Techlife News #541

“What surroundings, Mrs. Russell. We could be at Tsarskoye Selo,” exclaims Nathan Lane’s snooty Ward McAllister at his first glance of her opulent Fifth Avenue mansion on “The Gilded Age.” The social arbiter’s reference to an 18th century palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, is lost on the new-money Bertha, but the point was made: The HBO Max series has brought alive America’s post-Civil War renaissance and New York City’s cultural awakening in all its Beaux Arts glory. The term, which translates simply as “fine arts,” was anything but simple in the hands of the city’s wealthiest figures of the time — names like Astor, Carnegie, Frick, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and more. Thanks to this powerful ruling class and their architects, the period roughly spanning the 1870s to the 1930s produced some of…

Lawmakers followed through Wednesday on their threat to seek a criminal investigation of Amazon, asking the Justice Department to investigate whether the tech giant and senior executives obstructed Congress or violated other federal laws in testimony on its competition practices. The House Judiciary Committee escalated the bipartisan battle against the world’s biggest online retailer with a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland referring the case for a criminal inquiry. Amazon engaged in misleading conduct that appeared designed to “influence, obstruct or impede” the antitrust subcommittee’s 2019-20 investigation into the market dominance of Big Tech, the letter says. As an example, it cited testimony by a senior Amazon official maintaining that the company doesn’t use the data it collects on third-party merchants on its platform to compete with them, and doesn’t list its own…

U.S. authorities have broadly expanded the use of a smartphone app during the coronavirus pandemic to ensure immigrants released from detention will attend deportation hearings, a requirement that advocates say violates their privacy and makes them feel they’re not free. More than 125,000 people — many of them stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border — are now compelled to install the app known as SmartLink on their phones, up from around 5,000 less than three years ago. It allows officials to easily check on them by requiring the immigrants to send a selfie or make or receive a phone call when asked. Although the technology is less cumbersome than an ankle monitor, advocates say tethering immigrants to the app is unfair considering many have paid bond to get out of U.S. detention facilities…

Some social media users suggest that soaring fuel prices in the U.S. aren’t the result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, increased consumption or supply chain issues as daily life resumes after two years of stagnation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the flurry of Facebook and Twitter posts offer, without evidence, that a nefarious scheme is underway: President Joe Biden’s administration is intentionally driving up the price of gas to get more American drivers behind the wheel of an electric car. “$6.00 a gallon gas is how you get people to buy electric cars,” claims one popular meme, shared thousands of times across Facebook and Instagram since Tuesday. The newest internet fabrication shows that Americans’ obsession with conspiracy theories continues to play an outsize role in how they interpret political decision-making, even…

Ukraine’s attempt to get Russia kicked off the internet failed, but a diverse group of experts proposes a more narrow approach to sanctioning the Kremlin for invading its neighbor: Consider creating a mechanism that could technically blacklist individual Russian military and propaganda websites. In an open letter released Thursday, the activists say it’s time the internet community developed a way to confront humanitarian crises. The idea they float would mean gathering and publishing a list of sanctioned IP addresses and domain names in the form of data feeds that telecommunications providers and other network operators could subscribe to with the goal of rendering the targets unreachable. No new technology would be required and putting the system to work would require minimal effort because it would mirror existing ones already in use by…

Twitter has launched a privacy-protected version of its site to bypass surveillance and censorship after Russia restricted access to its service in the country. Russia has blocked access to Facebook and has limited Twitter in an attempt to try to restrict the flow of information about its war in Ukraine. Both companies have said they are working on restoring access to people inside Russia even as they restrict the country’s state media from their services. Known as an“onion”service, users can access this version of Twitter if they download the Tor browser, which allows people to access sites on what is also referred to as the“dark web.”Instead of .com, onion sites have a .onion suffix. Regular websites, including Twitter.com, are also accessible on Tor, but the .onion versions are made specifically for Tor…