrawals when the price of the crypto assets changed. He started running a Ponzi scheme that covered the shortfall with other clients' deposits, the agency determined.

"What happened at Quadriga was an old-fashioned fraud wrapped in modern technology," the OSC said. "Quadriga did not consider its business to involve securities trading and it did not register with any securities regulator. This lack of registration facilitated Cotten's ability to commit a large-scale fraud without detection. So did the absence of internal oversight over Cotten." On Thursday, the OSC attributed about $115 million of the $169 million clients lost to Cotten's "fraudulent" trading. Another $28 million was lost when Cotten used client assets on three external crypto asset trading platforms without authorization or disclosure. The OSC said he also misappropriated millions in client assets to fund his "lavish" lifestyle and because he was in sole control of the company ever since 2016, he "ran the business as he saw fit, with no proper system of internal oversight or controls or proper books and records." "Ernst & Young, Quadriga's bankruptcy trustee, was only able to recover $46 million in assets to pay out to clients," the report adds.