Libraries are successfully convincing state legislatures to help them win better terms for ebook licenses from Amazon and other publishers. From a report: Libraries say it is crucial for them to continue to service their communities, especially as digital access to books became even more important during the pandemic. "What a tragedy it would be if in a digital context, Americans and American library users have less access to knowledge and information than they did in the analog era," John Bracken, executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, told Axios.

A Maryland law set to take effect in January and a similar bill in New York would require publishers that sell ebooks to consumers to also license them to libraries on reasonable terms. Libraries pushed for the legislation because they say publishers charge high prices, require re-purchases of licenses, limit the ability to circulate digital copies, and, until recently in Amazon's case, refuse to license some ebooks to libraries at all. "We've had enough of this," Alan Inouye, senior director of public policy & government relations for the American Library Association, told Axios. "Libraries really need to have reasonable access."

The World Science Fiction Society has selected this year's winners for their prestigious Hugo award.

The best novel award went to Network Effect, the fifth book in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which also won this year's Hugo award for best series. (And Network Effect also won 2021's Nebula award for best novel, given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.) Here's how publisher Tor.com begins their description: You know that feeling when you're at work, and you've had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot.

Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you'll read this century.
The best novelette award went to Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker — available now for free reading online (which also won a Nebula award). The best novella award went to The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. (Both were also published by Tor.com.) Also available for free reading online is the Hugo winner for best short story, "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher. (And Kingfisher won a second Hugo this year — the Lodestar award for best young adult book for A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking — which also won a Nebula award.)

A special award for "Best Related Work" went to Beowulf: A New Translation. ("Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his macho bluster in a whole new light," wrote the New York Times.) And the Best Graphic Story award went to Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, written by Octavia Butler and adapted by Damian Duffy...

Netflix won a Hugo award for The Old Guard ("Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form"), while the final 53-minute episode of NBC's TV show The Good Place won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Shortform. (The episode also won this year's "Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation".)

And there were also awards for best fan podcast, best fan writer, and best fanzine, as well as special one-off Hugo award for best video game, which went to the game Hades.

Amazon bent over backwards to sell kindle and cloud services in China, Reuters reported on Friday. The company attempted to curry favor with Beijing by promoting President Xiâ(TM)s books as "best sellers," censoring reviews of propaganda films and providing a dissident's IP address to authorities, the report said. From the report: Amazon was marketing a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings on its Chinese website about two years ago, when Beijing delivered an edict, according to two people familiar with the incident. The American e-commerce giant must stop allowing any customer ratings and reviews in China. A negative review of Xi's book prompted the demand, one of the people said. "I think the issue was anything under five stars," the highest rating in Amazon's five-point system, said the other person. Ratings and reviews are a crucial part of Amazon's e-commerce business, a major way of engaging shoppers. But Amazon complied, the two people said. Currently, on its Chinese site Amazon.cn, the government-published book has no customer reviews or any ratings. And the comments section is disabled.

Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces. An internal 2018 Amazon briefing document that describes the company's China business lays out a number of "Core Issues" the Seattle-based giant has faced in the country. Among them: "Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success," the document notes. "We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong." That briefing document, and interviews with more than two dozen people who have been involved in Amazon's China operation, reveal how the company has survived and thrived in China by helping to further the ruling Communist Party's global economic and political agenda, while at times pushing back on some government demands.

In Boeing's factory of the future, immersive 3-D engineering designs will be twinned with robots that speak to each other, while mechanics around the world will be linked by $3,500 HoloLens headsets made by Microsoft. From a report: It is a snapshot of an ambitious new Boeing strategy to unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a single digital ecosystem -- in as little as two years. Critics say Boeing has repeatedly made similar bold pledges on a digital revolution, with mixed results. But insiders say the overarching goals of improving quality and safety have taken on greater urgency and significance as the company tackles multiple threats.

The planemaker is entering 2022 fighting to reassert its engineering dominance after the 737 MAX crisis, while laying the foundation for a future aircraft program over the next decade -- a $15 billion gamble. It also aims to prevent future manufacturing problems like the structural flaws that have waylaid its 787 Dreamliner over the past year. "It's about strengthening engineering," Boeing's chief engineer, Greg Hyslop, told Reuters in his first interview in nearly two years. "We are talking about changing the way we work across the entire company." After years of wild market competition, the need to deliver on bulging order books has opened up a new front in Boeing's war with Europe's Airbus, this time on the factory floor.

How a blind spot in the Kyoto Protocol helped create the biomass industry. From a report: In essence, Drax [a tiny village in North of England] is a gigantic woodstove. In 2019, Drax emitted more than fifteen million tons of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by three million typical passenger vehicles in one year. Of those emissions, Drax reported that 12.8 million tons were "biologically sequestered carbon" from biomass (wood). In 2020, the numbers increased: 16.5 million tons, 13.2 million from biomass. Meanwhile, the Drax Group calls itself "the biggest decarbonization project in Europe," delivering "a decarbonized economy and healthy forests." The apparent conflict between what Drax does and what it says it does has its origins in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change of 1997. The conference established the Kyoto Protocol, which was intended to reduce emissions and "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) classified wind and solar power as renewable-energy sources.

But wood-burning was harder to categorize: It's renewable, technically, because trees grow back. In accounting for greenhouse gases, the I.P.C.C. sorts emissions into different "sectors," which include land-use and energy production. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time, the I.P.C.C. was concerned that if they counted emissions from harvesting trees in the land sector, it would be duplicative to count emissions from the burning of pellets in the energy sector. According to William Moomaw, an emeritus professor of international environmental policy at Tufts University, and lead author of several I.P.C.C. reports, negotiators thought of biomass as only a minor part of energy production -- small-scale enough that forest regrowth could theoretically keep up with the incidental harvesting of trees. "At the time these guidelines were drawn up, the I.P.C.C. did not imagine a situation where millions of tons of wood would be shipped four thousand miles away to be burned in another country," Moomaw said. In the end, negotiators decided only to count land-use emissions. "But these emissions are very difficult to estimate, and the United States and Canada aren't even part of the Kyoto agreement," Moomaw said. The loss of future carbon uptake due to the removal of forests, even the plumes chugging out of a biomass plant's smokestacks -- these did not go on the books.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson shares which actions be believes need to be taken to address the climate crisis. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley: To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future -- then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade. The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story. [...] What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries. The screen doesn't fade to black; instead we watch people keep dying, and coping, and struggling to shape a future -- often gloriously.

I spoke to Robinson recently for an episode of the podcast The Dig. He told me that he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a "time stamp on [their] political view" that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form "a united front," he told me. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions." The point of Robinson's decades of sci-fi isn't to simply counsel "vote blue no matter who." He told me he remains a proud and longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he does want leftists -- and everyone else -- to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

Robinson's "all-hands" call is even more challenging on technology and economics than on electoral campaigns. He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun. As Ministry dramatizes, and as he reminded me, there's a good chance that a country being devastated by climate breakdown will try this, whether it's authorized by the international community or not. More broadly, Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention -- from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean -- from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The detonation of the first nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is seared into our collective memory, and the world has been haunted by the prospect of a devastating nuclear apocalypse ever since. Less well-known but equally significant from a nuclear arms race standpoint was the Soviet Union's successful detonation of a hydrogen "superbomb" in the wee hours of October 30, 1961. Dubbed "Tsar Bomba" (loosely translated, "Emperor of Bombs"), it was the size of a small school bus -- it wouldn't even fit inside a bomber and had to be slung below the belly of the plane. The 60,000-pound (27 metric tons) test bomb's explosive yield was 50 million tons (50 megatons) of TNT, although the design had a maximum explosive yield of 100 million tons (100 megatons).

The US had conducted the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb (codename: Ivy Mike) in 1954 and had been pondering the development of even more powerful hydrogen superbombs. But the Soviets' successful test lent greater urgency to the matter. Ultimately, President John F. Kennedy opted for diplomacy, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on October 7, 1963. But US nuclear policy -- and, hence, world history -- might have ended up looking very different, according to Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, released earlier this year. He also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.

Wellerstein has analyzed recently declassified documents pertaining to the US response to Tsar Bomba during the Kennedy administration. He described his conclusions in a fascinating article recently published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the test. [...] According to Wellerstein, the US initially sought to minimize the significance of the Soviets' success, officially dismissing it as a political publicity stunt with little to no technical or strategic importance. But the declassified files revealed that, behind the scenes, US officials took the matter very seriously indeed. Physicist Edward Teller in particular strongly advocated in favor of developing two even more powerful hydrogen bombs, with yields of 1,000 and even 10,000 megatons, respectively. While much of Teller's testimony at a secret meeting on the topic remains classified, Wellerstein found that many scientists who were present expressed shock at his proposal. Concerns about the practical use of such a massive weapon, particularly the widespread nuclear fallout, ultimately scuttled those plans. "I found the new information with regard to the US response to Tsar Bomba really interesting, because it contradicts what they said in public versus what was going on behind the scenes," says Wellerstein. "A lot of the discussions about the Tsar Bomba in American writing essentially parrot then-President Kennedy's line without realizing it: 'Oh, these bombs are worthless. No, they can't do it.' But it's clear that there were people within the Kennedy administration who didn't think it was as simple as that. We can be happy that those people didn't win out."

He added: "There is always this temptation for big bombs. I found a memo by somebody at Sandia, talking about meeting with the military. He said that the military didn't really know what they wanted these big bombs for, but they figured that if the Soviets thought they were a good idea, then the US should have one, too. It's reminiscent of that line from Dr. Strangelove."

Ars Technica sat down with Wellerstein to learn more about the Tsar Bomba test. You can read the full article here.

CNN profiles Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player — and the state of the chess community today: Interest in chess spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, and again in October 2020 after the release of the Netflix series, "The Queen's Gambit." In the first three weeks after its debut, sales of chess sets went up by 87% in the U.S. and sales of books about chess leaped 603%, according to marketing research company NPD Group. Not since the 1970s, when American legend Bobby Fischer burst onto the scene, has the game captured the attention of the world like this....

Carlsen tries hard to be indifferent toward anything at all during the press conference and interview. But he does have strong opinions on how the game should be changed to make sure it holds the attention of the current groundswell of interested players. "I've been somebody who's supported having quicker games in the world championship for a long time," he said. "I think for people who are not into chess at all, who don't know anything about the game, you're more naturally attracted to quicker games." World championship games can last hours and often end in ties because mistakes are so rare...

Carlsen's love of fast-paced chess isn't surprising, considering he is the current world champion in both "Rapid" and "Blitz" formats — games that generally last for 15 minutes or less. His tiebreak wins in previous championship games were both in the rapid format and there are numerous videos on YouTube where his quick thinking is showcased. Computers are now powerful enough to calculate billions of possible move combinations in seconds, ably deciding the best possible option. It makes preparation more exacting and less enjoyable, and Carlsen thinks quicker games would help solve that...

Carlsen could rightly be considered the greatest chess player ever. He has been the world champion for eight years and holds the longest unbeaten run in history. He only trails Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in weeks spent as the highest rated player.
But the New York Times points out that Carlsen has done something none of his chess-playing predecessors have ever done. "He has leveraged his fame to become one of the chess world's leading impresarios. In the process, he has amassed a small fortune." Carlsen has several private sponsorship agreements, including with Unibet, a sports betting site; Isklar, a Norwegian water company; and Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a Norwegian law firm. But the main vehicle for his business ventures is Play Magnus, a company that he co-founded in 2013, the year he became world champion. Initially designed as an app that allowed users to mimic Carlsen's playing style and strength at different ages, Play Magnus has expanded, mostly through acquisitions, to become a company with a dozen subsidiaries. It now includes an online playing site, multiple teaching and training platforms, and digital and book publishing arms.

According to Andreas Thome, Play Magnus's chief executive, the company has about 250 employees and about four million registered users of its products and proprietary learning programs. One year after it went public on the Euronext Growth Oslo stock exchange, Play Magnus now has a market capitalization of about $115 million. It is the only publicly traded chess company in the world.
Carlsen's personal stake in the company is worth nearly $9 million, the Times points out — even as Carlsen is now competing in the world chess championship for a $2.24 million prize, where "as much as 60% will go to the winner."

In the 14-game match, the first two games...all ended in a draw. "The result means there have now been 16 draws in a row in world championship games played at classical time controls," the Guardian pointed out, "dating back five years to game 11 of Carlsen's match against Sergey Karjakin in November 2016."

And then the third game, played Sunday....also ended in a draw.

The online bank Atom Bank has introduced a four-day work week for its 430 staff without cutting their pay. The BBC reports: Employees now work 34 hours over four days and get Monday or Friday off, when previously they clocked up 37.5 hours across the whole week. Boss Mark Mullen told the BBC it was inspired by the pandemic and would help improve wellbeing and retain staff. However, employees will have to work longer hours on the days that they are in.

Atom was one of the UK's first digital challenger banks and had 2.7 billion pounds of loans on its books in the last financial year. Its new working arrangements kicked in on 1 November after a review found they would not affect customer service or productivity. Mr Mullen said the new arrangement was voluntary, but strongly reflected his staff's preferences for more flexible working. "Everyone is expected to stick to it," he added. "I can't be sending my staff emails on a Friday, I can't expect to them to respond to them."

Last December, academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit demanding that Indian ISPs block access to Sci-Hub and Libgen for copyright infringement. The ongoing case now includes an intervention application from a group of social science researchers who say that blocking the platforms would result in a great societal loss to the country. TorrentFreak reports: Assisted and represented by the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a group of social science researchers affiliated with universities across Delhi has now filed an intervention application that aims to educate the High Court on the negative implications of ordering local ISPs to block the platforms. "In the application, they have demonstrated the importance of the LibGen and Sci-Hub in enabling them to continue with research and discharge professional obligations," IFF explains. "They have submitted that they cannot access countless essays/books/articles because of the exorbitant rates the publishers charge for them and that these publishers own more than 50% of the total output in social science research. The only way in which they can access these resources is by relying upon LibGen and Sci-Hub. Moreover, LibGen and Sci-Hub offer access to up-to-date research which is unavailable elsewhere."

The social science researchers also draw attention to the publishers' "prohibitive pricing" models that place a serious burden on the publicly-funded academic institutions where they conduct their research. They further note that, to the best of their knowledge, individual users who rely on Sci-Hub and Libgen have not dented the profits of the publishers. "The profit margins of the [publishers] are much higher than those of enterprises in other industries such as oil, medicines and technology. Thus, the Plaintiffs' plea of blocking [Sci-Hub and Libgen] only serves their self-interest of increasing their coffers without benefitting society," their application reads. "In fact, granting the Plaintiffs' reliefs will have a detrimental impact on the social science research undertaken in India and the careers of the Applicants and those they represent before this Hon'ble Court. The unavailability of the Defendant Websites will also stunt the academic growth of the nation."

After highlighting the risks to society should the Court authorize blocking, the researchers turn to the legality of doing so. They believe that while the publishers own the copyrights to the articles, the use of those articles is allowed under India's Copyright Act, at least under certain conditions. [...] Finally, the researchers say they are contesting any blocking injunction on the basis that it would be overbroad. They note that the publishers are not seeking the removal of specific infringing content but the blocking of entire websites in perpetuity. They argue that there are less restrictive measures available and these should have been sought first, rather than going directly for complete blocking of Sci-Hub and Libgen. Before issuing any blocking order, they also ask the court to consider Article 19(1) that recognizes the fundamental right to access information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks. Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report (PDF) recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule (PDF) that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.

Cryptocurrency firms could be forced to take greater steps to combat money laundering under new guidelines released on Thursday by the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that coordinates government policy on illicit finance. From a report: The task force called on governments to broaden regulatory oversight of crypto firms and force more of them to take measures such as checking the identities of their customers and reporting suspicious transactions to regulators. The FATF's guidelines don't have the force of law, and would need to be implemented by national regulators in each country. Still, the Paris-based group is influential in setting standards for government policies against money laundering and financing of terrorism, and its guidelines could shape new crypto regulations around the world. More than three dozen countries are FATF members, including the U.S., China and much of Europe.

Representatives of the crypto industry criticized the guidelines, saying they would undermine privacy, stifle innovation or simply not work in the context of blockchain and digital-asset technology. "It would be inappropriate for anything like these non-specific and confusing standards to replace the current law and regulations we have on the books here in the U.S.," Peter Van Valkenburgh, research director at crypto advocacy group Coin Center, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Among the targets of the FATF's guidelines is decentralized finance, or DeFi for short. DeFi is an umbrella term for various efforts to implement traditional financial activities -- such as lending or trading -- using software rather than a central intermediary to oversee transactions. DeFi has grown rapidly since last year, with over $100 billion of assets posted as collateral in various DeFi projects, according to data provider DeBank. The guidelines take aim at DeFi projects such as decentralized exchanges, in which crypto traders can swap assets with each other, typically on an anonymous basis. The task force said the people or companies that own or operate such decentralized platforms could be considered virtual asset service providers, or VASPs, a designation that would force them to check users' identities and take other measures against money laundering.

Advocates will once again be granted a DMCA exception to make accessible versions of texts. They argue that it's far past time to make it permanent. From a report: It's a cliche of digital life that "information wants to be free." The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities -- the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments -- are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.

Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill. On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.

"As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost," says Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. "It's an afterthought." Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Sophie Fornairon's independent bookshop has survived the rise of Amazon thanks to a French law that prohibits price discounting on new books, but she says the e-commerce giant's ability to undercut on shipping still skews the market against stores like hers. Fornairon, who owns the Canal Bookstore in central Paris, now hopes that new legislation that would set a minimum price for book deliveries will even the contest further in the battle of neighborhood stores against Amazon. "It's a just return towards a level playing field," Fornairon, who employs four workers, said. "We're not at risk of closing down any time soon, but Amazon is a constant battle".

French law prohibits free book deliveries but Amazon has circumvented this by charging a single centime (cent). Local book stores typically charge about 5-7 euros ($5.82-8.15) for shipping a book. Amazon's pricing strategy had resulted in the growing market share of a single operator, the Ministry of Culture said. "This law is necessary to regulate the distorted competition within online book sales and prevent the inevitable monopoly that will emerge if the status quo persists," the ministry told Reuters. Centre-right Senator Laure Darcos, who drafted the law, decided upon the minimum delivery charge when she observed how bookstores maintained 70% of their business despite being forced to shut during early COVID lockdowns, because the government reimbursed the shipping fees. "It showed what a brake on business the postage costs are for local bookstores," Darcos said. Asked when the legislation would be enacted, the Ministry of Culture declined to give a date, saying it was too early to say.

"Facebook has filed a lawsuit on Friday against a Ukrainian national for allegedly scraping its website and selling the personal data of more than 178 million users on an underground cybercrime forum," reports the Record. According to court documents filed Friday, the man was identified as Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko, a resident of Kirovograd, Ukraine. Facebook alleges that Solonchenko abused a feature part of the Facebook Messenger service called Contact Importer. The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had a Facebook account in order to allow users to reach out to their friends via Facebook Messenger. Between January 2018 and September 2019, Facebook said that Solonchenko used an automated tool to pose as Android devices in order to feed Facebook servers with millions of random phone numbers. As Facebook servers returned information for which phone numbers had an account on the site, Solonchenko collected the data, which he later collected and offered for sale on December 1, 2020, in a post on RaidForums, a notorious cybercrime forum and marketplace for stolen data.
The article also notes that Facebook's court documents say Solonchenko scraped data from some of the largest companies in the Ukraine, including its largest commercial bank and largest private delivery service.

And the Record points out that he's not the only person known to have this hole to scrape Facebook's user data and then sell it on the forum.) Days after another incident in April involving 533 leaked phone numbers of Facebook user, Facebook "revealed that it retired the Messenger Contact Importer feature back in September 2019 after it discovered Solonchenko and other threat actors abusing it."

How Natalie Grams, who once abandoned her medical education to study alternative therapies, became Germany's most prominent homeopathy skeptic. From a report: The pseudoscience of homeopathy was invented in Germany in the 18th century by a maverick physician named Samuel Hahnemann. His theory was based on the ancient principle of like cures like -- akin to the mechanism behind vaccines. The remedies Hahnemann developed, meant to help the body heal on its own, originate as substances that with excess exposure (like pollen) can make a patient ill (in this case, with hay fever) -- or kill them: Arsenic is used as a treatment for digestive problems, and the poisonous plant belladonna is meant to counteract pain and swelling. These substances are diluted -- again and again -- and shaken vigorously in a process called "potentization" or "dynamization." The resultant remedies typically contain a billionth, trillionth, orâ...âwellâ...âa zillionth (10 to the minus 60th, if you're counting) of the original substance.

Today, homeopathy is practiced worldwide, particularly in Britain, India, the U.S. -- where there's a monument to Hahnemann on a traffic circle six blocks north of the White House -- and, especially, Germany. Practitioners, however, differ greatly in their approach. Some only prescribe remedies cataloged in homeopathic reference books. Others take a more metaphoric bent, offering treatments that contain a fragment of the Berlin Wall to cure feelings of exclusion and loneliness or a powder exposed to cellphone signals as protection from radiation emitted by mobile handsets. Grams, the daughter of a chemist, first turned to homeopathy in 2002. While she was attending medical school to become a surgeon, a highway accident left her car in the ditch with the windshield shattered. Grams walked away unhurt, but she soon began to suffer from heart palpitations, panic attacks, and fainting spells that doctors couldn't explain. Her roommate suggested she visit a heilpraktiker, a type of German naturopath that offers alternative therapies ranging from acupuncture and massage to reiki and homeopathy.

Homeopaths typically spend a lot of time with patients, asking not just about symptoms but also about emotions, work, and relationships. This is all meant to find the root cause of a patient's suffering and is part of its appeal. The heilpraktiker asked Grams about her feelings and the accident, things she hadnâ(TM)t spoken about with her doctors -- or anyone -- thinking they weren't important in understanding what was wrong. The heilpraktiker prescribed her belladonna globules and recommended she visit a trauma therapist. Steadily, her symptoms fell away. She was healed. Soon after, Grams dropped the idea of becoming a surgeon, opting for a future as a general practitioner while taking night courses in alternative therapies. After completing her medical degree, she began a five-year residency to qualify as a GP. But three years in, Grams abandoned conventional medicine and began an apprenticeship with a homeopath near Heidelberg.

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

Novelist Dave Eggers has just published a sequel to his 2013 dystopian tale of a tech company called The Circle — in which a low-tech crusader now tries to destroy the most powerful tech company in the world. Ars Technica quips that "When big tech rules all, don't say Dave Eggers didn't warn us." The Every quickly asserts itself as a logical progression from its literary forebear. Moving past simply recording everything, this world now revolves around measuring everything so that technology can spit out directions... The Every's health app tells you when to get up and jump at your desk. The Every's storage solution will digitize all your belongings as 3D-printable files so you can incinerate your waste and lower your carbon footprint. Media from The Every is driven by data-tracking technology that can tell when readers/viewers/listeners tend to abandon ship; it then tells creators how to improve...

"The Circle was more about surveillance and whether privacy is possible," said Eggers. "This is more about whether we want to exercise free will on a daily basis, or are we happier to have these algorithms feed us and free us of all these decisions and anxieties? What if there was one monopoly who promised to make you your best self so long as you basically gave up control over every decision?"

Though its themes are no laughing matter, The Every is littered with the smirk-inducing ideas you'd expect from Eggers. Each matter-of-fact aside about how life has evolved from our present day into this book's near future is a comedic dystopian gem... You don't have to go far these days to see how tech-reliant society has become; it's painfully evident that our world is quite comfortable with outsourcing decisions and plans to the algorithm. In this light, The Every isn't blazing new trails with its central themes, but few works will so reliably stop you mid-sentence or post-chapter for a moment of reflection. And that's because Eggers has a gift. Consistently, his ideas are amusing and laugh-out-loud funny, but there's also a deep sense of reality beneath them. When that clicks for you during a reading session, you arrive at the realization that the real world isn't so far behind the Every world.

Comedy can turn into horror quickly.
"The best way to hold a mirror up to the way we live now is to turn the absurdity up just a little more, and we can reflect back on how we're living now," Eggers tells Ars Technica. "Then, maybe, there's a fork in the road where we say, 'Well, we actually don't want that, if that comes to fruition, maybe we'll fight back.' That's about the only hope you can have writing something like this."

Ars Technica notes that Eggers and his publisher McSweeney's "took extra care to sell through places beyond Amazon... 'It felt like a book about the increasing saturation and reach of a monopoly was a good opportunity to make a bit of a point: We still have a choice for the time being. You can go into [a local store like] Book People and buy a book there and support the local economy as opposed to giving money to the apex predator. If we want retail diversity, we need to feed smaller operations."

The article adds that Eggers doesn't have a smartphone, and he tries to stay offline.

"A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them," reports the Register: From January 2016 through March 2021, according to the indictment, Talsma rented textbooks from the Amazon Rental program in order to sell them for a profit... His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned. "These gift cards and MyVanilla Visa cards did not contain names or other means of identifying him as the person renting the textbooks," the indictment says. "Geoffrey Mark Talsma made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards."

As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma "recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit..."

The indictment says the four alleged scammers stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5m.
The U.S. Department of Justice adds If convicted, Talsma faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 20 years for each of the mail and wire fraud offenses; a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years for interstate transportation of stolen property; and a maximum term of imprisonment of 5 years for making false statements to the FBI.

Additionally, if convicted of the aggravated identity theft charges, Talsma will serve a maximum term of imprisonment of four years consecutive to any sentence imposed for the other criminal offenses. Restitution and forfeiture of certain assets obtained with the proceeds of the scheme may also be ordered as a result of a conviction.

In an article for The Conversation, Noah Wardrip-Fruin writes about how Computer Space marked the start of the $175 billion video game industry we have today when it debuted on Oct. 15, 1971 -- and why you probably haven't heard of it. From the report: Computer Space, made by the small company Nutting Associates, seemed to have everything going for it. Its scenario -- flying a rocket ship through space locked in a dogfight with two flying saucers -- seemed perfect for the times. The Apollo Moon missions were in full swing. The game was a good match for people who enjoyed science-fiction movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes" and television shows like "Star Trek" and "Lost in Space," or those who had thrilled to the aerial combat of the movies "The Battle of Britain" and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" There was even prominent placement of a Computer Space cabinet in Charlton Heston's film "The Omega Man." But when Computer Space was unveiled, it didn't generate a flood of orders, and no flood ever arrived. It wasn't until Computer Space's makers left the company, founded Atari and released Pong the next year that the commercial potential of video games became apparent. The company sold 8,000 Pong units by 1974.

Nolan Bushnell, who led the development of both Computer Space and Pong, has recounted Computer Space's inauspicious start many times. He claimed that Computer Space failed to take off because it overestimated the public. Bushnell is widely quoted as saying the game was too complicated for typical bar-goers, and that no one would want to read instructions to play a video game. [...] At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!, The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked. [...] Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form of Space Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.

Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity. The star in Spacewar! produced a gravity well that gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy -- for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star. Why didn't Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games were made using television technology rather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn't do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets. Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn't work. Bushnell's story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employee Jerry Jessop told The New York Times about Computer Space, "The game play was horrible."