This year's "International Day Against DRM" is highlighting user-disrespecting restrictions on educational materials.

An anonymous reader quotes the Free Software Foundation's Defective By Design site: The "Netflix of textbooks" model practiced by Pearson and similar publishers is a Trojan horse for education: requiring a constant Internet connection for "authentication" purposes, severely limiting the number of pages a student can read at one time, and secretly collecting telemetric data on their reading habits.

Every year, we organize the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to mobilize protests collaboration, grassroots activism, and in-person actions against the grave threat of DRM. For IDAD 2019, we are calling on Pearson and similar companies to stop putting a lock on our learning, and demonstrate their alleged commitment to education by dropping DRM from their electronic textbooks and course materials. At the same time, it is our plan to show that a better world is possible by encouraging people to contribute to collaborative and DRM-free textbooks, and resist the stranglehold these publishers are putting on something as fundamental as one's education. To help us, join the Defective by Design (DbD) coalition as we organize local and remote hackathons on free culture educational materials, and an in-person protest of Pearson Education on Saturday, October 12th.
The group is joined in this year's event by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and The Document Foundation (as well as 10 other participating organizations). Here's some of the site's suggestions for ways to participate:

• In Boston, we'll be leading the way with our own demonstration on October 12th, 2019, at Pearson Education's corporate offices, followed by an evening hackathon on collaborative, freely licensed educational materials... We'll be providing activists around the world with support on how they can stage their own local in-person event, as well as how to join us online while we help improve the free and ethical alternatives to educational materials restricted by DRM.

• The easiest way to participate is to join us in going a Day Without DRM, and resolve to spend an entire day (or longer!) without Netflix, Hulu, and other restricted services to show your support of the movement. Document your experiences on social media using the tags "#idad" or "#dbd", and let us know at info@defectivebydesign.org if you have a special story you'd like us to share.

• Print and share our dust jacket design, which you can slip over your "dead tree" books (while you still have them) to warn others of the dangers of ebook DRM. Pass them out at coffee shops, libraries, and wherever readers congregate!

iTunes is officially dead with the release of macOS Catalina today. Apple decided to break apart the app into separate Apple Music, Podcasts and TV apps. "Each is better at its individuals task than it was as a section within iTunes, which was teetering on collapse like the Jenga tower of various functions it supports," writes Dieter Bohn via The Verge.

"In the early days, iTunes was simply a way to get music onto Apple's marquee product, the iPod music player," reports Snopes. "Users connected the iPod to a computer, and songs automatically synced -- simplicity unheard of at the time." It was the first service to make songs available for 99 cents apiece, and $9.99 for most albums -- convincing many people to buy music legally than seek out sketchy sites for pirated downloads. "But over time, iTunes software expanded to include podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, movies and TV shows," recalls Snopes. "In the iPhone era, iTunes also made backups and synced voice memos. As the software got bloated to support additional functions, iTunes lost the ease and simplicity that gave it its charm. And with online cloud storage and wireless syncing, it no longer became necessary to connect iPhones to a computer -- and iTunes -- with a cable."

What did you like or dislike about iTunes? When you look back at the media player, what are you reminded of?

In 2014 consumer expert and Silicon Valley startup founder Nir Eyal wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. But five years later, the New York Times reports he's offering consumers a new book about how to resist those habits -- even while arguing that "addiction" is the wrong way to describe technology's hold on people: There was a problem, yes, but the thinking was all wrong, he decided. Using the language of addiction gave tech users a pass. It was too easy. The issue was not screens but people's own minds, and to solve the problem they had to look within. "If I call technology something that people get addicted to, there needs to be a pusher, a dealer doing it to you," Mr. Eyal said. "But if I say technology is something that people overuse, then it's, 'Oh, crap, now I need to do something about it myself....'" The solution he proposes in Indistractable is slow. It involves self-reflection. He argues that many times we look at phones because we are anxious and bad at being alone -- and that's not the phone's fault...

Mr. Eyal has written a guide to free people from an addiction he argues they never had in the first place. It was all just sloughing off personal responsibility, he figures. So the solution is to reclaim responsibility in myriad small ways. For instance: Have your phone on silent so there will be fewer external triggers. Email less and faster. Don't hang out on Slack. Have only one laptop out during meetings. Introduce social pressure like sitting next to someone who can see your screen. Set "price pacts" with people so you pay them if you get distracted -- though be sure to "learn self-compassion before making a price pact....."

"I got myself a feature phone that had no apps. I got on eBay a word processor, and all it does is let you type. I made my phone grayscale, which only ruined my pictures," he said. "I tried a digital detox, but I missed audiobooks and GPS...."
He also argues that getting hooked on social media isn't necessarily a bad thing. "For many people, social media is a very good thing and gaming is a very good thing. It's how you use it...." But he's also predicting a "post-digital" movement will emerge in 2020.

"We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking."

"In April 2013, I received via U.S. mail more than a gram of pure heroin as part of a scheme to get me arrested for drug possession," writes security reserch Brian Krebs. "But the plan failed and the Ukrainian mastermind behind it soon after was imprisoned for unrelated cybercrime offenses.

"That individual recently gave his first interview since finishing his jail time here in the states, and he's shared some select (if often abrasive and coarse) details on how he got into cybercrime and why... Vovnenko claims he never sent anything and that it was all done by members of his forum... "They sent all sorts of crazy shit. Forty or so guys would send. When I was already doing time, one of the dudes sent it...." In an interview published on the Russian-language security blog Krober.biz, Vovnenko said he began stealing early in life, and by 13 was already getting picked up for petty robberies and thefts... "After watching movies and reading books about hackers, I really wanted to become a sort of virtual bandit who robs banks without leaving home," Vovnenko recalled...

Around the same time Fly was taking bitcoin donations for a fund to purchase heroin on my behalf, he was also engaged to be married to a nice young woman. But Fly apparently did not fully trust his bride-to-be, so he had malware installed on her system that forwarded him copies of all email that she sent and received. But Fly would make at least two big operational security mistakes in this spying effort: First, he had his fiancée's messages forwarded to an email account he'd used for plenty of cybercriminal stuff related to his various "Fly" identities. Mistake number two was the password for his email account was the same as one of his cybercrime forum admin accounts. And unbeknownst to him at the time, that forum was hacked, with all email addresses and hashed passwords exposed.

Soon enough, investigators were reading Fly's email, including the messages forwarded from his wife's account that had details about their upcoming nuptials, such as shipping addresses for their wedding-related items and the full name of Fly's fiancée. It didn't take long to zero in on Fly's location in Naples. While it may sound unlikely that a guy so immeshed in the cybercrime space could make such rookie security mistakes, I have found that a great many cybercriminals actually have worse operational security than the average Internet user. I suspect this may be because the nature of their activities requires them to create vast numbers of single- or brief-use accounts, and in general they tend to re-use credentials across multiple sites, or else pick very poor passwords -- even for critical resources...

Towards the end, Fly says he's considering going back to school, and that he may even take up information security as a study. I wish him luck in that whatever that endeavor is as long as he can also avoid stealing from people.

Saturday the Guardian published a call to action by the author of the new book, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast: [W]e cannot save the planet unless we significantly reduce our consumption of animal products. This is not my opinion, or anyone's opinion. It is the inconvenient science. Animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector (all planes, cars and trains), and is the primary source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions (which are 86 and 310 times more powerful than CO2, respectively). Our meat habit is the leading cause of deforestation, which releases carbon when trees are burned (forests contain more carbon than do all exploitable fossil-fuel reserves), and also diminishes the planet's ability to absorb carbon. According to a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even if we were to do everything else that is necessary to save the planet, it will be impossible to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord if we do not dramatically reduce our consumption of animal products...

There is a place at which one's personal business and the business of being one of seven billion earthlings intersect. And for perhaps the first moment in history, the expression "one's time" makes little sense. Climate change is not a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, which can be returned to when the schedule allows and the feeling inspires. It is a house on fire. The longer we fail to take care of it, the harder it becomes to take care of, and because of positive feedback loops -- white ice melting to dark water that absorbs more heat; thawing permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane -- we will very soon reach a tipping point of "runaway climate change", when we will be unable to save ourselves, no matter how much effort we make...

The four highest impact things an individual can do to tackle the planetary crisis are: have fewer children; live car-free; avoid air travel; and eat a plant-based diet... [E]veryone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change. Furthermore, of those four high-impact actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.... We cannot keep eating the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, and that fraught.
Beef has the biggest "greenhouse gas impact," according to a recent article in the New York Times (followed by lamb and then "farmed crustaceans.") While there's also some impact from pork, poultry, farmed fish and even eggs, their table suggests it's a small fraction when compared to the climate impact of beef and lamb.

Facebook for most of the past decade was Silicon Valley's 800-pound gorilla, squashing rivals, ripping off their best ideas or buying them outright as it cemented its dominance of social media. Now the knives are coming out [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: A number of Facebook's current and former competitors are talking about the company's hardball tactics to investigators from the Federal Trade Commission, as part of its broader antitrust investigation into the social-media giant's business practices, according to people familiar with the matter. One of them is Snap, where the legal team for years kept a dossier of ways that the company felt Facebook was trying to thwart competition from the buzzy upstart, according to people familiar with the matter. The title of the documents: Project Voldemort.

The files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children's books, chronicled Facebook's moves that threatened to undermine Snap's business, including discouraging popular account holders, or influencers, from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content from trending on its app, the people said.

This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades.

"The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this? What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work.

Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry.

Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that.

Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient.

Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world.

Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away.

Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building.

Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable.
They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush.

"It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Fans of the surreal, the bizarre and sardonic anthropomorphic cows are in a fervour after The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson's website was updated last weekend with promises of "a new online era", 24 years after the reclusive creator retired at the age of 44.

Larson's iconic Far Side cartoons were syndicated in more than 1,900 daily newspapers from 1980 to 1995, treating readers to daily offerings from his offbeat visions of the world... His image of a caveman pointing to the tail of a stegosaurus and letting his audience know that it is called "the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmonds", led paleontologists to adopt the invented term.

Larson retired The Far Side in 1995 , citing "simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer or at the very least ease into the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons". Hugely publicity-shy -- he has long refused to have his picture taken -- he has since then released a compilation of Far Side cartoons, but worked to keep his pictures from being reproduced digitally, explaining in a letter the "emotional cost" of having his work "offered up in cyberspace beyond my control... These cartoons are my 'children' of sorts, and like a parent, I'm concerned about where they go at night without telling me," wrote Larson. "And, seeing them at someone's website is like getting the call at 2am that goes, 'Uh, Dad, you're not going to like this much, but guess where I am.'"

But the updating over the weekend of thefarside.com, which had previously remained virtually unchanged for more than a decade, has left many fans hoping for Larson's return. A new image, in which some of Larson's most iconic characters -- the cow on two legs, the bee-hived woman, the nerd -- are being defrosted from an iceberg, has appeared on the site, along with the promise: "Uncommon, unreal, and (soon-to-be) unfrozen. A new online era of The Far Side is coming!"

San Francisco-based non-profit is archiving billions of web pages in a bid to preserve web history. From a report: Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation. At a time when false and ultra-partisan content is rapidly created and spread, and social media pages are constantly updated, the importance of having an unalterable record of who said what, when has been magnified. "We're trying to put in a layer of accountability," said founder Brewster Kahle. Mr Kahle founded the archive, which now employs more than 100 staff and costs $18m a year to run, because he feared that what was appearing on the internet was not being saved and catalogued in the same way as newspapers and books. The organisation is funded through donations, grants and the fees it charges third parties that request specific digitisation services.

So far, the archive has catalogued 330bn web pages, 20m books and texts, 8.5m audio and video recordings, 3m images and 200,000 software programs. The most popular, public websites are prioritised, as are those that are commonly linked to. Some information is free to access, some is loaned out (if copyright laws apply) and some is only available to researchers. Curled up in a chair in his office after lunch, Mr Kahle lamented the combined impact of misinformation and how difficult it can be for ordinary people to access reliable sources of facts. "We're bringing up a generation that turns to their screens, without a library of information accessible via screens," said Mr Kahle. Some have taken advantage of this "new information system", he argued -- and the result is "Trump and Brexit." Having a free online library is crucial, said Mr Kahle, since "[the public is] just learning from whateverâ...âis easily available."

Almost 400 years after the first folio of Shakespeare was published in 1623, scholars believe they have identified the early owner of one copy of the text, who made hundreds of insightful annotations throughout: John Milton. The Guardian reports: The astonishing find, which academics say could be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times, was made by Cambridge University fellow Jason Scott-Warren when he was reading an article about the anonymous annotator by Pennsylvania State University English professor Claire Bourne. Bourne's study of this copy, which has been housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 1944, dated the annotator to the mid-17th century, finding them alive to "the sense, accuracy, and interpretative possibility of the dialogue." She also provided many images of the handwritten notes, which struck Scott-Warren as looking oddly similar to Milton's hand.

The first folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, published seven years after his death. Without it, 18 plays including Macbeth and The Tempest might have been lost to history. Around 750 first folios were printed, with 233 known to survive. They command huge sums at auction, with one selling for 1.87 million pounds three years ago. Scott-Warren has made a detailed comparison of the annotator's handwriting with the Paradise Lost poet's. He also believes that the work the annotator did to improve the text of the folio -- suggesting corrections and supplying additional material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet, along with cross-references to other works -- is similar to work Milton did in other books that survive from his library, including his copy of Boccaccio's Life of Dante.

A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley: The person throwing me what's called a "quaffle" (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I'm ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my "broom" (a PVC pipe), ready to run. "GO!" I run 20 feet and turn back to catch the ball. Success!

But as I take my next step, I get decked by team captain Dara Gaeuman, fall to the ground, drop the quaffle, re-grab the quaffle, get back up, run over to the hoop and score. It's a triumphant moment for my post-healthy, 33-year-old self, regardless of the fact that this a drill. On the first day of practice. Of a sport I'm playing for the first time. With people who likely weren't born when the first Harry Potter book came out....

[I]n 2005, a pair of students at Middlebury College -- Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe -- translated quidditch into a non-flying sport. The game used to be played on wooden brooms until a few years ago when the game got too rough. There are still chasers (offensive players), beaters (defenders), seekers, keepers (like a goalie in hockey or soccer) and quaffles (again the balls, stay with me here) and bludgers (slightly deflated dodgeballs). But here the snitch is actually a person with sock-like pouch attached to their lower back that has to be snatched by the seekers, while the snitch tries to evade them... Almost 15 years after its inception, real-world quidditch has grown into a global phenomenon, with an International Quidditch Association (IQA) that has a World Cup every two years, a couple of semi-pro leagues, several regional and national leagues and more than 150 colleges and universities with club teams.

During practice, Chanun Ong, a sophomore returning for his second year on the team, tells a freshman, "I wasn't a big Harry Potter fan, but this sport is pretty legit."
There's a short video of the quidditch practice, and the the article's author remembers some crucial advice he received from one of the players. "Scrunch your body down if someone is about to throw a bludger at you, so you're a harder target to hit."

Although he also acknowledges that most of the people watching the two-hour practice "were passersby trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

When an artificially intelligent chatbot that used Twitter to learn how to talk unsurprisingly turned into a bigot bot, Taylor Swift reportedly threatened legal action because the bot's name was Tay. Microsoft would probably rather forget the experiment where Twitter trolls took advantage of the chatbot's programming and taught it to be racist in 2016, but a new book is sharing unreleased details that show Microsoft had more to worry about than just the bot's racist remarks. Digital Trends reports: Tay was a social media chatbot geared toward teens first launched in China before adapting the three-letter moniker when moving to the U.S. The bot, however, was programmed to learn how to talk based on Twitter conversations. In less than a day, the automatic responses the chatbot tweeted had Tay siding with Hitler, promoting genocide, and just generally hating everybody. Microsoft immediately removed the account and apologized.

When the bot was reprogrammed, Tay was relaunched as Zo. But in the book Tools and Weapons by Microsoft president Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Microsoft's communications director, the executives have finally revealed why -- another Tay, Taylor Swift. According to The Guardian, the singer's lawyer threatened legal action over the chatbot's name before the bot broke bad. The singer claimed the name violated both federal and state laws. Rather than get in a legal battle with the singer, Smith writes, the company instead started considering new names.

A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet. From a report: As it currently stands, all books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain, meaning they're publicly owned and can be freely used and copied. Books published in 1964 and after are still in copyright, and by law will be for 95 years from their publication date. But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy.

The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law. As such, a coalition of libraries, volunteers, and archivists have been working overtime to identify which titles are in the public domain, digitize them, then upload them to the internet. At the heart of the effort has been the New York Public Library, which recently documented why the entire process is important, but a bit of a pain.

Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search. But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia. From a report: Apple's apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.) Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company's own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results.

The Times's analysis of App Store data -- which included rankings of more than 1,800 specific apps across 13 keywords since 2013 -- illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies' platforms. Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work -- even when they blame the algorithm for problems. [...] On Aug. 21, Apple apps ranked first in 735 of roughly 60,000 search terms tracked by Sensor Tower. Most of the tracked searches were obscure, but Apple's apps ranked first for many of the popular queries. For instance, for most of June and July, Apple apps were the top result for these search terms: books, music, news, magazines, podcasts, video, TV, movies, sports, card, gift, money, credit, debit, fitness, people, friends, time, notes, docs, files, cloud, storage, message, home, store, mail, maps, traffic, stocks and weather. In July this year, the company pushed some changes to its app store algorithm to handicap its apps to help other developers, it told The New York Times.

Microsoft is killing support for the EPUB document format in Edge classic, and it won't be supported in the new, Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge. Thurrott reports: "Download an .epub app to keep reading," a notification in Edge classic reads when you load an EPUB document. "Microsoft Edge will no longer be supporting [sic] e-books that use the .epub file extension. Visit the Microsoft Store to see our recommended .epub apps." Aside from the contorted grammar and word usage in the notification -- it's "support" not "be supporting," Microsoft -- the linked webpage is a "Reading room" area on the Microsoft Store that includes audiobook apps in addition to e-book apps. So good luck with that.

Microsoft provides a more grammatically correct explanation for the change on its Microsoft Edge support site, which notes that "Microsoft Edge will no longer support e-books that use the .epub file extension." The site also links to the same terrible Microsoft Store area, but adds that "you can expect to see more added over time as we partner with companies like the DAISY Consortium to add additional, accessible apps... These apps are expected to be available in the Microsoft Store after September 2019." Given that, it's likely that EPUB support will disappear in Edge classic sometime after those apps appear in the Store.

A new book by futurist James Lovelock argues "Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end. The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call 'cyborgs' that will have designed and built themselves."

An anonymous reader quotes NBC News' Mach blog: Lovelock describes cyborgs as the self-sufficient, self-aware descendants of today's robots and artificial intelligence systems. He calls the looming era of their dominance the Novacene -- literally, the "new new" age...

Unlike technoskeptics, including University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, Lovelock thinks it unlikely that our machines will turn against us, Terminator-style. And unlike utopians like futurist Ray Kurzweil, he doesn't envision humans and machines merging blissfully into a union that some call the singularity. Rather, Lovelock views the rise of technology through an evolutionary lens, in keeping with his decades of research and thinking about ecological and biological systems. He also brings the unique perspective of a scientist who just marked his 100th birthday, with a deep awareness of changing scientific fashions and with nothing left to prove. It's an outlook that pushes him to conclusions at once optimistic and deeply disturbing.

Once established, the cyborgs will remain dominant on our planet. "The Novacene," Lovelock says, "will probably be the final era of life on Earth..." Lovelock believes that advances like AlphaZero mean we don't have to look to the distant future to see how the story will unfold. "The crucial step that started the Novacene was, I think, the need to use computers to design and make themselves," he writes. "It now seems probable that a new form of intelligent life will emerge from an artificially intelligent precursor made by one of us, perhaps from something like AlphaZero."

Once we get used to being treated like houseplants, the early days of the Novacene might not be so bad. For one thing, Lovelock says, cyborgs and humans will have a shared interest in protecting Earth from climate change, because neither we nor they can tolerate temperatures beyond about 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). If humans fail to find ways to mitigate the effects of global warming, then the cyborgs will need to do it. "They will, of course, bring something new to the party, probably in the field of geoengineering -- large-scale projects to protect or modify the environment. Such projects will be well within the capacity of electronic life," Lovelock writes. For instance, the cyborgs might cover large areas of Earth's surface with mirrors to reduce the amount of absorbed solar heat.

As the Novacene progresses, the cyborgs might decide to remake Earth's ecosystem. With no need for oxygen or water, they might create a new world that is better for them but lethal for us... Given their complete dominion over Earth, the cyborgs would become our planet's final inhabitants.

XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe says he received "a huge number of submissions" in a contest to choose an additional city for his upcoming book tour. The challenge? "Write the best story using nothing but book covers... You'll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible." And the winning entry involved 98 people in an earnest community project featuring Alaskans young and old, in a series of four YouTube videos that lasts nearly three minutes. ("Listen to me. This idea is brilliant. Stop staring at screens. If you love me, get a life...!")

Munroe applauded their efforts in a blog post announcing their winning entry. I'm a sucker for (a) public libraries, and (b) people who get so excited about glaciers that they lose their train of thought."
Several runners-up will receive a personalized drawing of their bookstore or library -- or a signed book. Runners up include the Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minnesota, who assembled over 60 people for a story in the form of a choose-your-own adventure flowchart. And Naitian Zhou of Ann Arbor, Michigan built an interactive tool that generates arbitrary grammatical sentences by running a database of book titles through Python language tools. ("Don't judge a book by its cover," jokes its web page. "Judge it by its linguistic productivity instead!")

The How To book tour starts on September 3rd in Cambridge, and Munroe says "I'll be appearing in conversation with some very cool people, including researchers, journalists, and cartoonists. We'll be discussing How To, science, comics, the destruction of the universe, and the ethics of hitting drones with tennis balls."

DevNull127 writes: The 77th World Science Fiction Convention announced the winners of the 2019 Hugo Awards at a ceremony Sunday night.

Here's some of the highlights. At least two of these stories can be read (for free) online:

BEST NOVELETTE: "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," by Zen Cho. The entire text is availabe online in the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, where it was published in November of 2018.

BEST SHORT STORY: "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies," by Alix E. Harrow. The complete text is available online, published in Apex Magazine in February 2018.

BEST NOVEL: The Calculating Stars, which presents an alternate history in which a meteor "decimates the U.S. government and paves the way for a climate cataclysm that will eventually render the earth inhospitable to humanity. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated timeline in the earth's efforts to colonize space..."

BEST NOVELLA: Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries #2. ("it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more...")

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
The Daily Dot reports that there was also one very unusual winner: Archive of Our Own (AO3), the fan-run, nonprofit website that's home to more than 5 million transformative works like fanfiction, fanart, and podfics, won one of science fiction's most prestigious awards at Worldcon Sunday night.

The website (which is part of the Organization of Transformative Works) won the Hugo for best related works, a widespread category that sometimes encompasses making-of books, pieces of criticism, and biographies. Fellow nominees included a book on Ursula K. Le Guin's writing, a Hugo Award retrospective, a website that campaigned to sponsor Worldcon memberships for Mexican creators, and Lindsay Ellis' video series on The Hobbit...

The very existence of AO3's nomination was a way of legitimizing fanfiction as a form of expression. But its win validates it even further, particularly in the science-fiction and fantasy community...

Amazon's Audible was sued by some of the top U.S. publishers for copyright infringement on Friday, aiming to block a planned rollout of a feature called 'Audible Captions' that shows the text on screen as a book is narrated. From a report: The lawsuit was filed by seven members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), including HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan Publishers. "Essentially Audible wants to provide the text as well as the sound of books without the authorization of copyright holders, despite only having the right to sell audiobooks," AAP said in a statement.

An anonymous reader writes: A photographer trying to raise money for a self-published book of historical space artifacts had his Facebook ads repeatedly removed by Facebook because flat-Earthers and Moon hoax conspiracy theorists were offended. About 24 hours after the ads were approved, he got a notification telling him the ad had been removed. He resubmitted it. It was accepted -- and then removed again -- 15 or 20 times, he said. The explanation given: He had run "misleading ads that resulted in high negative feedback."

He understood that it was Facebook's algorithm that rejected the ads, not a person. Getting additional answers proved difficult, a common complaint with advertising on Facebook. The best clues he could find came in the comments under the ads, which he and his colleagues captured in screenshots before they were removed and in responses to other posts about the project: There were phrases such as "The original moon landing was faking" and "It's all a show," along with memes mocking space technology. Some comments were hard to gauge, with users insisting that the earth was flat but that they'd buy the book anyway.

Mr. Redgrove didn't entirely blame the commenters. If these were their beliefs, then of course they were going to be annoyed by the ads. But how these individuals had ended up with the power to derail his campaign perplexed him. "They don't really have their systems in place to protect people," Mr. Redgrove said of Facebook. Facebook said it could not immediately comment on what had gone wrong. On Thursday, after the publication of this article, a representative for the company said it had investigated the issue and had confirmed that, as Mr. Redgrove had said, all the ads were originally approved.