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.

The Internet Archive is a massive endeavor -- it's an online library aiming to "provide Universal Access to All Knowledge." It has digitized millions of web pages, movies, photos, recordings, software programs, and books that might otherwise be lost to history. But it's neither un-censorable nor outside the bounds of copyright law. And now open internet supporters are wondering how to save it before it disappears.

Over the past few months, OpenAI has vacuumed an incredible amount of data into its artificial intelligence language systems. It sucked up Wikipedia, a huge swath of the rest of the internet and tons of books. This mass of text -- trillions of words -- was then analyzed and manipulated by a supercomputer to create what the research group bills as a major AI breakthrough and the heart of its first commercial product, which came out on Thursday. From a report: The product name -- OpenAI calls it "the API" -- might not be magical, but the things it can accomplish do seem to border on wizardry at times. The software can perform a broad set of language tasks, including translating between languages, writing news stories and poems and answering everyday questions. Ask it, for example, if you should keep reading a story, and you might be told, "Definitely. The twists and turns keep coming." OpenAI wants to build the most flexible, general purpose AI language system of all time. Typically, companies and researchers will tune their AI systems to handle one, limited task. The API, by contrast, can crank away at a broad set of jobs and, in many cases, at levels comparable with specialized systems.

While the product is in a limited test phase right now, it will be released broadly as something that other companies can use at the heart of their own offerings such as customer support chat systems, education products or games, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. [...] The API product builds on years of research in which OpenAI has compiled ever larger text databases with which to feed its AI algorithms and neural networks. At its core, OpenAI API looks over all the examples of language it has seen and then uses those examples to predict, say, what word should come next in a sentence or how best to answer a particular question. "It almost gets to the point where it assimilates all of human knowledge because it has seen everything before," said Eli Chen, CEO of startup Veriph.ai, who tried out an earlier version of OpenAI's product. "Very few other companies would be able to afford what it costs to build this type of huge model."

Software developer Danny Bittman tweeted about how he's convinced that his eyesight was damaged from wearing a VR headset for hours a day. The BBC reports: Danny Bittman, who has worked as a virtual reality developer for four years, suggested it could have affected his eyesight. "Just had my first eye doctor visit in three years. Now I'm very worried about my future VR use. I have a new eye convergence problem that acts like dyslexia. The doc, a headset owner, is convinced my VR use caused this. He said "these glasses we usually prescribe to 40-year-olds," he tweeted. He went on to describe the problem: "My eyes jump when I read things like a screen or books. I've always had a small level of this but it's greatly intensified now. It's also linked to headaches and vertigo."

He said that the issue was about "prolonged use," and admitted that he could spend up to six hours a day wearing a headset, split into 30-minute sessions. Ceri Smith-Jaynes, from the Association of Optometrists, told the BBC: "We currently do not have any reliable evidence that VR headsets cause permanent deterioration in eyesight in children or adults. There have been some studies looking into the effects of short-term use of VR headsets only; these did not reveal a deterioration in eyesight. "However, some people do suffer from temporary symptoms such as nausea, dry, irritable eyes, headache or eyestrain." But she did have some advice about usage: "If you spend all day in VR without a break, you'll need time to readjust to the light and the different visual environment of the real world. I would suggest taking a five-to-ten minute break each hour, using that time to move about, blink and look out of a window, or take a short walk.

An anonymous reader quotes Wired: When students return to school in New Albany, Ohio, in August, they'll be carefully watched as they wander through red-brick buildings and across well-kept lawns — and not only by teachers. The school district, with five schools and 4,800 students, plans to test a system that would require each student to wear an electronic beacon to track their location to within a few feet throughout the day. It will record where students sit in each classroom, show who they meet and talk to, and reveal how they gather in groups. The hope is such technology could prevent or minimize an outbreak of Covid-19, the deadly respiratory disease at the center of a global pandemic...

Many schools and colleges plan to proceed gradually and carefully, while keeping kids spread out as much as possible. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines for reopening schools recommend staggered schedules that allow for smaller classes, opening windows to provide more air circulation, avoiding sharing books and computers, regular cleaning of buses and classes, and requiring masks and handwashing. Many see some form of distance learning continuing through next year. A handful also are considering deploying technology to help...

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers says she isn't aware of other schools looking to adopt detailed surveillance measures. But the AFT has issued guidelines on reopening schools and colleges that warns about vendors potentially using the crisis to expand data-mining practices. A small but growing surveillance industry has sprung up around Covid already, with firms pitching everything from temperature-tracking infrared cameras and contact tracing apps to wireless beacons and smart cameras to help enforce social distancing at work. "It's been one of the most disturbing parts of this," says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

Now, Cahn says, this cottage industry is keen to find a way into classrooms. "One of the things that will be a huge profit driver, potentially, is that younger children would need specially designed devices if they don't have smartphones," he says.
An official at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education also told Wired that some state universities are "exploring" the use of people-tracking Bluetooth beacons.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: In a famous Siberian experiment carried out the 1950s, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation. The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark.

Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication...

Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. And males and females had very similar skull shapes. All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome. Overall, urban foxes' skulls seemed to be designed for a stronger bite than were those of rural foxes, which are shaped for speed.

Perhaps that's because in the city, a fox can simply stand at a human trash pile and feed on the food we've tossed out, where they may encounter more bones that can only be crushed with stronger jaws, Parsons speculates. Still, he emphasizes that the urban red foxes are not domesticated. But the study does show how exposure to human activity can set an animal down this path, says Melinda Zeder, an emeritus archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Thelasko shares an excerpt from FiveThirtyEight: Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave -- and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force -- wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters -- it doesn't work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?

There's 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force -- using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want -- those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate "abrasive policing tactics" and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police. Experts say the following decades of research have turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.

Anne Nassauer, a professor of sociology at Freie Universitat in Berlin, has studied how the Berlin Police Department handles protests and soccer matches. She found that one key element is transparent communication -- something Nassauer said helps increase trust and diffuse potentially tense moments. The Berlin police employs people specifically to make announcements in these situations, using different speakers, with local accents or different languages, for things like information about what police are doing, and another speaker for commands. Either way, the messages are delivered in a calm, measured voice. Communication is also a cornerstone of what police know as "the Madison Model," created by former Madison, Wisconsin, chief of police David Couper. His strategy for dealing with protesters was to send officers out to talk with demonstrators, engage, ask them why protests are made, listen to their concerns and, above all, empathize. The report notes that many police departments in the U.S. did try different strategies in the 1980s and 1990s, but they ultimately ended up responding with force anyway.

"The 'negotiated management' model of protest policing called for officers to meet with protesters in advance to plan events together to specify the times, locations and activities that would happen, even when that included mass arrests," reports FiveThirtyEight. "But the era of negotiated management basically fell apart after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when protesters blocked streets, broke windows and successfully shut down the WTO meeting and stalled trade talks. When protesters violated the negotiated terms, police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and took away the wrong lessons, [said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University]. 'What a lot of people took from that in policing is, we can't trust these people. We need to be smarter and overwhelm them to nip these things in the bud," he said. 'We sort of went backwards.'"

HBO Max, AT&T's big bet on the future of streaming, will be excused from AT&T's mobile data caps, while competing services like Netflix and Disney Plus will use up your data. From a report: That's the follow-up from a Vergecast conversation with Tony Goncalves, the AT&T executive in charge of HBO Max. Asked whether HBO Max would hit the cap, Goncalves said his team "had the conversation" but didn't have the answer. AT&T later confirmed to The Verge that HBO Max will be excused from the company's traditional data caps and the soft data caps on unlimited plans. According to an AT&T executive familiar with the matter, HBO Max is using AT&T's "sponsored data" system, which technically allows any company to pay to excuse its services from data caps. But since AT&T owns HBO Max, it's just paying itself: the data fee shows up on the HBO Max books as an expense and on the AT&T Mobility books as revenue. For AT&T as a whole, it zeroes out. Compare that to a competitor like Netflix, which could theoretically pay AT&T for sponsored data, but it would be a pure cost.

Today, member companies of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Internet Archive (IA) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit asks the Court to enjoin IA's mass scanning, public display, and distribution of entire literary works, which it offers to the public at large through global-facing businesses coined "Open Library" and "National Emergency Library," accessible at both openlibrary.org and archive.org. In a statement, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) wrote: IA has brazenly reproduced some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books, including recent works, commercial fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, and children's books. The plaintiffs --Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House -- publish many of the world's preeminent authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Newbery Medal, Man Booker Prize, Caldecott Medal and Nobel Prize. Despite the self-serving library branding of its operations, IA's conduct bears little resemblance to the trusted role that thousands of American libraries play within their communities and as participants in the lawful copyright marketplace. IA scans books from cover to cover, posts complete digital files to its website, and solicits users to access them for free by signing up for Internet Archive Accounts.

The sheer scale of IA's infringement described in the complaint -- and its stated objective to enlarge its illegal trove with abandon -- appear to make it one of the largest known book pirate sites in the world. IA publicly reports millions of dollars in revenue each year, including financial schemes that support its infringement design. In willfully ignoring the Copyright Act, IA conflates the separate markets and business models made possible by the statute's incentives and protections, robbing authors and publishers of their ability to control the manner and timing of communicating their works to the public. IA not only conflates print books and eBooks, it ignores the well-established channels in which publishers do business with bookstores, e-commerce platforms, and libraries, including for print and eBook lending. As detailed in the complaint, IA makes no investment in creating the literary works it distributes and appears to give no thought to the impact of its efforts on the quality and vitality of the authorship that fuels the marketplace of ideas.

In recent months, Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon.com, has been meeting with talent agencies and producers to discuss acquiring potential new podcast projects -- or, in the terminology that Audible prefers, "Audible Originals." From a report: Audible is offering anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per show, according to people familiar with the matter, more than every competitor except Spotify. So far, Audible has already purchased shows from documentary producer John Battsek, as well as from comedians Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish.

The acquisitions by the dominant audiobook service in the U.S. are part of a new, multimillion-dollar shopping spree, designed to establish Audible as a more enticing destination for podcast fans and to fend off growing audio-storytelling competition, particularly from Spotify. Audible has been funding original series for years now, but after starting with programs from well-known authors, the company is now prioritizing celebrity hosts and shows that can help broaden its audience beyond the avid audiobook listener. Audible is also considering changes to its business model. Under the current system, each month subscribers pay $14.95 and receive credits for one book and two original shows. Now the company is debating selling original shows individually so that customers don't need to be subscribers to listen, said the people, who asked not to be identified while discussing terms of private business deals. Audible has also explored the possibility of rolling out a lower-priced plan that would offer access to originals but not books. None of these plans have been set, and the company declined to comment for this story.

SoftBank Group said its Vision Fund business lost 1.9 trillion yen ($17.7 billion) last fiscal year after writing down the value of investments, including WeWork and Uber. From a report: The company posted an overall operating loss of 1.36 trillion yen in the 12 months ended March and a net loss of 961.6 billion yen, according to a statement on Monday. The Tokyo-based conglomerate released figures in two preliminary earnings statements last month. The losses are the worst ever in the company's 39-year history. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's $100 billion Vision Fund went from the group's main contributor to profit a year ago to its biggest drag on earnings. Uber's disappointing public debut last May was followed by the implosion of WeWork in September and its subsequent rescue by SoftBank. Now Son is struggling with the impact of the coronavirus on the portfolio of startups weighted heavily toward the sharing economy. 50 of the Vision Fund's 88 portfolio companies had a cut in valuation in the 12 months to March 31, 2020, said Son, adding that 15 could soon file for bankruptcy.