An Official’s Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

Foldable Phones Are Here. Do We Really Want Them?

To make gadgets bend, you have to sacrifice some hardness. The flexible displays of foldables are generally covered by a plastic layer, which can be scratched up or penetrated more easily than the tough glass protecting traditional phone displays. (Samsung said its Z Flip uses an ultrathin, foldable glass that would let you fold and unfold your phone 200,000 times.)“If you take a ballpoint pen and you push really hard on the iPhone screen, it’ll be fine,” said Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that provides instructions and parts to repair gadgets. “If you do the same thing on the foldable displays, you’ll kill it.”In theory, the clamshell designs of the Z Flip and the Razr offer a partial solution to the durability problem. That’s because the main screens are not exposed when folded up. Yet if you drop the phones while using them — say, when you are walking and texting and trip over something — you will have a problem.“There’s no protecting the foldable display in a real-world environment the way that consumers treat their smartphones,” said Raymond Soneira, the founder of DisplayMate, who advises tech companies on screen technology.Foldables also have a design flaw. In general, when they are unfolded, the screen has a visible crease — an eyesore compared with the seamless displays on our smartphones and tablets.Last but not least, it remains to be seen whether the mechanical hinges of folding phones will survive the test of time. There are early reports of potential problems with the hinge on the Razr: Some reviewers said the hinge is extremely tight, making it cumbersome to fold and flip open the phone. CNET, the tech reviews site, said the hinge of its Razr test unit broke after 27,000 cycles using a robot.Motorola said in a statement that it was confident in the durability of Razr, adding that CNET’s test method put undue stress on the hinge. Read the full article

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Is Identifying Child Victims of Abuse

“We thought it was too controversial of a feature because it was too easy to use that functionality for abuse,” said Mr. Burns. “And also it’s just a legal nightmare.”Still, Mr. Burns said, he understood why investigators would want to use facial recognition software. “They are faced with a very grim task, and if there’s a tool that gives them an opportunity to safeguard victims, I don’t blame them for trying to grab it with both hands,” he said.Since Clearview’s practices have come to light, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Venmo and YouTube have sent the company cease-and-desist letters, asking it to stop scraping photos from their sites and delete existing images in its database. The attorney general of New Jersey banned the use of Clearview by officers in the state and called for an investigation into how it and similar technologies were being used by law enforcement. A class-action lawsuit seeking certification was filed in Illinois, where a strong biometric privacy law prohibits the use of residents’ faceprints without their consent, and another was filed on Feb. 3 in Virginia.Bills banning the use of facial recognition by police have recently been introduced in New York and Washington. And Clearview received a letter from Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, asking for a list of law enforcement agencies that have used the app and whether biometric information has been collected for children under 13 years old.“While this type of technology has existed for quite some time, we believe we have created something that enables law enforcement to solve previously unsolvable crimes and, most importantly, protect vulnerable children,” Mr. Ton-That said in his email. “At the same time, we are responding to requests for information from government and other interested parties as appropriate, and look forward to engaging in constructive discussions with them as we work to make our communities safer.”In October, law enforcement groups sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to not ban the use of facial recognition for their investigations. “We understand the public’s concern about protection of their privacy and civil rights,” they wrote. “With clear, publicly available policies we believe those concerns can be addressed.”Many agencies had been using Clearview for months at the time the letter was sent, but the letter made no mention of it.Michael H. Keller and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Read the full article

How to Run a Business in 2020

In recent years, stars have lent their names to all kinds of sneaker collaborations. Puma had Rihanna. Reebok had Gigi Hadid. Adidas had Kanye West. Nike had … Jesus Christ?Not exactly. In October, a pair of “Jesus shoes” — customized Air Max 97s whose soles contained holy water from the River Jordan — appeared online for $1,425. They were designed by a start-up called MSCHF, without Nike’s blessing.The sneakers quickly sold out and began appearing on resale sites, going for as much as $4,000. The Christian Post wrote about them. Drake wore them. They were among the most Googled shoes of 2019.The only thing that didn’t happen, said Kevin Wiesner, 27, a creative director at MSCHF, was a public disavowal of the shoes by Nike or the Vatican. “That would’ve been rad,” he said.Now, in the MSCHF office in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a pair stands like a trophy.MSCHF isn’t a sneaker company. It rarely even produces commercial goods, and its employees are reluctant to call it a company at all. They refer to MSCHF, which was founded in 2016, as a “brand,” “group” or “collective,” and their creations, which appear online every two weeks, as “drops.”Many of those drops are viral pranks: an app that recommends stocks to buy based on one’s astrological sign (which some observers took seriously), a service that sends pictures of A.I.-generated feet over text, a browser extension that helps users get away with watching Netflix at work.As Business Insider recently noted, the present and future profitability of these internet stunts is dubious. Yet, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, MSCHF has raised at least $11.5 million in outside investments since the fall of 2019.In the high-risk, maybe-reward world of venture capital, the group’s antics are well known. Nikita Singareddy, an investment analyst at RRE Ventures, compared MSCHF to Vine and Giphy. All three, she said, offer “lots of delight” and encourage content sharing.“Sometimes investors are a little too serious about monetizing something immediately,” Ms. Singareddy said. “With MSCHF, there’s faith that it’ll pay off. There’s an inherent virality and absurdness to all the projects that they’ve created, and it’s something people want to share and ask questions about.”For starters: What is it?

‘This Is How We Live’

The MSCHF office says as much about the company as any of its products.A giant white pentagram covers the entrance floor. On a visit in December, an inflatable severed swan’s head dangled from a ceiling beam, and a rubber chicken bong — a recent drop — sat on a coffee table, full of weed.“My mom thinks we make toys,” said Gabriel Whaley, 30, the chief executive.MSCHF has 10 employees, nine of whom are men. The company Twitter and Instagram pages are private, so most of its direct marketing takes place not on social media but through text messages from a mysterious phone number.Though the team used to run a marketing agency, working with brands like Casper in order to fund MSCHF projects, they stopped taking on clients last year. Now, they pretty much do whatever they want.“The cool thing that we have going for us is we set this precedent that we’re not tied to a category or vertical. We did the Jesus shoes and everyone knows us for that, and then we shut it down,” Mr. Whaley said. “We will never do it again. People are like, ‘Wait, why wouldn’t you double down on that, you would have made so much money!’ But that’s not why we’re here.”The point, he said, is to produce social commentary; the “story” the sneakers told was more important than turning a profit. “There are several youth pastors that have bought a pair, and even more who are asking, like, ‘I love sneakers, and I love God. I would love a pair of these,’ and that wasn’t the point,” Mr. Whaley said. “The Jesus shoes were a platform to broach the idea while also making fun of it: that everybody’s just doing a collaboration now.”In order to prepare each drop — be it an object, an app or a website — MSCHF’s employees log long hours. Most mornings, Mr. Whaley gets to the office around 7; the rest of the team arrives by 10. They often stay late into the evenings, conducting brainstorms, perfecting lines of code, shooting live-streams or assembling prototypes. Weekends, Mr. Whaley said, aren’t really a thing.“It’s not just a full-time job,” he said. “This is how we live. The distinction between your work and normal life doesn’t really exist here, and it’s just because this is what we were all doing whether we were getting paid or not in our former lives. So nothing has really changed, except we have more power as a unit than we did as individuals.”Though Mr. Whaley eschews corporate titles, functional groups exist within MSCHF: idea generation, production, distribution and outreach. In their past lives, most of the staffers were developers and designers, some with art backgrounds, working at their own firms and for companies like Twitter and BuzzFeed. The oldest employee is 32, and the youngest is 22.Some C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 companies have tried to mentor Mr. Whaley and “shoehorn” MSCHF into a traditional business, he said. They insist MSCHF is building a brand, that it needs a logo, a mission, a go-to product that people recognize.But MSCHF doesn’t have a flagship product, or market its releases traditionally. “It just happens that anything we make tends to spread purely because people end up talking about it and sharing it with their friends,” Mr. Whaley said.That’s part of the appeal for V.C. firms. With software companies, for example, there are “very clear metrics and paths to monetization that are tried and true,” Ms. Singareddy said. For MSCHF, that path is less obvious.“Some of the best investments, even early on it wasn’t clear what the result would be, but you’re making an investment in the team,” she said. “That’s what makes a company like MSCHF so exciting. Venture is about taking reasoned risk — it’s a true venture capital opportunity.”

Banksy for the Internet

Mr. Whaley talks a lot about what MSCHF is and who the people who work there are — and aren’t. Running ads on subways, or trying to build a social media following, or landing a spot on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list isn’t who they are. He cringes at the word “merch.” (“The day we sell hoodies is the day I shut this down.”)To observers, critics and followers, the company’s portfolio may amount to a very successful string of viral marketing campaigns, a series of jokes or something like art.“I don’t see anybody doing exactly what MSCHF is doing,” said Frank Denbow, a technology consultant who works with start-ups. “Everybody is able to get a one-off campaign that works, but to consistently find ways to create content that really sticks with people is different. It reminds me of Banksy and his ability to get a rise out of people.”On Twitter and Reddit, users trade theories and tips about MSCHF’s more cryptic offerings, such as its most recent, password-protected drop, Zuckwatch — a website that looks like Facebook and appears to be commentary on data privacy.Among these ardent fans, the drops are treated as trailheads, or entry points, setting off mad, winding dashes in search of cracking the code. Other followers, less devoted, may only know MSCHF for its Jesus shoes, which Mr. Wiesner said have been knocked off by sellers around the world. He is happy about it. “If we can make things that people run away with, that’s absolutely the dream,” he said. “Most of what we make is us personally running away with stuff.”Ahead of the presidential election, MSCHF’s employees plan to take on more political projects. (A drop in November, involving a shell restaurant, enabled users to mask political donations as work expenses; it was promptly shut down.) The company also hopes to expand beyond apps and objects to experiences and physical spaces.“Everything is just, ‘How do we kind of make fun of what we’re observing?’” Mr. Whaley said. “Then we have as much fun with it as possible and see what happens.” Read the full article

Who’s Watching Your Porch?

Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages. Read the full article

SpaceX’s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The rocket launched. It exploded.SpaceX and NASA declared the blast a success.Usually the destruction of a rocket means a failed mission. But on Sunday, SpaceX was demonstrating a crucial safety system of its Crew Dragon spacecraft, a capsule that is to carry astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station.There was no one on board during Sunday’s flight. The passengers this time were two test dummies with sensors to measure the forces that real astronauts would experience if the capsule’s escape system were ever needed. The system proved itself, even during a phase of the flight when atmospheric forces on the spacecraft are most severe. About nine minutes after the test, the intact capsule landed in the Atlantic Ocean.“Overall, as far we can tell thus far, it was a picture-perfect mission,” said Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, during a news conference after the test.This accomplishment may set the stage for opening a new era in spaceflight. For more than eight years since the last space shuttle flight, no person has launched to orbit from the United States. Instead, NASA has had to rely on Russia for the transportation of its astronauts.Now SpaceX and Boeing, the companies hired by NASA, are nearly ready for their first crewed flights, and probably not just of NASA astronauts.“We’re on the cusp of commercializing low-Earth orbit,” said Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator. “I want to see large amounts of capital flowing into activities that include humans in space. And those activities could be industrialized biomedicine. It could be advanced materials, and it could be people that want to go to space for tourism purposes.”Boeing and SpaceX may not be the only companies taking people to space from the United States. Two companies, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, seem to be on track to carry their first customers on expensive, short-hop space tourism flights soon. The number of people heading toward space could surge, even if most experience weightlessness for just a few minutes.The abort test was postponed one day because of rough seas and gusty winds on Saturday at the planned splashdown site. On Sunday, the waves were beginning to calm, but a storm was moving toward the launchpad.At 10:30 a.m., conditions on both land and sea were good enough to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to blast off into the sky.At 84 seconds after liftoff, powerful thrusters on the Crew Dragon pushed the spacecraft away from the rocket quickly, reaching a speed of more than twice that of sound. The rocket then exploded.Mr. Musk said the capsule, with its heat shield, should be able to survive fiery conditions that erupted before the capsule made its escape.“It could quite literally look like something out of Star Wars, fly right out of a fireball,” he said. “We want to avoid doing that.”Coasting to an altitude of more than 130,000 feet, the capsule then performed a carefully designed choreography — jettisoning the bottom of the spacecraft, firing small thrusters and deploying its parachutes — before it splashed into the ocean about 20 miles from where it started.The next Crew Dragon mission is to take two NASA astronauts, Douglas G. Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, to the space station.Mr. Musk said that flight would likely occur in the second quarter of the year, between April and June. The Falcon 9 rocket and a new Crew Dragon capsule for that flight will be ready in Florida by the end of February, he said, but safety reviews will take some time.The crew on the space station is to drop to three in April when three astronauts currently there return to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.The mission for Mr. Hurley and Mr. Behnken is currently scheduled to last two weeks, but could be extended, which would prevent a drop-off in scientific research at the station. For a longer stay, the astronauts would need additional training.“So far on space station, our responsibility is to take care of ourselves while we’re there, not make a mess,” Mr. Behnken said.Mr. Bridenstine said that a decision on whether Mr. Hurley and Mr. Behnken would stay longer would be made in a few weeks. He also said that NASA was still negotiating to buy an additional seat on a Soyuz.“I think it’s important we have options,” Mr. Bridenstine said.

A slow trek back to orbit

The last time NASA astronauts launched from the United States was July 8, 2011, when the space shuttle Atlantis blasted off on its last flight from Florida.Thirteen days later, it glided to a landing back at the Kennedy Space Center, where it is now a museum piece. Since then, astronauts from NASA and other nations flying to the space station have been hitching rides on Russian Soyuz rockets, at a current price of more than $80 million each.From Alan Shepard’s first flight in 1961 through the Apollo moon landings to the space shuttles, NASA was in charge of designing, building and operating its rockets and spacecraft.After the retirement of the shuttles, NASA planned to continue that approach with the Constellation program started under President George W. Bush. NASA aimed to develop the Ares 1 rocket to take astronauts to the space station.But costs for Ares 1 and the accompanying Orion capsule kept rising and the schedule slipped repeatedly. The Obama administration canceled the program.To replace Ares 1, NASA turned to commercial companies, the approach it uses for launches of satellites, cargo to the space station and robotic planetary probes. But relinquishing the transportation of astronauts was a bigger shift for the space agency.When NASA awarded the commercial crew contracts to Boeing and SpaceX in 2014, the hope was that the flights carrying astronauts would begin by the end of 2017. The contracts set fixed prices, unlike earlier big NASA contracts where contractors were reimbursed for costs with an additional fee.Watchdogs in government have questioned the management and costs of the program, and both Boeing and SpaceX have suffered technological setbacks along the way. SpaceX successfully sent an uncrewed Crew Dragon to the space station a year ago, and the company was gearing up to conduct the in-flight abort test.But in April, during a ground test, the capsule that was to be used for the abort test — the same one that had gone to orbit — exploded. No one was injured, but that pushed back SpaceX’s schedule as it figured out what happened and how to fix it.In December, Boeing launched one of its Starliner capsules without crew, but the mission ended early, without going to the space station, because of a problem with the spacecraft’s clock.

All aboard?

Many space enthusiasts hope that the commercial crew program will spur new business in space.Last June, NASA announced that it would allow space tourists to make trips to the space station, and one company, Axiom Space, says it has one passenger signed up already for a 10-day trip that will cost $55 million. An Axiom mission could launch as soon as summer 2021.However, another company, Bigelow Space Operations, which also said it planned to launch space tourists to the station, backed away a few months later.“NASA still has a substantial amount of work to do,” said Robert T. Bigelow, the founder and chief executive of the company. “We learned last year when we secured a SpaceX launch and options for three others that unfortunately it was premature. So, therefore, we had to cancel those agreements.”NASA is also expected to soon announce the winner of a competition to attach a commercial module to the International Space Station, providing more room for visitors.Still, putting people in orbit will most likely remain a small slice of the money invested on space ventures.“There’s certainly a business to made with human spaceflight,” said Chad Anderson, chief executive of Space Angels, an investment firm focused on start-up space companies. But, he added, his company saw human spaceflight more as a high-profile catalyst than a big business.The areas of major growth, he said, will be global positioning systems, earth observation and communications, none of which require astronauts.Closer to the ground, another pair of American companies could take passengers on brief trips to the edge of space.The spacecraft built by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic basically just go up and down like a big roller coaster and never accelerate to the speeds needed to reach orbit. Virgin’s officials are optimistically saying that commercial flights will begin this year. Blue Origin has not yet carried any passengers.Neither company’s trip to space will be in financial reach of the average person. Virgin Galactic charges $250,000 for a seat. Blue Origin has not yet said what it will charge.But the companies could greatly increase the number of people who travel to space. In the 58 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, fewer than 600 people have followed him there. Read the full article

Facebook Apologizes for Vulgar Translation of Chinese Leader’s Name

Facebook apologized on Saturday after its platform translated Xi Jinping, the name of the Chinese leader, from Burmese to a vulgar word in English.The mistranslation caught the company’s attention when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto civilian leader of Myanmar, wrote on her official Facebook page about Mr. Xi’s two-day visit to her country.When the Burmese posts were translated into English on Facebook, Mr. Xi’s name repeatedly appeared as “Mr. Shithole.”It was not clear how long the issue lasted, but Google’s translation function did not show the same error, Reuters reported.Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, apologized on Saturday.“We fixed a technical issue that caused incorrect translations from Burmese to English on Facebook,” Mr. Stone said. “This should not have happened and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”Mr. Xi’s visit to Myanmar, the first by a Chinese leader in nearly two decades, was designed to celebrate Beijing’s expanding presence in the region.The embassies of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of the Union of Myanmar in the United States did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.News of the vulgar translation appeared to be censored in China, where major news websites and social media platforms were silent about it. In China, citizens have been detained, and even convicted and imprisoned, for much milder derision of Mr. Xi.When Facebook’s system finds a word that does not have a translation, it makes a guess and replaces it with a word with similar syllables, Mr. Stone said. After running tests, Facebook found that multiple Burmese words starting with “xi” and “shi” translated to the vulgarity in English.Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at the University of California in Berkeley, Calif., said when he first saw the translation he thought someone intentionally made it to embarrass Mr. Xi.On closer inspection of the original Burmese post, Mr. Wong said he could see how a machine would make that error. Mr. Xi’s name sounds similar to “chi kyin phyin,” which roughly translates to “feces hole buttocks” in Burmese, Mr. Wong said.Greg Garvey, a professor of game design and development at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said his first intuition was also that somebody had pulled a prank, though there were multiple explanations for how this might have occurred.When the translation system finds a word that doesn’t have a direct translation, it should put in a replacement word using the context of the rest of the sentence and data from millions of Facebook users.Excluding malicious intent, Mr. Garvey said the vulgarity would have been used only if the system’s algorithm found it made sense based on Facebook’s trove of user data.The exception, Mr. Garvey said, would be if there were words that corresponded in Burmese to the vulgarity — a happenstance that Mr. Wong and Facebook said did, in fact, occur. Read the full article

Tech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.

In the case of Mrs. Thatcher, the silk scarf, which, along with the skirt suit and pussy-bow blouse, became signifiers of the Iron Lady, the woman who put on her absolutely appropriate clothes like armor in her battle to liberate the markets and bring “tough capitalism” to Britain.Combining both, Mr. Denny, 37, found the shape, literally, of an idea.Mr. Denny is known for work that explores the culture of technology and its effects on society. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Germany in 2007 to attend art school. After graduating, as he began developing his signature, he started “following” individuals he saw as paradigm changers: reading their press, their speeches and books; checking in as their careers progressed.Peter Thiel was one. Mr. Denny’s 2019 exhibition, “The Founder’s Paradox,” held in Auckland, New Zealand, featured Mr. Thiel (for one), the billionaire tech venture capitalist who is known for buying up swaths of land in that country, as a figure called Lord Tybalt, in art inspired by fantasy board games. Dominic Cummings, the architect of Boris Johnson’s electoral victory, is another. Ditto Mrs. Thatcher.“She was very visible in the 1980s, shaping a new kind of politics that emphasized the individual, deregulation and global neoliberalism,” Mr. Denny said, speaking on the phone from Berlin a few days before the opening.Though Mr. Denny has previously had exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine in London, and represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, this is the first time he has used fashion in his work, and it is partly because of the former prime minister. Read the full article

An Ice Skater’s Paradise in Quebec

On the Rivière du Loup, or Wolf River, Le Baluchon offers 89 rooms in a mix of inns and chalets on 1,000 acres featuring about 25 miles of cross-country ski and snowshoe trails, a tubing run and an ice rink with supplied equipment for broomball — a hockey-like game played with brooms and without skates. The sledders headed straight for the Nordic spa to steep in a series of hydrotherapy pools indoors and out.Later that evening, a full moon lit the riverside trail to the inn’s restaurant — acclaimed for its menu using local ingredients in dishes like walleye with Quebec seaweed butter — and of waterfalls stilled by ice.Agritourism on iceOne winter, when Jean-Pierre Binette and Madeleine Courchesne, beekeepers in rural Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, about an hour north of Trois-Rivières, had three children under the age of 9, they flooded a small section of woods on their property. Excited by the frozen forest playground, their children invited their friends, who invited their friends. In 1997, the seasonal diversion became a secondary business as Le Domaine de la Forêt Perdue, or the Lost Forest, opened to the public, keeping a form of agritourism alive in winter (in summer, they offer a high-ropes course).“We were the first skating path in Quebec and now we are training people who are opening trails around the province,” Thérèse Deslauriers, the managing director of the Forêt Perdue, said, as she worked the rustic entry house that doubles as a retail shop for honey products.Outside, beyond the skate rental tent, 15 kilometers — more than nine miles — of iceways wove through pine and hardwood forests dotted with farm pens occupied by goats, sheep, ducks, deer and more exotic animals, including an ostrich. Next to the alpaca enclosure, a repurposed phone booth dispensed handfuls of animal feed for a Canadian quarter. Read the full article

The F.A.A. Wants to Start Tracking Drones’ Locations

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed wide-sweeping regulations on Thursday that would require that all but the tiniest drones incorporate technology that would enable them to be tracked at all times while flying in United States airspace.“Remote ID technologies will enhance safety and security by allowing the F.A.A., law enforcement and federal security agencies to identify drones flying in their jurisdiction,” the federal transportation secretary, Elaine L. Chao, said in a statement.As drone operators, manufacturers and others involved in the rapidly expanding drone industry began sifting through the 319-page proposal on Thursday afternoon, responses varied wildly. While some applauded the F.A.A. for finally creating a system to rapidly identify owners of rogue — potentially deadly — drones, others declared that this was going to drastically hinder drone efficiency and cost effectiveness. Since 2015, operators of all drones that weigh more than half a pound have been required to register their devices, by submitting their names along with their email and home addresses to the F.A.A. Some federal facilities — prisons, for example — are authorized to use systems to detect the presence of drones, said Reggie Govan, a former chief counsel to the F.A.A. who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.But at the moment, officials do not have a quick way to identify the owner of a given drone or to track the location of drones that have been registered by a particular person. Even airports and power plants currently lack the legal authority to track drones, Mr. Govan said. At the simplest level the proposed regulation requires all drones over 0.55 pound to emit a very particular kind of signal. “Once you have drones that are emitting an identifier then you can have a system that can track all drones,” Mr. Govan said, adding that he applauded the regulations.Brendan Schulman, vice president for policy and legal affairs at DJI, a Chinese company that is one of the leading manufacturers of small consumer drones, said that for the past several years, industry leaders and government stakeholders had been trying to figure out how to create a sort of drone “license plate system.” He said that the proposed system could make sense. His primary concern is that the cost and burden to drone pilots and operators remain low — something he is still evaluating. (DJI was embroiled in another government drone matter, with mounting security concerns that the cameras and other technology on its drones could send surveillance data back to China.)But for Paul Aitken, a founder of DroneU, a drone pilot training company in New Mexico, the costs immediately struck him as excessive. The new regulations require all registered drones within 36 months to begin carrying a specific type of remote identification system that broadcasts over the internet. Often finding an internet connection is not feasible in the locations where drone operators fly, Mr. Aitken said. According to his reading of the rules, if you don’t have cellular service or another way to connect to the internet, operators will have to limit flights to 400 feet laterally, which is roughly to the end of a block — and back.Search and rescue missions often require going at least four times that distance, he said. “People will literally die from these rules,” he said, adding that other “industries that are thriving with drones like utility inspection, precision agriculture, land surveying, ranch management and even some construction management would suffer greatly” given that the rules undermine efficiency, which for many is part of the appeal of drones.He is also concerned that drone pilots will have to publicly disclose their locations. “Pilots need privacy to protect them from fear-based citizens who think that drones are spying on them,” he said.A New York City councilman, Justin Brannan, said he thought this was a step in the right direction, however. It is currently illegal to fly a drone in most of New York City. “We need to create a framework for drones to legally and safely operate here in New York City because I do believe the benefits will outweigh the risks,” he said.The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, as the proposed legislation is called, will be open for a 60-day comment period. At that point the regulations become law.Jonathan Rupprecht, a Florida-based lawyer who specializes in drones, was left with many questions as to how this would be enforced. He pointed out that the F.A.A. had rarely prosecuted violations of drone regulations — such as flying in a careless manner or flying an unregistered aircraft — over the last decade. “They should refrain from biting off more than they can chew,” he said. Mr. Rupprecht said that focusing on locations that need protecting, instead of creating an unwieldy tracking system for the entire United States, would be more realistic. Read the full article

Scientists Consider Indoor Ultraviolet Light to Zap Coronavirus in the Air

As society tries to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, some scientists hope a decades-old technology could zap pathogens out of the air in stores, restaurants and classrooms, potentially playing a key role in containing further spread of the infection.It has the ungainly name of upper-room ultraviolet germicidal irradiation, and it is something like bringing the power of sunlight indoors.“We have struggled in the past to see this highly effective, very safe technology fully implemented for airborne infections,” said Dr. Edward A. Nardell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We’ve done the studies. We know it works.”Sunlight disinfects, and the UV part of its spectrum is particularly effective at knocking out airborne pathogens.In the approach scientists like Dr. Nardell describe, fixtures mounted on walls or ceilings, similar to fluorescent lights used today, shine ultraviolet light across the top of an interior space, well above people’s heads. Ceiling fans are sometimes installed to draw air upward so that floating bacteria, viruses and fungi are zapped more quickly. A different frequency of ultraviolet might be even safer, even when it shines directly on people, which would also allow disinfection of surfaces.Ultraviolet light mangles the genetic material in pathogens — DNA in bacteria and fungi, RNA in viruses — preventing them from reproducing. “You’ve killed it essentially,” said William P. Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Pennsylvania State University.Dr. Nardell estimated that installing commercially available fixtures for an intermediate-size warehouse-type store like Walmart would cost about $100,000, which might be too expensive for some smaller businesses.The systems also add to electricity bills and require cleaning and maintenance. “They’re not plug in and walk away forever,” Dr. Nardell said.In the 1930s, the first upper-room ultraviolet fixtures were installed around Philadelphia.During five years of experiments at several schools there, students in classrooms outfitted with ultraviolet fixtures were less likely to catch and spread some contagious diseases, such as smallpox and mumps.The most striking divergence occurred during the spring of 1941 when measles swept through schools around Philadelphia. At Germantown Friends School, one of the schools studied, ultraviolet fixtures had been installed in the primary grade classrooms. There, about 15 percent of children who did not possess immunity to measles — that is, those who had not previously contracted the disease — became sick.In the upper-grade classrooms, where ultraviolet fixtures had not been installed, more than half of the susceptible students contracted measles.“There’s no doubt that wavelength band will kill or inactivate micro-organisms,” said Dr. Bahnfleth, who recently presented an online seminar on the topic.But experts concede that the use of ultraviolet light indoors could be a tough sell. After all, people have been told for decades to wear sunscreen to ward off skin cancer caused by the ultraviolet rays in sunlight — the wavelengths known as UVA and UVB.For that reason, the germicidal fixtures employ wavelengths of light known as UVC that are shorter than UVA and UVB. The shorter wavelengths mean that the particles of light, or photons, are of higher energy. Counterintuitively, this means UVC is safer for people, because it is absorbed by proteins in the outer layer of dead skin cells before reaching the DNA in the living cells. (Outdoor sunlight is devoid of UVC, because Earth’s atmosphere blocks it.)UVC can irritate skin and eyes, which is why the light is usually restricted to above people’s heads, or for use in unoccupied rooms. The irritation usually clears up within a couple of days. The safety of UVC “is really long established,” Dr. Nardell said.Sometimes UV-C lamps are installed within ventilation air ducts, out of sight and completely shielded from people.Syracuse Hancock International Airport in upstate New York, for example, has installed the fixtures above security checkpoints and its arrivals areas.“Historically, it’s been homeless shelters and medical centers,” said Daniel Jones, president of UV Resources of Santa Clarita, Calif., a manufacturer of the fixtures used by the airport. Sales are up tenfold in the past month. “The demand is through the roof,” he said.Dr. Nardell started research in the field in the 1980s after an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis at a Boston homeless shelter, Later, in a tuberculosis ward in South Africa, he and his collaborators installed ultraviolet fixtures, which were turned on every other day. When the fixtures were operating, air from the ward flowed to a chamber of 90 guinea pigs, which can contract tuberculosis. A second group of 90 guinea pigs served as the control group. When the fixtures were off, untreated air was sent to their chamber.Scientists are now also exploring what is called far UVC — an even shorter, higher energy wavelength — that appears to be even safer and which could be bathed throughout a room continuously, disinfecting surfaces in addition to destroying pathogens in the air. Manufacturers are just beginning to ramp up production of far UVC fixtures.“Not soon enough to help us with the current wave,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center. “Perhaps soon enough for the next bump everyone says is coming.”Dr. Brenner is conducting laboratory experiments that will shine far UVC on hairless mice for eight hours a day for 60 weeks. After 40 weeks, there are no signs of precancerous lesions or eye damage, he said.One of the challenges in the wider use of ultraviolet lights is showing that it works well in a variety of settings. Hospitals are generally well ventilated and well maintained. Would air in a cavernous department store flow close enough to the fixtures to be disinfected? Would a fixture on the wall of a restaurant be effective enough to halt virus from traveling from an infected diner at one table to the neighboring tables?“The mall owners are calling with the exact same question,” said Jelena Srebric, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland.Part of the challenge is that the placement of fixtures and fans would need to be optimized for specific spaces, and the effectiveness has yet to be demonstrated in big public areas.Earlier computer simulations by Dr. Srebric showed that her models matched experimental tests, but the work looked at small spaces like individual rooms.Ceiling fans helped, improving the efficiency by about a third. Without fans, about 25 percent to 30 percent of the pathogens were never killed, because pockets of air never rose into the path of the ultraviolet rays.She and Dr. Nardell are now applying the models to bigger spaces like airports and retail stores.“I know it will definitely improve safety,” Dr. Srebric said, “but I cannot tell you by how much or how safe or whether I would go to a mall.”Then there is the problem of calling the technology ultraviolet germicidal irradiation. Dr. Nardell thinks it needs a new name, perhaps something as simple as “light disinfection.”“We’ve had a P.R. problem for decades and have suffered from it,” Dr. Nardell said. Read the full article

Why the Apple iPhone SE Doesn't Matter

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.Join us for a live conversation about tech and the coronavirus. Today at 4 p.m. Eastern time, my Times Opinion colleague Charlie Warzel and I are hosting a conference call to talk about the use of smartphone location data to fight the coronavirus and other aspects of using technology in this pandemic. Lend us your ears, and ask your burning questions. You can RSVP here.This sure feels like a strange time for Apple to release a new iPhone. But here’s a hard truth: Our habits show that new phones are irrelevant to most of us — in a pandemic or otherwise.Brian X. Chen, a New York Times personal technology writer, wrote about Apple’s plan to release a new version of the iPhone SE next week. That’s the four-year-old model with a relatively small screen and a relatively low price of $399 and up in the United States.This iPhone model hasn’t been a blockbuster, but it’s a nice option for some people. Apple and other companies are likely to keep releasing more fresh smartphone models this year, perhaps with some pandemic-related delays.Conditions aren’t ideal for selling stuff. American consumer spending in March fell at the fastest rate in the nearly three decades the government has tracked the data. Many stores around the world, including Apple’s and other cellphone retailers’, are closed. Millions of newly unemployed people don’t have spare money, and Americans are shifting what they are buying. Groceries and streaming video, yes. Electronics, no.Apple probably had this latest model ready to go before the pandemic hit — and sure, why not give it a go? The honest truth is, it’s impossible to predict if and when our buying habits will return to normal.New smartphones have been a tough sell for some time. People in the United States and many other countries are waiting longer to replace their phones — for Americans, it’s more than three years on average.Pick your favorite explanation for this phenomenon. Many people don’t want to pay the going rate of $1,000 or more for phones with all the bells and whistles. To some people, even the features that are supposed to be exciting feel blah.The best explanation for the smartphone sales malaise is a simple one: This is what happens when products go from new and novel to normal.Products get more reliable and resilient as they become mass market, and new models don’t feel so different from the old. Apart from the die-hards, most people lose interest in the latest and greatest. The hot new thing feels…fine.In Brian’s assessment of last fall’s iPhone models, he said there was no rush to buy a new phone if your current one is less than a few years old. (Yes, a professional tech reviewer suggested you might NOT need to buy something.)The shift from wow to shrug happened with cars, personal computers and televisions. More than a decade after modern smartphones hit the market, we’ve lost our zing for those pocket computers, too. Until economic conditions stabilize, our zing will probably be even less zingy than normal.A smartphone is now a refrigerator. We need it, but we don’t replace our current model when a new ice-making feature comes out. This is not great for companies with shiny new phones to sell. For the rest of us, it’s fine.

When old tech really is a problem

A three-year-old smartphone is great. Broken government technology that’s failing struggling people is not.My colleagues have written about the Small Business Administration’s online application system melting down with loan requests from businesses applying for help. A Lyft driver in New York was told to fax his pay stubs to the unemployment office. There are unprecedented demands right now. But, wow, this is a bad look for government technology when it’s needed most.The problem isn’t necessarily the age of the technology used by government organizations. It’s the upkeep.The hidden secret of the internet is that behind the scenes, there are Sputnik-era computers doing chores like handling your credit card payment on Amazon and filling your online travel reservations. That 60-year-old computer programming language that New Jersey’s governor talked about? It works, as long as there are people to keep it up-to-date.The problem with many government and even corporate technology is the lack of money and care for upkeep. Chris O’Malley, the chief executive of Compuware, which works on old tech, told me there’s a mentality that tech systems are something you set up once and they’re done. Nope. If it ain’t broke, it still needs fixing.

Before we go …

When “less bad” is good. Businesses are cutting back on advertisements. Others are nervous about their ads appearing in a Facebook feed next to grim news. That dynamic is likely to hurt Google and Facebook, which make most of their money from selling ads, my Times colleagues write. Still, the tech titans will probably hold up better than other companies reliant on advertising.We need baby ducks right now: In our doom times, people are gravitating to news websites and social media accounts featuring happy tales like a police officer guiding ducklings, the Times reporter Taylor Lorenz writes. (A shameless plug to stick around for the end of this newsletter.)Another idea to bridge America’s digital divide: Thomas L. Friedman, the Times Opinion columnist, talks up a proposal for federal loans and regulatory changes to help rural communities and cooperatives build fast internet networks. Expanding online access would encourage more inventions like the robotic poultry coop cleaners he found in Minnesota. Yesterday, I wrote about another plan to make fast internet available to more people.Stick to the basics. Brian, in another article, said the pandemic has made it clear what technology is essential in our personal lives, and what is neat but frivolous.Hugs to thisPete Wells, a restaurant critic for The Times, writes a lovely appreciation of this six-hour video of sheep at a California vineyard. They are mostly sitting, bleating or munching grass. The monotony is strangely soothing.You can reach us at [email protected] receive On Tech in your inbox each weekday, please sign up here. Read the full article

Why the Apple iPhone SE Doesn't Matter

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.Join us for a live conversation about tech and the coronavirus. Today at 4 p.m. Eastern time, my Times Opinion colleague Charlie Warzel and I are hosting a conference call to talk about the use of smartphone location data to fight the coronavirus and other aspects of using technology in this pandemic. Lend us your ears, and ask your burning questions. You can RSVP here.This sure feels like a strange time for Apple to release a new iPhone. But here’s a hard truth: Our habits show that new phones are irrelevant to most of us — in a pandemic or otherwise.Brian X. Chen, a New York Times personal technology writer, wrote about Apple’s plan to release a new version of the iPhone SE next week. That’s the four-year-old model with a relatively small screen and a relatively low price of $399 and up in the United States.This iPhone model hasn’t been a blockbuster, but it’s a nice option for some people. Apple and other companies are likely to keep releasing more fresh smartphone models this year, perhaps with some pandemic-related delays.Conditions aren’t ideal for selling stuff. American consumer spending in March fell at the fastest rate in the nearly three decades the government has tracked the data. Many stores around the world, including Apple’s and other cellphone retailers’, are closed. Millions of newly unemployed people don’t have spare money, and Americans are shifting what they are buying. Groceries and streaming video, yes. Electronics, no.Apple probably had this latest model ready to go before the pandemic hit — and sure, why not give it a go? The honest truth is, it’s impossible to predict if and when our buying habits will return to normal.New smartphones have been a tough sell for some time. People in the United States and many other countries are waiting longer to replace their phones — for Americans, it’s more than three years on average.Pick your favorite explanation for this phenomenon. Many people don’t want to pay the going rate of $1,000 or more for phones with all the bells and whistles. To some people, even the features that are supposed to be exciting feel blah.The best explanation for the smartphone sales malaise is a simple one: This is what happens when products go from new and novel to normal.Products get more reliable and resilient as they become mass market, and new models don’t feel so different from the old. Apart from the die-hards, most people lose interest in the latest and greatest. The hot new thing feels…fine.In Brian’s assessment of last fall’s iPhone models, he said there was no rush to buy a new phone if your current one is less than a few years old. (Yes, a professional tech reviewer suggested you might NOT need to buy something.)The shift from wow to shrug happened with cars, personal computers and televisions. More than a decade after modern smartphones hit the market, we’ve lost our zing for those pocket computers, too. Until economic conditions stabilize, our zing will probably be even less zingy than normal.A smartphone is now a refrigerator. We need it, but we don’t replace our current model when a new ice-making feature comes out. This is not great for companies with shiny new phones to sell. For the rest of us, it’s fine.

When old tech really is a problem

A three-year-old smartphone is great. Broken government technology that’s failing struggling people is not.My colleagues have written about the Small Business Administration’s online application system melting down with loan requests from businesses applying for help. A Lyft driver in New York was told to fax his pay stubs to the unemployment office. There are unprecedented demands right now. But, wow, this is a bad look for government technology when it’s needed most.The problem isn’t necessarily the age of the technology used by government organizations. It’s the upkeep.The hidden secret of the internet is that behind the scenes, there are Sputnik-era computers doing chores like handling your credit card payment on Amazon and filling your online travel reservations. That 60-year-old computer programming language that New Jersey’s governor talked about? It works, as long as there are people to keep it up-to-date.The problem with many government and even corporate technology is the lack of money and care for upkeep. Chris O’Malley, the chief executive of Compuware, which works on old tech, told me there’s a mentality that tech systems are something you set up once and they’re done. Nope. If it ain’t broke, it still needs fixing.

Before we go …

When “less bad” is good. Businesses are cutting back on advertisements. Others are nervous about their ads appearing in a Facebook feed next to grim news. That dynamic is likely to hurt Google and Facebook, which make most of their money from selling ads, my Times colleagues write. Still, the tech titans will probably hold up better than other companies reliant on advertising.We need baby ducks right now: In our doom times, people are gravitating to news websites and social media accounts featuring happy tales like a police officer guiding ducklings, the Times reporter Taylor Lorenz writes. (A shameless plug to stick around for the end of this newsletter.)Another idea to bridge America’s digital divide: Thomas L. Friedman, the Times Opinion columnist, talks up a proposal for federal loans and regulatory changes to help rural communities and cooperatives build fast internet networks. Expanding online access would encourage more inventions like the robotic poultry coop cleaners he found in Minnesota. Yesterday, I wrote about another plan to make fast internet available to more people.Stick to the basics. Brian, in another article, said the pandemic has made it clear what technology is essential in our personal lives, and what is neat but frivolous.Hugs to thisPete Wells, a restaurant critic for The Times, writes a lovely appreciation of this six-hour video of sheep at a California vineyard. They are mostly sitting, bleating or munching grass. The monotony is strangely soothing.You can reach us at [email protected] receive On Tech in your inbox each weekday, please sign up here. Read the full article

Muting Coronavirus Anger, China Empowers Its Internet Police

SHANGHAI — As China tries to reshape the narrative of its fumbled response to the coronavirus outbreak, it is turning to a new breed of police that carry out real-world reprisals for digital misdeeds.The internet police, as they are known here, have gained power as the Communist Party has worked to seize greater control over the thoughts, words, and even memories of China’s 800 million web users. Now, they are emerging as a bulwark against the groundswell of anger over governance breakdowns that exacerbated the epidemic.Officers arrive with an unexpected rap at the door of online critics. They drag off offenders for hours of interrogation. They force their targets to sign loyalty pledges and recant remarks deemed politically unacceptable, even if those words were made in the relative privacy of a group chat.In the central city of Chengdu, a recent law school graduate, Li Yuchen, said he was pulled from his home in early February after writing a sarcastic treatise in classical Chinese about censorship. The police questioned him from late afternoon until midnight, first asking him whether he loved his country, to which he said yes. Mr. Li said he was forced to sign a statement disavowing his views and pledging loyalty to the party.The experience mirrored what happened to the hero of Mr. Li’s essay, a Wuhan doctor named Li Wenliang, who tried to alert colleagues about the spread of a mysterious virus in a chat group, only to be called to a police station and forced to sign a confession for spreading rumors.When Dr. Li died of the coronavirus, waves of mourning and anger swept across China’s internet.“Li Wenliang said that a healthy society shouldn’t have only one voice,” wrote Mr. Li, who is not related to Dr. Li. “I think the best way to mourn him is to continue to be a citizen” and continue writing, he wrote in a later post on WeChat.That has become more difficult. To stanch anger over Dr. Li’s death, and the deaths of the many others his warning might have saved, authorities have doubled down on the very tactics that drove the fury in the first place: using the internet police to muffle the most outspoken.Little is known about the group, formally part of the Cybersecurity Defense Bureau, which has long policed hacking and online fraud. But occasional government releases offer clues. In 2016, the 50-million person region of Guangxi said it had almost 1,200 internet police officers. The goal was to have one internet police officer for every 10,000 people in the region, a sign of the force’s ambitions.In the early years of Chinese social media, punishments doled out to critics were rarely severe. As millions took to clones of Twitter and Facebook, which are banned in China, censorship usually meant disappearing posts and inaccessible foreign websites. Now the police actively pursue the authors of forbidden material, and irritation has been replaced by fear.Friends and families warn each other not to speak too openly in group chats. The changes have come as China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has pushed hard to extend the party’s iron-fisted rule over the internet.Mr. Xi has given new resources to domestic security forces. The internet police’s uncanny speed in finding people, who might believe they are hidden among the internet’s hordes of anonymous grumblers, is the result of billions of dollars in new spending on surveillance technology.China’s Ministry of Public Security, which controls the police, did not respond to requests for comment, including the role of the internet police in silencing Dr. Li. But experts said the statement he signed and later posted online matched the types of letters the internet police force online critics to endorse.“One reason for the online outrage after Li Wenliang’s death was because people know that what he encountered is just a normal Chinese person’s experience,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s not the local police’s fault. It’s Xi’s error that this kind of thing has become a part of daily life.”Mr. Xi moved quickly to coordinate online oversight after he took over in 2012. He created a new organization, the Cyberspace Administration of China, to coordinate censorship online and suppress social-media influencers who didn’t always toe the party line.The 2015 emergence of the internet police signaled Mr. Xi’s ambitions to take online suppression to an even greater level. That year local police stations created social media accounts to highlight internet arrests.Before long, the internet police became the state’s sharpest tool for prodding online rabble rousers into silence. Often hanging back and monitoring, officers would tap local law enforcement to pull offenders in and question them — what they called “touching the ground.” Placed at increasingly local police stations, they have carried out campaigns cracking down on everything from telecom fraud to use of Twitter.Before the coronavirus epidemic, their focus was the protests in Hong Kong.Bole Cheng, a 45-year old financial worker, got called in last autumn. He had lost his cool during a debate about Hong Kong and referred to Mr. Xi with a pun that means “Little Wicked.” Two days later, two officers were at his door.“They said I was talking drivel on WeChat and there was a problem, so I had to go to the station with them,” he said. During five hours of interrogation, they told Mr. Cheng they used an artificial-intelligence powered search engine to find him.In the coming months, they contacted him twice more. Once they bragged that their powers were expanding, and they had been given new national security responsibilities. Another time, Mr. Cheng discussed George Orwell with a young officer, who sought to distance his work from what is described in “1984.”“He was trying to show that he read books, and that the stories weren’t about China. That Orwell wasn’t talking about us,” he said.When the police threatened to make it difficult for his son to attend school, Mr. Cheng gave in and signed a letter promising to refrain from discussing Hong Kong and to stop insulting the country’s leader.Mr. Xiao, of Berkeley, said internet police activity has only intensified during the coronavirus outbreak. Sporadic government reports attest to this. In the first weeks of the year, the police in the region of Guangxi investigated 385 people for spreading rumors. In Qinghai Province, they pulled in 72. In the Ningxia region, another 66.Online censors have been working overtime too. Since Dr. Li’s death, he has become a censored topic. Huge numbers of posts and accounts have disappeared from social media.“Since social media has existed in China, there’s been nothing like the current explosion of speech,” said Hannah Yeung, who runs an online group dedicated to preserving posts, which she calls the cyber graveyard. So tight has the censorship become in recent weeks, she said she feared Chinese people were losing the ability to chronicle the past.“After people scream and shout, their posts get deleted and there’s no more voice of opposition. Nothing gets fixed,” she said.Early signs indicate the campaign has at least partially succeeded. The Chinese internet is filled with apparently sincere praise for the government’s efforts. Records of early missteps are mostly gone.That success poses its own threats. If local or regional officials bury problems, the country’s leaders could miss early warnings of major crises, like the warnings doctors in Wuhan issued in early January.When Miles Zhang went on a business trip in early January to Wuhan, he was one of the few ready for the outbreak. He wore goggles and a mask at the insistence of his wife, who had read online about the crackdown against Dr. Li before the news was censored.“I really stood out,” he recalled. The precautions may have saved him from getting the coronavirus, which was then quietly spreading across the city.Such interest in blocked information had gotten Mr. Zhang in trouble only the year before. In September, the police dragged him in for questioning over his use of a software to thwart the government’s internet filters. After hours of interrogation, they threw him out onto the street. Stunned at the experience, he walked the several kilometers home to his worried family.Just back from a trip to Canada, he began planning to leave China for good.“I used to think the censorship was a technical problem that could be overcome,” Mr. Zhang said. “But this time was like a smack to the head. This is state terrorism.”Lin Qiqing contributed research from Shanghai. Read the full article

Steven Seagal Settles Charges of Unlawfully Promoting Cryptocurrency

Steven Seagal, the actor best known for playing hard-bitten cops and commandos in action movies, has agreed to settle charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose that he was being paid to promote a cryptocurrency investment on his social media accounts.The S.E.C. said on Thursday that Mr. Seagal, who lives in Moscow and holds both Russian and American citizenship, was promised $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of cryptocurrency from the company Bitcoiin2Gen in exchange for endorsing its initial coin offering, a crowdfunding strategy that involves creating and selling the virtual currency.In 2018, Facebook and Twitter accounts belonging to Mr. Seagal posted several times about the coin offering, calling him the “worldwide ambassador” for the company, the S.E.C. said. The posts did not disclose that Mr. Seagal, 67, was being paid for the promotions. The S.E.C. said that Mr. Seagal, who is also a trained martial artist, had 6.7 million Facebook followers during the time that he posted about the cryptocurrency company.The S.E.C. noted that Mr. Seagal’s posts about the coin offering came more than six months after the commission announced its decision that initial coin offerings — like initial public offerings of stocks — may be considered sales of securities and are subject to federal securities laws. Anti-touting provisions in those laws require individuals to disclose the amount of compensation they will receive in exchange for promoting a security.In a February 2018 news release, Bitcoiin2Gen called Mr. Seagal a “Zen Master” and said that the actor’s personal mission to lead people “into contemplation” and “enlighten them in some manner” aligned with the company’s objectives of creating a decentralized payment system.A spokesman for Mr. Seagal, Christopher Nassif, said in a statement on Thursday that the actor entered into an agreement allowing people associated with Bitcoiin2Gen to post on his social media accounts about the cryptocurrency, but that Mr. Seagal eventually became “concerned with the bona fides of the product” and terminated his relationship with the company. He was only paid part of the agreed-upon fee.Mr. Seagal agreed to settle the charges by paying back that part of the fee, $157,000, as well as a civil penalty in the same amount, the commission said. He also agreed to refrain from promoting any securities for three years.Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal saw the agreement as “simply a case of someone paying a celebrity for the use of his image to promote a product,” and that he had fully cooperated with the S.E.C.’s investigation.Over the course of his acting career, Mr. Seagal’s parts have often highlighted his physical prowess, such as a firefighting specialist for an oil company in “On Deadly Ground” (1994), and a former C.I.A. operative-turned-police officer in “The Glimmer Man” (1996). In 2018, however, before he started promoting the cryptocurrency, Mr. Seagal accepted a very different role, this time from the Russian government: special representative to improve relations with the United States. (Russian officials said that the position was unpaid.)With the S.E.C. agreement in place, Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal “looks forward to continuing his life’s work as an actor, musician, martial artist and diplomat.” Read the full article

Lawrence Tesler, Pioneer of Personal Computing, Dies at 74

Lawrence Tesler, a pioneering computer scientist who, in his work at Xerox and with Steve Jobs at Apple, devoted himself to making it easier for users to interact with computers, died on Sunday at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 74.The cause was not known, his wife, Colleen Barton, said. the cause was not known. But at in recent years Mr. Tesler had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident.During his career Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies. But it was as a young researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work, helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), working with another researcher, Tim Mott, Mr. Tesler developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.Mr. Tesler was passionate about simplifying interaction with computers. At Apple he was responsible for the idea that a computer mouse should have only one button. For many years the license plate on his car read, “NO MODES.”At Xerox PARC, his first breakthrough came when he took a newly hired secretary, sat her in front of a blank computer monitor and took notes while she described how she would prefer to compose documents with a computer. She proceeded to describe a very simple system, which Mr. Tesler then implemented with Mr. Mott.The Gypsy program contained such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” or WYSIWYG printing, a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.And it implemented the idea of opening a computer file by simply clicking on a screen icon while pointing at it with the mouse cursor. Before that, files had to be opened by typing the file name into a command line.“At Xerox he pushed a lot for things to be simpler in ways that would broaden the base of users,” said David Liddle, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist who worked with Mr. Tesler at Xerox PARC. “He was always quite focused on users who weren’t also Ph.D.s in computer science.”Mr. Tesler later joined a small team of researchers run by Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist who had pioneered the idea of a so-called Dynabook, which would become the inspiration for today’s laptop computers. The group was developing a software environment called Smalltalk, and Mr. Tesler developed a system for searching for software components, which he named the browser.“He can be hailed as one of the true pioneers of many important aspects of personal computing,” Mr. Kay said.After attending a demonstration of the Altair, an early hobbyist personal computer, at a Palo Alto hotel in 1975, Mr. Tesler returned to PARC to alert his colleagues to the arrival of low-cost systems. His warnings were largely ignored.He continued to advocate for less costly computers. In 1978, with Adele Goldberg and Douglas Fairbairn, he designed a portable machine called NoteTaker, a forerunner of luggable computers like the Osborne, Kaypro and Compaq machines of the early 1980s. But Xerox declined to commercialize the NoteTaker; only a few prototypes were made.It was Mr. Tesler who gave Steve Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of first Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.Mr. Tesler left Xerox to work for Mr. Jobs at Apple in 1980.“The questions the Apple people were asking totally blew me away,” Mr. Tesler was quoted as saying in a profile that appeared in IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in 2005. “They were the kind of questions Xerox executives should have been asking but didn’t.”In addition to helping develop the Lisa and Macintosh, Mr. Tesler founded and ran the company’s Advanced Technology Group, where he led the design of the Newton hand-held computer, although that proved unsuccessful. The Advanced Technology Group also created much of the technology that would become the Wi-Fi wireless standard, and Mr. Tesler led an Apple joint venture with two other companies that created Acorn RISC Machine, a partnership intended to provide a microprocessor for the Newton.Although Apple would eventually sell off its holdings in that company, it would come to dominate the market for the chips that power today’s smartphones. The chip architecture created by the partnership is today the most widely used microprocessor design in the world.Mr. Tesler left Apple in 1997 for a start-up and later went on to work for both Amazon and Yahoo. He left Yahoo in 2008 and spent a year as a product fellow at 23andMe, the genetics information company. He was most recently an independent consultant.Lawrence Gordon Tesler was born in the Bronx on April 24, 1945, to Isidore and Muriel (Krechman) Tesler. His father was an anesthesiologist.In 1960, while attending the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Tesler developed a new method of generating prime numbers. He showed it to one of his teachers, who was impressed. As Mr. Tesler later recalled, he told the teacher it was a formula; the teacher responded, “No, it’s not really a formula, it’s an algorithm, and it can be implemented on a computer.”“Where do you find a computer?” Mr. Tesler asked.The teacher said he would get him a programming manual first and then figure out where to find a computer.One day Mr. Tesler was sitting in the school cafeteria reading his manual, which offered instructions on how to program an IBM 650 mainframe in the most low-level, arcane machine programming language.A student walked up to Mr. Tesler and asked, “What are you doing with that?”“I’m learning about programming,” Mr. Tesler responded.The other student alerted Mr. Tesler to a program at Columbia University, which gave high school students programming time. He was able to use a university computer for a half-hour each week, teaching himself to program before he got to college.He attended Stanford, graduating in 1965 with a degree in mathematics. While there, he became involved in a number of early projects that prefigured personal computing. He had early access to a computer known as a LINC when he worked as a student programmer for the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg. The LINC, designed by the M.I.T. physicist Wesley A. Clark, is believed by many computer historians to have been the first true personal computer.Mr. Tesler’s first start-up venture was a programming consulting company located in a mall adjacent to the Stanford campus. He also used a mainframe computer to build a system to permit the Stanford football student rooting section to program elaborate card stunts. It was, Mr. Kay said, a forerunner to the ways in which modern graphical displays would be programmed.In 1969, with two other scientists at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Mr. Tesler designed a small computer and proposed the idea to the calculator company Frieden. Although intrigued, the company declined to pursue the idea.Mr. Tesler left computing for a short while after that and moved to an Oregon commune with his daughter from a short-lived marriage. Lack of work led him back to the Bay Area, where he would eventually join Xerox PARC.In addition to Ms. Barton, a geophysicist, and his daughter, Lisa Tesler, he is survived by two brothers, Charles and Alan.At Stanford and afterward, Mr. Tesler was active in both the antiwar movement and the 1960s counterculture. He was a participant in an alternative school formed around Stanford, the Mid-Peninsula Free University, where he taught several classes, including one exclusively for people born under the sign of Taurus. In 1968 he taught a class titled “How to End the IBM Monopoly.”Years later, as a computer scientist at Xerox, his former colleague Ms. Goldberg said, he remembered his activist roots. The Central Intelligence Agency was a Xerox customer, and when agency employees arrived for a meeting, Mr. Tesler attended wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Read the full article