soyagi

Do you sometimes get frustrated at how slow your computer's operating system can be? Now is your chance to prove that you could do a better job!

Behold the nerdiest game ever, in which YOU are the operating system! As such, you have to manage the computer's processes, memory and input/output events, and try not to get rebooted by an impatient user. Good luck!

Do you sometimes get frustrated at how slow your computer's operating system can be? Now is your chance to prove that you could do a better job!

Behold the nerdiest game ever, in which YOU are the operating system! As such, you have to manage the computer's processes, memory and input/output events, and try not to get rebooted by an impatient user. Good luck!

Archived version: https://archive.ph/3vfmc

How much ink does an all-in-one printer need in order to fax a document? Or to scan one to your computer? The obvious answer is "none." But if you own certain printers from companies like HP and Canon, you won't be able to use core features unless the device has ink—even if those features have nothing to do with ink.

Unfortunately, all-in-one printers arbitrarily demanding ink to perform non-printing functions isn't a new frustration. And that's despite some companies having printers that can scan without ink. Clearly, scanning or faxing without requiring an ink cartridge would improve users' experience—and they've illustrated that through class-action lawsuits. But this hasn't stopped printer makers from fighting to keep the nettlesome practice.

No ink, no scan

Since mid-2022, HP has been fighting a class-action lawsuit alleging that certain all-in-one printer models won't scan or fax without ink and that HP doesn't properly disclose this to shoppers. On January 13, 2023, the complaint was dismissed but allowed to be amended (you can view the amended complaint here: [PDF]), and on August 10, a Northern District of California judge dismissed HP's motion to dismiss the amended complaint [PDF].

HP Envy 6455e and HP Deskjet 2655 purchasers Gary Freund and Wayne McMath filed the complaint, which states that HP printers are designed to enter an error state when low or out of ink, preventing usage until the installment of a new ink cartridge. The plaintiffs are also peeved that HP marketing and advertising doesn't clearly disclose this, the complaint says. The complaint also notes that an HP support agent has said that HP printers are "designed in such a way that with the empty cartridge or without the cartridge the printer will not function."

"HP’s All-in-One Printers do not work as advertised. Ink is not a necessary component to scan or to fax a document," the complaint reads.

It adds:

Tying the scan or fax capabilities of the All-In-One Printers to ink contained in the devices offers no benefit and only serves to disadvantage and harm consumers financially. However, tying the scan or fax capabilities of the All-In-One Printers to ink contained in the devices does, however [sic], serve to benefit HP.

Anyone who's owned an inkjet printer knows how expensive ink can be. That suggests a reason to push people to buy ink through tactics like blocking core features if no ink is present and reportedly selling printers below cost. Ink-buying programs have also become cash cows. HP in 2021, for example, said its Instant Ink subscription business was worth $500 million, per CRN. In its Q2 2023 financial report, HP named Instant Ink a key growth area.

The complaint against HP says:

Indeed, HP designs its All-in-One printer products so they will not work without ink. Yet, HP does not disclose this fact to consumers. … Even were it technically possible to scan a document without all ink cartridges present, HP does not disclose any 'workaround' to consumers in any of the product packaging nor in any of HP’s advertising and marketing materials regarding its multi-function devices.

The complaint seeks monetary damages as well as the end of HP's "misleading advertising and marketing campaign" and for HP to "engage in a corrective campaign to inform consumers of the misleading advertising."

Here are all the HP printer models listed in the complaint:

• HP Deskjet 2755e
• HP DeskJet 3755
• HP DeskJet 4155e
• HP ENVY 6055e
• HP ENVY 6075
• HP ENVY 6455
• HP ENVY Pro 6475
• HP OfficeJet 250 Mobile
• HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 Wide Format
• HP OfficeJet Pro 8025
• HP DeskJet 2622
• HP DeskJet 2655

HP declined to comment on this story.

Canon's doing it, too

HP isn't the only company demanding ink for scans and faxes. It's not even the only one that has faced litigation over it.

As noticed by The Verge, Canon back in March settled a class-action lawsuit [PDF] stating that Canon all-in-one printers can't scan or fax with low or empty ink cartridges and its "advertising claims are false, misleading, and reasonably likely to deceive the public."

The settlement terms weren't disclosed, and Canon didn't respond to Ars Technica's request for comment. But here are the models listed in that complaint:

• MAXIFY GX7020
• MAXIFY GX6020
• PIXMA TS3520
• PIXMA G3260
• PIXMA G7020
• PIXMA G2260
• PIXMA MX330
• PIXMA MX452
• PIXMA TS9520
• PIXMA TR8620
• PIXMA TS6420
• PIXMA TS6320
• PIXMA TR4520
• PIXMA MG3620
• PIXMA MG2522
• PIXMA TS3320
• PIXMA TR7020
• PIXMA TS9521C
• PIXMA TS8320
• PIXMA TR8520
• PIXMA TR7520
• "and any and all predecessor models"

Similarly to the HP situation, representatives on Canon's support forum allegedly confirmed that certain all-in-one printer models require "all ink tanks installed and they must all contain ink in order to use the functions of the printer" and that "there is no workaround for this."

However, the posts that are linked to in the complaint (here and here) as of November 22, 2022, have a comment from a moderator saying, "It's possible to scan with an empty ink tank or cartridge." The support page provides instructions for disabling the function that detects ink levels.

Canon didn't explain why its printers ever required ink to scan in the first place. But the company has at least agreed to instruct users on disabling the ink requirement, which is better than where HP is currently.

Semantics prioritized over customers

As of this writing, HP doesn't seem to be working toward enabling its printers to scan and fax without ink. When trying to get the complaint dismissed, HP claimed that support agents who said printers are designed to not scan without ink don't represent HP and were not referring to printer models owned by the complaint's plaintiffs.

The printer industry has long had an issue with customer trust. HP, for instance, has bricked third-party ink (and issued other problematic printer firmware updates), along with the company's controversial HP+ program and region-locked printers . HP has already paid settlements for abruptly bricking third-party ink via its Dynamic Security "feature."

The Verge noticed that HP at least changed its language for the Envy 6455e's Amazon product page to say that you can "print, scan, and copy from your phone—from whenever, wherever" to "print, scan, and copy from your phone—from anywhere."

Such semantic games feel more like HP seeking a loophole than trying to please customers.

Such corporation-first tactics may be why Epson thinks it's dunking on competitors with its own support page dedicated to this topic. It reads, "Since 2008, all Epson printers will scan even when there is little or no usable ink left in the cartridge."

But, as is often the case with printers, a sneaky little caveat could abruptly ruin your day. As the support page also states:

However, all of the genuine Epson cartridges must be installed in the printer, even if depleted of usable ink and the printer displays the replace cartridge message.

So you still need an Epson ink cartridge to scan. If you happened to have tossed your ink cartridge when it became useless, your all-in-one printer could be virtually useless, too. (Epson didn't respond to a request for comment.)

It's alarming that printer makers know customers feel swindled and confused—but won't eliminate the problematic design. Printer vendors have become too bold in expecting customers to accept wordplay, settlements, and confusing support responses. Class-action lawsuits may light a fire under these companies, but it shouldn't be up to disgruntled customers to complain to support agents, lawyers, and judges.

If printer companies can't deliver a reliable, easy experience, customers will have no choice but to consider alternatives.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/eSuy1

A few months ago, an engineer in a data center in Norway encountered some perplexing errors that caused a Windows server to suddenly reset its system clock to 55 days in the future. The engineer relied on the server to maintain a routing table that tracked cell phone numbers in real time as they moved from one carrier to the other. A jump of eight weeks had dire consequences because it caused numbers that had yet to be transferred to be listed as having already been moved and numbers that had already been transferred to be reported as pending.

“With these updated routing tables, a lot of people were unable to make calls, as we didn't have a correct state!” the engineer, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Simen, wrote in an email. “We would route incoming and outgoing calls to the wrong operators! This meant, e.g., children could not reach their parents and vice versa.”

A show-stopping issue

Simen had experienced a similar error last August when a machine running Windows Server 2019 reset its clock to January 2023 and then changed it back a short time later. Troubleshooting the cause of that mysterious reset was hampered because the engineers didn’t discover it until after event logs had been purged. The newer jump of 55 days, on a machine running Windows Server 2016, prompted him to once again search for a cause, and this time, he found it.

The culprit was a little-known feature in Windows known as Secure Time Seeding. Microsoft introduced the time-keeping feature in 2016 as a way to ensure that system clocks were accurate. Windows systems with clocks set to the wrong time can cause disastrous errors when they can’t properly parse timestamps in digital certificates or they execute jobs too early, too late, or out of the prescribed order. Secure Time Seeding, Microsoft said, was a hedge against failures in the battery-powered onboard devices designed to keep accurate time even when the machine is powered down.

“You may ask—why doesn’t the device ask the nearest time server for the current time over the network?” Microsoft engineers wrote. “Since the device is not in a state to communicate securely over the network, it cannot obtain time securely over the network as well, unless you choose to ignore network security or at least punch some holes into it by making exceptions.”

To avoid making security exceptions, Secure Time Seeding sets the time based on data inside an SSL handshake the machine makes with remote servers. These handshakes occur whenever two devices connect using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, the mechanism that provides encrypted HTTPS sessions (it is also known as Transport Layer Security). Because Secure Time Seeding (abbreviated as STS for the rest of this article) used SSL certificates Windows already stored locally, it could ensure that the machine was securely connected to the remote server. The mechanism, Microsoft engineers wrote, “helped us to break the cyclical dependency between client system time and security keys, including SSL certificates.”

Simen wasn’t the only person encountering wild and spontaneous fluctuations in Windows system clocks used in mission-critical environments. Sometime last year, a separate engineer named Ken began seeing similar time drifts. They were limited to two or three servers and occurred every few months. Sometimes, the clock times jumped by a matter of weeks. Other times, the times changed to as late as the year 2159.

“It has exponentially grown to be more and more servers that are affected by this,” Ken wrote in an email. “In total, we have around 20 servers (VMs) that have experienced this, out of 5,000. So it's not a huge amount, but it is considerable, especially considering the damage this does. It usually happens to database servers. When a database server jumps in time, it wreaks havoc, and the backup won’t run, either, as long as the server has such a huge offset in time. For our customers, this is crucial.”

Simen and Ken, who both asked to be identified only by their first names because they weren’t authorized by their employers to speak on the record, soon found that engineers and administrators had been reporting the same time resets since 2016.

In 2017, for instance, a Reddit user in a sysadmin forum reported that some Windows 10 machines the user administered for a university were reporting inaccurate times, in some cases by as many as 31 hours in the past. The Reddit user eventually discovered that the time changes were correlated to a Windows registry key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\SecureTimeLimits. Additional investigation showed that the time changes were also linked to errors that reported valid SSL certificates used by the university website were invalid when some people tried to access it. The admin reached the following conclusion:

TLDR: Windows 10 has a feature called Secure Time which is on by default. It correlates time stamp metadata from SSL packets and matches them against time from the DCs. It processes these various times by means of black magic and sets the system clock accordingly. This feature has the potential to flip out and set the system time to a random time in the past. The flip out MIGHT be caused by issues with SSL traffic.

Other examples of people reporting the same behavior—for example, here and here—date back to 2016, shortly after the rollout of STS. More recent reports of harmful STS-induced time changes are here, here, and here.

“We've run into a show-stopping issue where time on a bunch of production systems jumped forward 17 hours,” one Reddit user wrote. “If you've been in the game more than a week, you know the havoc this can cause.”

STS primer

To determine the current time, STS pulls a set of metadata contained in the SSL handshake. Specifically, the data is:

• ServerUnixTime, a date and time representation showing the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970
• Cryptographically signed data obtained from the remote server’s SSL certificate showing whether it has been revoked under a mechanism knowns as the Online Certificate Status Protocol.

Microsoft engineers said they used the ServerUnixTime data “assuming it is somewhat accurate” but went on to acknowledge in the same sentence that it “can also be incorrect.” To prevent STS from resetting system clocks based on data provided by a single out-of-sync remote server, STS makes randomly interspersed SSL connections to multiple servers to arrive at a reliable range for the current time. The mechanism then merges the ServerUnixTime with the OCSP validity period to produce the smallest possible time range and assigns it a confidence score. When the score reaches a sufficiently high threshold, Windows classifies the data as an STSHC, short for Secure Time Seed of High Confidence. The STSHC is then used to monitor system clocks for “gross errors” and correct them.

Despite the checks and balances built into STS to ensure it provides accurate time estimates, the time jumps indicate the feature sometimes makes wild guesses that are off by days, weeks, months, or even years.

“At this point, we are not completely sure why secure time seeding is doing this,” Ken wrote in an email. “Being so seemingly random, it’s difficult to [understand]. Microsoft hasn't really been helpful in trying to track this, either. I've sent over logs and information, but they haven't really followed this up. They seem more interested in closing the case.”

The logs Ken sent looked like the ones shown in the two screenshots below. They captured the system events that occurred immediately before and after the STS changed the times. The selected line in the first image shows the bounds of what STS calculates as the correct time based on data from SSL handshakes and the heuristics used to corroborate it.

The “Projected Secure Time” entry immediately above the selected line shows that Windows estimates the current date to be October 20, 2023, more than four months later than the time shown in the system clock. STS then changes the system clock to match the incorrectly projected secure time, as shown in the “Target system time.”

The second image shows a similar scenario in which STS changes the date from June 10, 2023, to July 5, 2023.

Simen, meanwhile, said he has also reported the time resets to multiple groups at Microsoft. When reporting the problems on Microsoft’s feedback hub in May, he said, he received no company response. He then reported it through the Microsoft Security Response Center in June. The submission was closed as a “non-MSRC case" with no elaboration.

The engineer then tapped a third party specializing in Microsoft cloud security to act as an intermediary. The intermediary relayed a response from Microsoft recommending STS be turned off when the server receives reliable timekeeping through the Network Time Protocol.

“Unfortunately, this recommendation isn't publicly available, and it is still far from enough to stop the wrongly designed feature to keep wreaking havoc around the world,” Simen wrote in an email.

Warning: STS will “bite you in the butt”

Simen said he believes the STS design is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of the TLS specification. Microsoft’s description of STS acknowledges that some SSL implementations don’t put the current system time of the server in the ServerUnixTime field at all. Instead, these implementations—most notably the widely used OpenSSL code library starting in 2014—populate the field with random values. Microsoft’s description goes on to say, “We have observed that most servers provide a fairly accurate value in this field and the rest provide random values.”

“The false assumption is that most SSL implementations return the server time,” Simen said. “This was probably true in a Microsoft-only ecosystem back when they implemented it, but at that time [when STS was introduced], OpenSSL was already sending random data instead.”

While official Microsoft talking points play down the unreliability of STS, Ryan Ries, whose LinkedIn profile indicates he is a senior Windows escalation engineer at Microsoft, wasn’t as reticent when discussing STS on social media last year.

“Hey people,” he wrote. “If you manage Active Directory domain controllers, I want to give you some UNOFFICIAL advice that is solely my personal opinion: Disable Secure Time Seeding for w32time on your DCs.” When someone asked him why, Ries responded, “Because it's just a matter of time—wink—before it bites you in the butt.”

A Microsoft representative emailed the following statement several hours after this post went live on Ars:

Secure Time Seeding feature is a heuristic-based method of time keeping that also helps correct system time in case of certain software/firmware/hardware timekeeping failures. The feature has been enabled by default in all default Windows configurations and has been shown to function as intended in default configurations.

Time distribution is unique to each deployment and customers often configure their machines to their particular needs. Given the heuristic nature of Secure Time Seeding and the variety of possible deployments used by our customers, we have provided the ability to disable this feature if it does not suit their needs. Our understanding is that there are likely unique, proprietary, complex factors in deployments where customers are experiencing Secure Time Seeding issues and these customers do not benefit from this feature as it is currently implemented. In these isolated cases, the only course of action we can recommend is to disable this feature in their deployments.

We agree that the overall direction of technology with the adaption of TLS v1.3 and other developments in this area could make Secure Time Seeding decreasingly effective over time, but we are not aware of any bugs arising from their use. This technology direction also makes heuristic calculation of time using SSL/TLS far less attractive when compared to deterministic, secure time synchronization.

We continue to investigate how to best secure time synchronization on the Internet and welcome customer input on how to best meet their future needs.

The mystery continues

As Simen noted earlier, it's not clear precisely what causes STS to make the errors sometimes but not always.

"This is what really strikes me as odd," Simen wrote. Microsoft "know the field they look at might contain random data, so my guess is that their implementation breaks down when this is skewed so that most/all implementations they communicate with contains random data rather than just some."

HD Moore, CTO and co-founder at runZero, speculated that the cause is some sort of logic bug in Microsoft code. On Signal, he wrote:

If OpenSSL has been setting random unix times in TLS responses for a long period of time, but this bug is showing up infrequently, then it's likely harder to trigger than just forcing a bunch of outbound TLS connections to a server with bogus timestamp replies—if it was that easy, it would happen far more frequently.

Either the STS logic requires different root certificates as the signer, or some variety in the hostnames/IPs, or only triggers on certain flavors of random timestamp (like values dividable by 1024 or something).

It smells like a logic bug that is triggered infrequently by fully random timestamps (32-bit) and likely just some subset of values and with some other conditions (like multiple requests in some period of time to multiple certs, etc.).

There are other means to ensure server clocks remain accurate, Moore said:

[Clock-setting] seems like something better handled through NTP, or at least through a trusted TLS connection to a known endpoint operated by the vendor (time.windows.com and friends). The super lazy (but arguably safer) way to get a trusted timestamp is something like: ❯ curl -s -vvv https://www.microsoft.com/4040 2>&1 | grep -i '< date:'< date: Wed, 16 Aug 2023 04:37:31 GMT.

Second-ish precision, and if you lock the HTTP client to a short list of trusted CA roots for the target domain, pretty hard to mess with. I used something similar forever ago on Linux systems where the clock would go wrong often—set the hwclock to the HTTP response timestamp of a known good server, then run NTP, which would succeed since the clock was close enough to be within the boundary check—otherwise NTP would fail since the clock was too far off.

As the creator and lead developer of the Metasploit exploit framework, a penetration tester, and a chief security officer, Moore has a deep background in security. He speculated that it might be possible for malicious actors to exploit STS to breach Windows systems that don't have STS turned off. One possible exploit would work with an attack technique known as Server Side Request Forgery.

Microsoft’s repeated refusal to engage with customers experiencing these problems means that for the foreseeable future, Windows will by default continue to automatically reset system clocks based on values that remote third parties include in SSL handshakes. Further, it means that it will be incumbent on individual admins to manually turn off STS when it causes problems.

That, in turn, is likely to keep fueling criticism that the feature as it has existed for the past seven years does more harm than good.

STS “is more like malware than an actual feature,” Simen wrote. “I’m amazed that the developers didn’t see it, that QA didn’t see it, and that they even wrote about it publicly without anyone raising a red flag. And that nobody at Microsoft has acted when being made aware of it.”

Archived version: https://archive.ph/JsTV6

The US broadband industry is united in opposition to a requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. Five lobby groups representing cable companies, fiber and DSL providers, and mobile operators have repeatedly urged the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement before new broadband labeling rules take effect.

The trade associations petitioned the FCC in January to change the rules and renewed their call last week in a filing and in a meeting with FCC officials. The requirement that ISPs list all their monthly fees "would add unnecessary complexity and burdens to the label for consumers and providers and could result in some providers having to create many labels for any given plan," the groups said in the filing on Friday.

The trade groups said the FCC should instead "require providers to include an explanatory statement that such fees may apply and that they vary by jurisdiction, similar to the Commission's treatment of government-imposed taxes," or require "the display of the maximum level of government-imposed fees that might be passed through, so that consumers would not experience bill shock with respect to such fees."

The filing was submitted by NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, which represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable companies. The NCTA's ex parte filing described a meeting with FCC officials that also included wireless industry trade group CTIA and USTelecom, which represents telcos including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Frontier, and Windstream.

The meeting was attended by two other groups representing smaller ISPs: NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association and ACA Connects-America's Communications Association. The trade groups met on Wednesday with the legal advisors to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and Commissioner Brendan Carr, according to the filing.

Comcast accused of “trying to create loopholes”

Comcast submitted its own filing urging the FCC to scrap the rules in June. The calls to weaken the FCC's truth-in-billing rules angered consumer advocates, as we wrote at the time. "The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes. This request would allow the big ISPs to continue hiding the true cost of service and frustrating customers with poor service," Joshua Stager, policy director at media advocacy group Free Press, told Ars.

Congress required the FCC to implement broadband labels with exact prices for Internet service plans in a 2021 law, but gave the FCC some leeway in how to structure the rules. The FCC adopted specific label rules in November 2022.

The labels must be displayed to consumers at the point of sale and include monthly price, additional charges, speeds, data caps, additional charges for data, and other information. The FCC rules aren't in force yet because they are subject to a federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review under the US Paperwork Reduction Act.

ISPs object to a portion of the FCC order that says, "providers must list all recurring monthly fees" including "all charges that providers impose at their discretion, i.e., charges not mandated by a government." The five trade groups complain that this would require ISPs "to display the pass-through of fees imposed by federal, state, or local government agencies on the consumer broadband label."

But just because an ISP says a fee is related to a government charge doesn't mean that ISPs have to break them out separately. ISPs could instead include all costs in their advertised rates to give potential customers a clearer idea of how much they would have to pay each month.

"A provider that opts to combine all of its monthly discretionary fees with its base monthly price may do so and list that total price. In that case, the provider need not separately itemize those fees in the label," the FCC order said.

Non-mandatory fees

Discretionary charges "include those the provider collects to recoup from consumers its costs associated with government programs but where the government has not mandated such collection, e.g., USF [Universal Service Fund] contributions," according to the FCC. Comcast said the non-mandatory fees also include pass-through of state and local government fees.

The FCC order said the requirement to list "all charges that providers impose at their discretion" is meant to help broadband users "understand which charges are part of the provider's rate structure, and which derive from government assessments or programs." These fees must have "simple, accurate, [and] easy-to-understand name[s]," the FCC order said.

"Further, the requirement will allow consumers to more meaningfully compare providers' rates and service packages, and to make more informed decisions when purchasing broadband services. Providers must list fees such as monthly charges associated with regulatory programs and fees for the rental or leasing of modem and other network connection equipment," the FCC said.

Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars in June that the FCC "should reject the request to create loopholes which would obscure what fees providers decide to pass on versus those that are mandated by state law. It is an effort to pass blame to the state which properly belongs to the ISP."

Debate over record-keeping rule

ISPs also object to a record-keeping requirement designed to ensure that ISPs follow the rules when they provide labels through "alternate sales channels" such as retail stores or customer service phone calls. ISPs can meet the label requirement in alternate sales channels either by providing a hard copy of the label or by "directing the consumer to the specific web page on which the label appears."

ISPs that don't provide hard copies of the label to prospective customers in those sales channels must document each instance in which they direct a consumer to a label.

"Requiring that providers collect identifying information and document every customer interaction would be highly disruptive to consumers seeking information through alternative sales channels and would impose significant burdens on providers of all sizes," the trade groups told the FCC. The trade groups want the FCC to "clarify that a provider satisfies these rules by developing appropriate business practices to promote distribution of the label through alternative sales channels and retaining documentation of these practices for two years."

Latino advocacy group ALLvanza also objected to the data-collection rule on privacy grounds, saying, "Many Latinos are already hesitant and/or unwilling to provide identifying information to companies or the government due to privacy concerns, fear of discrimination, potential immigration status issues, mistrust of institutions, and cultural preferences for privacy."

ISPs could avoid the requirement to collect identifying information from consumers in retail stores by providing hard copies of the label. The FCC defended the compliance plan in a submission to the OMB last month as part of the Paperwork Reduction Act review, saying it needs detailed information to ensure ISPs follow the rules.

When ISPs choose not to provide hard copies of the labels in alternate sales channels, the FCC said it needs details on each customer interaction to "allow the Commission to investigate and enforce providers' obligation to make the label available to consumers at each point of sale."

The FCC also defended itself against industry accusations that the rule is too vague. "The Commission stated in the Broadband Label Order that '[p]roviders must document each instance when it directs a consumer to a label at an alternate sales channel and retain such documentation for two years.' We believe it is unambiguous that this would include the identity of each consumer," the FCC said.

Video description:
Roundabouts - the circular intersections seen all over Europe and elsewhere in the world - are said to be far safer than traffic lights. Research shows they reduce crashes, clear up congestion and save cities quite a bit of money. They have a heritage in the U.S., but America has a fraction of the roundabouts that far smaller countries like France, Spain and the United Kingdom have. But there are some states that are adopting them, and one small town in particular: Carmel, Indiana. The people of Carmel love their roundabouts and the mayor credits them with helping revitalize his city. So are they all they’re cracked up to be? And if so, why hasn’t the U.S. adopted them?

Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/08/10/prepare-your-firefox-desktop-extension-for-the-upcoming-android-release/

Archived version: https://archive.ph/x9dHq

On the flip side, this also means users have the option to have a cleaner, less cluttered interface.

Full text:

[AUGUST 8, 2023] A new viewer experience that better corresponds to your YouTube watch history preferences

One of the benefits of having YouTube watch history on is that it enables YouTube to provide video recommendations you may be interested in; however, we know some prefer to clear and turn off your YouTube watch history. Starting today, we’re changing how you see recommendations on YouTube, based on your Watch History settings:

Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead.

We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations. You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not.

Two weeks after workers at the company announced a union drive, Grindr management has issued a return-to-office policy that workers say is retaliatory.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/4K1Ob

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

Archived version: https://archive.ph/Uz7ql

The famous Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly is a modernist/art deco building. It started life as a menswear store and has the feel of that sort of traditional shop that is fast disappearing. But this bookshop, like many others, is enjoying a very modern sales boost from social media.

Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.

But while very much an online phenomenon, BookTok is having a material impact on the high street, with TikTok now pushing people to buy their books from bricks-and-mortar booksellers through a partnership with bookshop.org, which allows people to buy online and support independent bookshops at the same time.

Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer: “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books. It’s driven huge sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including titles such as The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and authors such as Colleen Hoover.

“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”

Caroline Hardman, a literary agent at the Hardman & Swainson agency, says: “It’s driving the appetite for romance and ‘romantasy’ in a really big way, so it’s having a strong effect on what publishers look for too.”

BookTok was established in 2020 but this year brings new developments to a community which has so far been an organic phenomenon. This month, the winners of the inaugural TikTok book awards will be unveiled.

Users of the platform voted on a shortlist announced in May, with contenders for BookTok Book of the Year including Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola, Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood, Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart and Maame by Jessica George.

There are also awards for BookTok influencers, independent bookshops, books to end a reading slump, and crucially, Best BookTok Revival, which has brought older novels to a new audience. The finalists in the revival category include One Day by David Nicholls, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

James Stafford, a general manager at TikTok UK, calls the shortlist “a true celebration of the variety of literature that resonates with the TikTok community”.

Book awards typically boost authors’ profiles and can lead to higher sales. As BookTok is already providing remarkable publicity, it will be interesting to see how these awards affect the shortlisted authors’ sales.

In April, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, also filed a trademark for a book publisher – 8th Note Press. The company has appointed Katherine Pelz, formerly from Penguin Random House, as acquisitions editor. Her specialist area is romance. Nothing is yet known about plans for 8th Note Press, although some self-published romance writers have said they have been approached about book deals.

According to the New York Times, the new publisher will focus on digital books until TikTok launches an online retail platform – something the company plans to do in the US later this year.

There is concern in the publishing industry that BookTok could become focused on books from ByteDance’s own publishing house. If the company can also sell the books direct to its users, that has repercussions for bookshops as well as publishers.

But could TikTok replicate the magic it has wrought in influencing book sales with its own products? Alice Harandon, who owns the St Ives Bookseller, isn’t sure. Her small but busy shop in the Cornish seaside resort regularly gets shoppers coming in to buy BookTok recommendations. The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a frequent request, as is A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

“When traditional publishers try to muscle in on the BookTok market, it never seems to work out quite the same way as an organic, viral recommendation,” she says. “It works best when a good book that has already been out in the world for a while – and is genuinely good – finds a natural following rather than trying to write books for the market. It starts to look very commercial, and will turn some people off.”

Rhea Kurien is editorial director at Orion Fiction, one of the biggest traditional publishers in the UK. She’s interested to see if TikTok can become more than a marketing tool for authors. “If the BookTok effect on consumer buying behaviour wears off, what will they be offering their authors that other publishers aren’t?

“What has been interesting for me is looking at the self-published authors who are doing incredibly well because of TikTok. They’ve established demand for their books and, as traditional publishers, we can then get them out to even more readers. This is especially the case for authors whose books are very big in the US but less so in the rest of the world. That’s where UK publishers can help. I’m also just not sure the TikTok generation is one that wants to be steered this much by publishers.”

The reaction of BookTok’s key market will be crucial to success. The most recent Publishers Association research says that BookTok is overwhelmingly a factor in Gen Z reading habits. In a poll of more than 2,000 16- to 25-year-olds, almost 59% said that BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.

The report says: “BookTok and book influencers significantly influence what choices this audience make about what they read, with 55% of respondents saying they turn to the platform for book recommendations.”

One in three use it to discover books they wouldn’t otherwise hear about. It encourages diversity, with one in three readers polled saying they discovered books by authors from different cultures, and almost 40% being introduced to new genres by the app.

Bluemoose Books, based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, is an independent publisher that first put out The Gallows Pole by Ben Myers, recently made into a BBC drama. Founder Kevin Duffy thinks that a new publisher entering the market is a positive step, but sounds a note of caution.

“My concern is that a bigger slice of the publishing pie will go to celebrities who already have huge social media profiles, and further reduce the opportunities of talented but under-represented writers to see their work published.”

BookTok has had a major effect on how the traditional publishing model works, and while Kurien acknowledges the fears of the creation of a small, elite group of celebrity TikTok authors, she thinks it’s a challenge the industry needs to rise to. “The disadvantage to TikTok’s influence is simply that it’s taking up so many slots on our bestseller lists, tables in bookshops and spaces in supermarkets,” she says.

“The rise of BookTok titles has meant less visibility for other titles, whether they’re longstanding authors or debuts. But I think it’s good for our industry to be shaken up at times, for us to reconsider what we think our readers want and to make way for these new trends.”

Judging by Waterstones Piccadilly, BookTok has created both online and real-life communities that warm the hearts of the booksellers. Waterstones says: “Girls are meeting up and having bookshop days out. They save up their money and come into the shop in gaggles, getting really excitable about what they want to buy. Their energy is amazing and their friendships are really strong, They’ve bonded over books and the things they love, and that’s awesome.”