US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finds that IBM discriminated against older workers when making thousands of layoffs between 2013 and 2018

(www.propublica.org)

The letter says a nationwide EEOC investigation “uncovered top-down messaging from (IBM’s) highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for” younger ones.

Lawyers for some former workers said EEOC investigators have told them the agency decision may apply to more than 6,000 ex-IBM employees, a number that could grow considerably if, as experts say is likely, the agency’s finding prompts new, private age discriminaton lawsuits.

This is huge, glad that it has been opened up to maybe more legal actions against IBM. Journalism works in this case.

NIVIDIA has agreed to buy ARM for $40 billion in cash/stock

(bloom.bg)

Nvidia will pay $21.5 billion in stock and $12 billion in cash for the U.K.-based chip designer, including a $2 billion payment at signing. SoftBank may receive an additional $5 billion in cash or stock if Arm’s performance meets certain targets, the companies said Sunday in a statement. An additional $1.5 billion will be paid to Arm employees in Nvidia stock.

Regulatory approvals may well prove challenging. The companies said sign-offs are needed from China, U.K., European Union and U.S. authorities and may take as long as 18 months. China’s approval may be particularly difficult given rising tensions with the U.S.

One client that will be directly challenged is Intel. Huang said a priority will be investing in Arm’s efforts to design chips for data-center computing. While he’s carved out a $3 billion niche in the business of supplying Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc. with graphics processors that help with their artificial intelligence workloads, Huang said he wants to speed up the adoption of Arm-based central processors, or CPUs. That’s a lucrative market dominated by Intel, which has about 90% share.

question remains that if it'll get by regulators from the US and EU, which I hope not because this is a monopoly play and it's going to be bad for mostly everyone.

Cathleen Ritteriser on the observance of 2751 Moments of Silence.

(cathleenritt-blog.tumblr.com)

Getting out my calculator, I learned the grim statistic that 2751 over 24 hours amounted to just under 2 people per minute. By defining a “moment” as 30 seconds, it would take 22.9 hours to observe a moment of silence for each individual killed that day. The last hour honors those that survived, yet suffered loss or trauma, and are forever haunted by the events of that day. 2751 Moments of Silence. Because social media like Twitter and Facebook have given me the luxury of meeting and befriending so many new, interesting individuals, while giving me a chance to develop personally, creatively and professionally, I want those 2751 individuals to have it for a day. 2751 individuals never had the chance to tweet, post a Facebook status update, record a Seesmic, write their blog or to decide it was all stupid and a complete waste of time. So on September 11th, neither will I. I encourage you to join me. In response to, “What are you doing right now?”, just say, 2751 Moments of Silence.

This still gets me to this day.

Jim Wright with a must-read on what a lot of people are feeling in the nearly two decades since 9/11

(www.stonekettle.com)

We simply cannot kill enough people to sate our need for revenge.

Entire countries were laid waste in revenge for 9-11. We did that. I know, I was there, I was one of those who went to war for a lie and helped to kill hundreds of thousands in revenge for something they never did.

It’s been almost 20 years now, and in those decades since 911 we Americans have become a callous people who can look upon those devastated lands and say, well, you know they had it coming, all of those bastards had it coming including their goddamned children. Fuck them.

We became a nation that tortures people and disappears people and detains people, including our own citizens, indefinitely without trial or recourse in abject repudiation of the very spirit of our nation’s own founding – and we are unashamed of that and unrepentant.

Nearly two decades on and we have a become a nation so filled with hate, so filled with rage, so fearful and so terrorized, that we are now deporting the very veterans who fought for America in the terrible days after 9-11.

2020 feels so much different that 2001: From unified to divided than ever.

joeo10.10centuries.org.

The Apocalyptic Red Western Skies Caused by Climate Change-Fueled Wildfires

(kottke.org)

These fires, along with the death, property damage, and poor health they’ve caused and will continue to cause, are just some of the debts coming due for decades of bad public policy, political inaction, and deliberate negligence by fossil fuel companies. The climate has changed and these are the consequences — the message in the sky is simply unmistakable.

Jason Kottke says it best on the Mars-like skies due to the fires on the west coast…

Karl Bode with a great piece on why the US will never going to fix their broken broadband sector until they recognize state and federal corruption is at the heart of the problem.

(www.techdirt.com)

While a kind gesture, the episode is fairly representative of our relationship to the digital divide and America's patchy, expensive broadband networks. As in, we've let telecom giants dictate state and federal policy for 30 years, resulting in geographic monopolies where the primary objective is maintaining the status quo (high prices, little competition, zero real accountability for market failure). Then, in the rare instance where the problem can hold our attention for more than thirty seconds, we throw a band aid on the byproduct of this corruption and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.

American broadband doesn't suck because America is big, or because we haven't thrown enough money at the problem (giants like AT&T have received countless billions in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors, usually in exchange for bupkis). American broadband sucks because giant monopolies literally write state and federal telecom law, and have completely corrupted the legislative process from the town level on up.

This is why we're likely going to talk about this a decade from now since I feel nothing is going to change even with a new administration until the US can face this hard on.

Google's proposed Web Bundles could threaten the Web as we know it

(www.ghacks.net)

Webmasters may use Web Bundles to randomize URLs, reuse URLs, and hiding dangerous URLs.

The core of the issue lies in the fact that content that is inside WebBundles may be different from content that is offered elsewhere. Sites could use random URLs for tracking and advertising scripts to make blocking harder or even impossible, and they could even go a step further by using the names of legitimate resources for advertising or invasive content.

Watch this space folks, this could be the stage where Google would kill what's left of the open web.

A federal appeals court has ruled the NSA phone metadata program was illegal & maybe unconstitutional to boot.

(politi.co)

Judge Marsha Berzon's opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the "bulk collection" of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The appeals court stopped just short of saying that the snooping was definitely unconstitutional, but rejected the Justice Department's arguments that collecting the metadata did not amount to a search under a 40-year-old legal precedent because customers voluntarily share such info with telephone providers.

Huge, and I guess Edward Snowden was right after all…

What Windows 95 Changed

(anildash.com)

And as a product, Windows 95 itself was fine. The user interface and design were certainly a leap forward over previous generations. There were decided user benefits in making it easier to configure computers, and it set the stage for later innovations where a normal person could plug in a mouse or keyboard into their computer and it would probably work. But the most lasting impact is how it changed the broader cultural perception of technology.

But after Windows 95 arrived, tech quickly became a standard part of people’s lives. The Internet became mainstream, homes got connected, and software became something everyone uses. Eventually, smartphones put a computer in everyone's pocket, not just in their homes, and software became "apps" — and became part of our lives.

Windows 95 turned 25 this week, and it's still one of the most important software releases in the modern era. Here's Anil Dash with a good retrospective.

Chromium's impact on root DNS traffic

(blog.apnic.net)

At this point, a new issue arises. Some networks (for example, ISPs) use products or services designed to intercept and capture traffic from mistyped domain names. This is sometimes known as “NXDomain hijacking.” Users on such networks might be shown the “did you mean” infobar on every single-term search. To work around this, Chromium needs to know if it can trust the network to provide non-intercepted DNS responses.

"in the 10+ years since the feature was added, we now find that half of the DNS root server traffic is very likely due to Chromium’s probes. That equates to about 60 billion queries to the root server system on a typical day."

Yikes, must-read.