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1. After years of dragging its feet, FCC finally starts tackling America's robocall scourge

2. FCC urges Americans to run internet speed app to counter Big Cable's broadband data fudging

3. Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

4. NSA helps out Microsoft with critical Exchange Server vulnerability disclosures in an April shower of patches

5. Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

• Truth and consequences for enterprise AI as EU know who goes legal: GDPR of everything from chatbots to machine learning

  Regulations On A European Approach For Artificial Intelligence
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 08:30 UTC

  One of the Brexit bonuses we’ve been enjoying since January 1st is that we have abandoned our influence within the world’s regulatory superpower.

  America and China may have industrial and military dominance, but by placing a decent proportion of global economic activity under the world’s strongest regulatory regime, the EU forces the pace for everyone else. GDPR commands respect around the world.

  So when the draft "Regulation On A European Approach For Artificial Intelligence" leaked earlier this week, it made quite the splash - and not just because it’s the size of a novella. It goes to town on AI just as fiercely as GDPR did on data, proposing chains of responsibility, defining "high risk AI" that gets the full force of the regs, proposing multi-million euro fines for non-compliance, and defining a whole set of harmful behaviours and limits to what AI can do with individuals and in general.

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• Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

  Two-week vote dismissed options to back or sack controversial FOSS figure
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 07:50 UTC

  The Debian developer community has decided to say nothing about the new controversy surrounding Richard Stallman.

  The decision to say nothing came after a call for the project to support an open letter that called for Stallman’s removal from all leadership positions in the free software community and the removal of the entire Free Software Foundation for enabling Stallman.

  Stallman resigned from the Foundation in 2019 after he questioned whether the term “sexual assault” was applicable in the case of a woman who, aged 17, was coerced to have sex with AI pioneer Marvin Minksy.

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• You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?

  Two windows, one tetchy techie – what could possibly go wrong?
  Richard Speed Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 07:15 UTC

  Who, me? Today's tale from The Register's Who, Me? files is a reminder that a momentary loss of focus is all that is required to trigger a potentially catastrophic error.

  Our contributor, Regomised as "Sam", regaled us with a story from a mere five years ago when he was still a fresh-faced worker doing time as second-line support at the service desk of a large motorcycle broker.

  He had been called into the office on a Sunday to deal with a problem with the systems. "My boss," he said, with a less than fresh-faced weariness, "was nagging me about something another colleague did (as she saw everything as my fault) and she wanted me to restart a training server of the main brokerage platform because the restore had failed."

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• Adobe co-founder and PostScript co-creator Charles Geschke passes, aged 81

  Mathematician and massive figure in digital publishing lives on in every PDF
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 06:44 UTC

  Charles Geschke, co-founder of Adobe and co-creator of PostScript, and a reason this story is visually appealing, died Friday, April 16, at the age of 81.

  Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan sent an announcement of Geschke’s passing to staff that included this tribute from his collaborator of five decades, John Warnock:

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• Pakistan cut off Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Telegram – for just four hours

  To stop protests by far-right party that wants France’s ambassador expelled
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 05:58 UTC

  Pakistan shut down several social networks within its borders on Friday but lifted the ban after around four hours.

  The nation’s Telecommunication Authority announced the ban, effective immediately, with the following explanation:

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• India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

  Three-pronged adoption drive includes cut-price courseware
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 19 Apr 2021 // 02:59 UTC

  India has launched a national IPv6 drive.

  A joint initiative of the nation’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology and Ministry of Department of Telecommunications, the effort will be run out of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and aims to educate locals about the benefits of IPv6.

  An IPv6 Expert Panel – branded “IP Guru” – has been appointed, with a remit to “extend support to all the Indian entities who are finding it technically challenging to migrate and adopt IPv6.” The Panel has been tasked with “identifying & hiring [an] agency that will help end customer by providing necessary technical support to adopt IPv6.”

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• Linus Torvalds reluctantly issues one more release candidate for Linux kernel 5.12

  We gotta do this again? Really? Oh, alright then. But this eight release candidates thing is not great
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Sun 18 Apr 2021 // 23:59 UTC

  Linux kernel development boss Linus Torvalds has reluctantly issued an eighth release candidate for version 5.12 of the FOSS OS.

  “Ok, so it's been _fairly_ calm this past week, but it hasn't been the kind of dead calm I would have taken to mean "no rc8 necessary,” Torvalds wrote in his customary Sunday afternoon (US time) update on the state of kernel development.

  “So here we are, with an extra rc to make sure things are all settled down. It's not _that_ rare: this is the fifth time in the 5.x series we've ended up with an rc8, but I have to admit that I prefer it when a release doesn't end up needing that extra week,” he added.

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• Seeing a robot dog tagging along with NYPD officers after an arrest stuns New Yorkers

  Plus: 'First civil lawsuit' against police for incorrect facial recognition match in wrongful collaring, and more
  Katyanna Quach Sat 17 Apr 2021 // 15:05 UTC

  In brief Bystanders in New York City were stunned this week when cops left a public housing complex with a handcuffed man and a robot law enforcement dog trotting after them.

  The four-legged machine – shown below – was built by Boston Dynamics, and has been dispatched to crime scenes across the American metropolis since October, according to Gothamist.

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• Google's FLoC flies into headwinds as internet ad industry braces for instability

  Reinventing web advertising tech at a time of heightened privacy concern proves difficult
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Sat 17 Apr 2021 // 08:07 UTC

  Analysis With Google testing its FLoC ad technology in preparation for the planned elimination of third-party cookies next year, uncertainty about potential problems and growing legal support for privacy is shaking up the digital ad industry.

  The move away from third-party cookies will have significant financial impact on the ad industry, and the internet ecosystem that depends on advertising – assuming you accept studies that credit third-party cookies with meaningful [PDF] rather than minimal [PDF] revenue.

  "Our analysis suggests that the publishing industry will have to replace up to $10 billion in ad revenue with a combination of first-party data gathered through a combination of paywalls and required registrations, and updated contextual targeting and probabilistic audience modeling (analytics that incorporate an array of unknown elements)," said consultancy McKinsey in a recent report.

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• Elon Musk's SpaceX bags $3bn NASA contract to, fingers crossed, land first woman on the Moon

  And the 13th guy
  Iain Thomson in San Francisco Fri 16 Apr 2021 // 22:28 UTC

  NASA today announced the next US lunar mission will use SpaceX's HLS Starship to put American astronauts on the Moon's surface.

  Elon Musk's rocketry biz thus scoops a $2.89bn contract to put the first woman and the 13th man on the Moon as part of the American space agency's Artemis program. NASA will use its own much-delayed SLS booster to launch four astronauts into orbit and make the trans-lunar injection burn – pointing them Moon-ward, basically – and then two of the 'nauts will transfer to SpaceX hardware to touch down.

  “This is an exciting time for NASA and especially the Artemis team,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, program manager for HLS at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

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• Pentagon confirms footage of three strange craft taken by the Navy are UFOs (no, that doesn't mean they're aliens)

  Unless by aliens you mean Russians
  Katyanna Quach Fri 16 Apr 2021 // 21:41 UTC

  Photos and videos taken by US Navy officers of strange-shaped aircraft streaming across our skies a couple of years ago have been officially labelled as unidentified flying objects by Uncle Sam.

  The first clip, filmed in night-vision, features a cone-shaped object blinking in the sky across an eerie green sky. In a second incident, pilots captured a device that rotated as it flew, and in the third image an object hovered in front, CNN reported.

  Sue Gough, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, referred to those objects as being shaped like a “sphere,” or “acorn" and called the last one a "metallic blimp." All the footage was taken by the Navy, and Gough confirmed the content was being investigated by the US government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, a special unit focused on probing UFOs, which is led by the Navy and was created in August.

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