Malaysian authorities seized 1,069 bitcoin mining rigs, laid them out in a parking lot at police headquarters, and used a steamroller to crush them, as part of a joint operation between law enforcement in the city of Miri and electric utility Sarawak Energy. CNBC reports: Assistant Commissioner of Police Hakemal Hawari told CNBC the crackdown came after miners allegedly stole $2 million worth of electricity siphoned from Sarawak Energy power lines. A video of the event posted last week by local Sarawak news outlet Dayak Daily has since gone viral on social media.

Acting on a tip, authorities on the island of Borneo confiscated the rigs in six separate raids between February and April. In total, police destroyed about $1.26 million of mining equipment. Police opted to crush the mining gear rather than sell it, in accordance with a court order. Other countries, like China, have taken a different route, reportedly auctioning off seized rigs. Hawari said that electricity theft by bitcoin miners led to three houses burning down in the city. The Miri police chief told CNBC that there are no other active mining operations underway currently. The report notes that crypto mining is not illegal in Malaysia, although "there are stringent laws around power use."

"The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates that Malaysia accounts for 3.44% of all the world's bitcoin miners, placing it in the top ten mining destinations on the planet."

This week Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer addressed the question of whether he'd return to cryptocurrency.

"My answer is a wholehearted 'no'," he confirmed, before launching into a scathing Tweet storm. "To avoid repeating myself I figure it might be worthwhile briefly explaining why hereâ¦" "After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity. Despite claims of 'decentralization', the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace.

"The cryptocurrency industry leverages a network of shady business connections, bought influencers and pay-for-play media outlets to perpetuate a cult-like 'get rich quick' funnel designed to extract new money from the financially desperate and naive. Financial exploitation undoubtedly existed before cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency is almost purpose built to make the funnel of profiteering more efficient for those at the top and less safeguarded for the vulnerable. Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person...

"I applaud those with the energy to continue asking the hard questions and applying the lens of rigorous skepticism all technology should be subject to. New technology can make the world a better place, but not when decoupled from its inherent politics or societal consequences."
Insider points out this wasn't Palmer's first time speaking out against crypto. "When Dogecoin soared to $2 billion in 2018, he wrote an op-ed on Vice, saying 'something is very wrong.'" Palmer and his co-founder, Billy Markus, created Dogecoin in 2013 as a "joke" currency as alternative cryptocurrencies flooded the market, promising to be the next big thing... It is now valued at $25.8 billion, as of time of writing.

Palmer and Markus are no longer part of Dogecoin. Both left in 2015 after deciding that the cryptocurrency was not aligned with their values. Palmer's co-creator, Markus, retweeted Palmer's Twitter thread and responded with a GIF.
In a later tweet, Markus added that "I think his points are generally valid aside from the pointless American politics piece."

Long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam shares "an interesting take on SQL and its issues from Jamie Brandon (who describes himself as an independent researcher who's built database engines, query planners, compilers, developer tools and interfaces).

It's title? "Against SQL." The relational model is great... But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is: Inexpressive, Incompressible, Non-porous. This isn't just a matter of some constant programmer overhead, like SQL queries taking 20% longer to write. The fact that these issues exist in our dominant model for accessing data has dramatic downstream effects for the entire industry:

- Complexity is a massive drag on quality and innovation in runtime and tooling
- The need for an application layer with hand-written coordination between database and client renders useless most of the best features of relational databases

The core message that I want people to take away is that there is potentially a huge amount of value to be unlocked by replacing SQL, and more generally in rethinking where and how we draw the lines between databases, query languages and programming languages...

I'd like to finish with this quote from Michael Stonebraker, one of the most prominent figures in the history of relational databases:

"My biggest complaint about System R is that the team never stopped to clean up SQL... All the annoying features of the language have endured to this day. SQL will be the COBOL of 2020..."
It's been interesting to follow the discussion on Twitter, where the post's author tweeted screenshots of actual SQL code to illustrate various shortcomings. But he also notes that "The SQL spec (part 2 = 1732) pages is more than twice the length of the Javascript 2021 spec (879 pages), almost matches the C++ 2020 spec (1853) pages and contains 411 occurrences of 'implementation-defined', occurrences which include type inference and error propagation."

His Twitter feed also includes a supportive retweet from Rust creator Graydon Hoare, and from a Tetrane developer who says "The Rust of SQL remains to be invented. I would like to see it come."

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones lost access to her 400,000 followers on Twitter last month — which she'd been using to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for downplaying the severity of the state's Covid-19 crisis. Then Jones announced she'd be running for Congress. "This also means, under Desantis' recently signed social media law, I get to fine Twitter $250K per day until my account is restored starting July 1."

Orlando Weekly reports: After a media frenzy, Jones deleted the post. She said she was attempting to point out Gov. Ron DeSantis's "hypocrisy" in writing a law that allowed political candidates to sue media companies that ban them, while still celebrating her Twitter suspension...

The bit became real when she filed to run as an Independent in Florida's 1st congressional district on June 25...

On her campaign website, she lists eight issues on her platform: protecting Florida's environmental systems, promoting government transparency, fighting for media accountability in disinformation, giving access to representatives, ensuring the district's veterans are taken care of, scrutinizing restrictive voting laws, funding science and research, and boosting support for all levels of education. Jones says there's still room for other issues on her platform, after she talks to more residents.
Jones' GoFundMe account ("DefendScience") now directs visitors to her official campaign site if they want to make campaign contributions. (And the GoFundMe page also notes that her campaign has been endorsed by 90-year-old Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study on the Vietnam War.)

But the last six weeks have been a wild ride for the data scientist:

• Last month Florida's Inspector General granted official whistleblower status to Jones.
• Six days later Twitter told Slashdot they'd "permanently suspended" Jones' account "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation."
• When Jones then created a new Twitter account for her campaign, "it was suspended within a day of its creation," Orlando Weekly reports.
• Jones created a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist". Yet since June 16th Instagram has also marked it as "unavailable," saying the link "may be broken, or the page may have been removed." (Since June 16th Instagram has not responded to Slashdot's request for an explanation.)
• Jones' GoFundMe page now refers visitors to an entirely different Instagram page.

Yesterday the official coronavirus coordinator for the White House reported that one in five of America's Covid-19 cases this week have come from Florida.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The White House escalated its fight against vaccine misinformation on Friday, with President Biden directly criticizing Facebook and other platforms for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread -- and consequently raising the ongoing death toll from the deadly pandemic. Asked for a message to platforms like Facebook, Biden replied, "They're killing people ... the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of the president's comments. The full exchange is embedded [here]. "We will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts," said a Facebook spokesperson. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine."

"The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives," the spokesperson continued. "Period."

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former EA and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Now, according to a recent datamine, the streaming giant may be forming a partnership with PlayStation to bring some of the biggest PlayStation brands to Netflix. IGN reports: Reported by VGC, dataminer Steve Moser appears to have uncovered PlayStation brand imagery and content in the Netflix app code. Moser shared the information via a tweet, including images of both the Ghost of Tsushima box art and some PS5 controllers. It's unclear exactly what this means for Netflix, but if there is a burgeoning partnership between Netflix and PlayStation, it could see Ghost of Tsushima content come to the streaming service in some form.

Moser suggests that the gaming section of Netflix currently has the codename 'Shark', and the placement of PlayStation IP within that suggests a collaborative approach. This wouldn't be the first major deal between Sony and Netflix, as the two companies agreed a deal earlier this year that means movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment will come to Netflix first after their theatrical run. [...] Given that many first-party PlayStation games are narrative-driven adventure games with a focus on cinematic stories, it makes sense to try and adopt games like Ghost of Tsushima and the last of us into movies and TV. Whilst PlayStation already has a games streaming service, PlayStation Now, it could also potentially be looking to push gaming content beyond the PlayStation console ecosystem, as Microsoft has done with Xbox Game Pass.

Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets, according to data released by the social media platform. In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year. Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia. India topped the list for information requests by governments in the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States for the first time, the report said.

The company said globally it received over 14,500 requests for information from July 1 to Dec. 31, and it produced some or all of the information in response to 30% of the requests. Such requests can include governments or other entities asking for the identities of people tweeting under pseudonyms. Twitter also received more than 38,500 legal demands to take down various content, down 9% from the first half of 2020, It complied with 29% of the demands. In the updated transparency report, Twitter said the number of impressions, or views of a tweet, that violated Twitter's rules accounted for less than 0.1% of the total global views in the second half of 2020, the first time the platform has released such data.

Microsoft is threatening to bring back its loveable / annoying Clippy character. A post adds: The software giant claims it will replace the paperclip emoji in Microsoft Office with Clippy if one of its tweets gets 20,000 likes. The tweet has already passed 19,500 likes, so Clippy could be about to return as a more innocent emoji. Born in Office 97, Clippy originally appeared as an assistant to offer help and tips for using Microsoft Office. You either loved or hated its Groucho eyebrows and persistence, and Microsoft eventually killed off Clippy in Office XP in 2001.

Twitter saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets, according to data released by the social media platform. From a report: In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year. The biannual report on Twitter's enforcement of policy rules and the information and removal requests it receives comes as social media companies including Facebook and Alphabet's YouTube face government scrutiny worldwide over the content allowed on their platforms. Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.

Say goodbye to Fleets, the row of fullscreen tweets at the top of the Twitter timeline that expire after 24 hours. The ephemeral tweet format is shutting down due to low usage after launching widely just eight months ago. From a report: Starting on August 3rd, users will instead just see active Spaces -- Twitter's live audio chat rooms -- at the top of their timelines. And the composer for traditional tweets will be updated with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text-formatting and GIF stickers over photos. Twitter's decision to axe Fleets is not just an admission that the feature didn't work but that the company still hasn't figured out how to get people tweeting more. For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly and not just consume other people's tweets. Fleets was its shot at using Stories, the popular social media format invented by Snapchat and further popularized by Instagram, to lower the pressure around tweeting. "We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product, said in a statement. "But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped."

In a new report released last week by The Stanford Internet Observatory, researchers analyzed a Jordanian disinformation network that pushed pro-monarchy and pro-military narratives on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. The campaign, which Facebook said in a separate report had links to the Jordanian military, also republished audio that had been secretly recorded on Clubhouse. Rest of World reports: Researchers said this is the first time they have identified a disinformation operation that relied on Clubhouse and TikTok, indicating that some states are taking advantage of newer platforms to spread propaganda. The Jordanian campaign cobbled together audio and screen recordings from Clubhouse into at least one video that was then shared on Facebook. According to the report, the audio was taken from a conversation in which Jordanians outside the country and other Arab voices discussed Prince Hamzah, the half-brother of Jordan's leader, King Abdullah II, who was taken into custody in early April, along with over a dozen other prominent figures. Jordanian authorities accused Hamzah of plotting to destabilize the government, and while the prince later publicly pledged his loyalty to the king, he currently remains on house arrest.

People who saw the video "didn't know that it was linked to individuals in the Jordanian military," said Shelby Grossman, a research scholar at the Internet Observatory and a co-author of the report. "But at the same time, you could imagine that if someone watched this video, they might think to themselves, "Oh, people are listening when you have these Clubhouse conversations.'" While Clubhouse has not been officially banned by the Jordanian government, the nonprofit Jordan Open Source Association found that the app can currently only be accessed using a VPN. Recording is against Clubhouse's Terms of Service, which prohibits users from capturing "any portion of a conversation without the expressed consent of all of the speakers involved."

The most extensive portion of the Jordanian disinformation network was on Facebook. The social network said in its report that it had removed over 100 Facebook and Instagram accounts, three groups, and 35 pages connected to the campaign, four of which had more than 80,000 followers. The effort also included around $26,000 worth of Facebook ads, but it's unclear exactly whom they may have targeted. A spokesperson for Facebook said that the company's Ad Library transparency tool doesn't currently include data on ads that were run previously in Jordan. The reports says that the researchers "also identified a handful of sock puppet accounts on TikTok that appeared to have ties to the same network." They didn't put a lot of effort into it though. "[T]he fake personalities didn't post original content, instead sharing videos from established accounts associated with the Jordanian military."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Twitter did something that I would not have thought possible: It stole reading from me," argues a former New Yorker writer (who was once nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). In a new piece in the Atlantic this week, they argue that Twitter "hacked itself so deep into my circuitry that it interrupted the very formation of my thoughts..."

"For the past few years, I've felt a strange restlessness as I read, and the desk in my bedroom is piled with wonderful books I gave up on long before the halfway mark. I had started to wonder if we were in a post-reading age, or if reading loses its pleasure as we age — but I knew that wasn't really true... I had suspected for a while that my reading problems had something to do with Twitter, and several times I'd tried leaving the phone in another room — but it was no good. Twitter didn't live in the phone. It lived in me."

Maybe it all comes back to brain plasticity — the idea that our brains adapt to whatever activities we're doing the most, in a kind of "accidental optimization." But what happens if we feed our minds a continual diet of quick bursts of information? It's what I call hit-and-run reading — skimming headlines, comments, comment headlines, tweets, pictures on Instagram... Doesn't it seem like that would have some kind of impact?

I once spoke to a trial attorney who complained about the ever-shortening attention spans of juries...

I'm still haunted by a free 37-minute documentary I saw two years ago on YouTube called Bookstores: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content. It followed Max Joseph, the former host of the TV show Catfish (and the documentary's director) as he spoke to several reading experts (including a speed reader) about how he could form better habits. But at one point he calculates he was spending 20 minutes a day just on news, plus another 30 minutes a day on social media — which adds up to 304 hours a year that could've been spent reading books. (Enough time to read 30 books a year.)

And along with that goes the mental exercise of retaining an entire books' worth of material in your brain at one time. (The documentary even suggests that in our busy world, reading becomes a kind of "forced meditation.") So does your focus come back if you just keep on reading books?

I've been forcing myself to stay offline for one day a week, to at least create the time for revisiting that stack of unfinished books by my bed. But is that enough? The Atlantic's author titled their piece, "You Really Need to Quit Twitter." After describing how it had somehow stolen the joy of reading, the piece closes by asking, "What is it stealing from you?"
What's been the experience of Slashdot readers? Share your own thoughts and stories in the comments.

Are we reading fewer books because of social media?

UPDATE: Branson's done it. "In a live broadcast during the vehicle's descent, Branson called the trip, 'an experience of a lifetime,'" reports NBC News: Branson's flight took off Sunday morning at around 10:30 a.m. ET, although the launch time was delayed by around 90 minutes because of overnight weather conditions at Spaceport America...

Branson was joined on his flight by pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci and three mission specialists, all of whom are employees of Virgin Galactic: Chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses, lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and government affairs vice president Sirisha Bandla.

Virgin Galactic is expected to conduct several additional test flights before beginning commercial operations with private customers next year. The company has said the suborbital joyrides will likely cost more than $250,000 each, but final pricing has not yet been announced...

"It's taken 17 years to get to this flight, and of course a lot of personal wealth has been poured into it, but it also shows that this takes tenacity," said Greg Autry, a space policy expert at Arizona State University.
Earlier in the day, Virgin Galactic's Twitter feed shared a nice clip of the astronauts arriving on the launch site.

CBS News streamed their own live coverage at the top of this web page (as well as in their CBSN app), but also reported on the other options: With typical Branson fanfare, Sunday's flight will be broadcast live across Virgin Galactic's social media platforms, featuring appearances by Stephen Colbert and retired Canadian space station astronaut Chris Hadfield, along with the performance of a new song by singer-songwriter Khalid. Even SpaceX founder Elon Musk plans to be watching. "Will see you there to wish you the best," he tweeted Saturday.
And what did Jeff Bezos have to say before Branson launched his history-making flight? "Wishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!"

Saturday CBS News offered this description of Branson's hopes: Richard Branson, the globe-trotting media mogul and founder of Virgin Galactic, plans to rocket into space Sunday morning on a flight that would make him the first owner of a private space company to launch aboard one of his own spacecraft. If all goes well, he will beat rival Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin, who is set to launch on July 20. Branson, two company pilots and three Virgin Galactic crewmates are launching from Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on what's expected to be at least an hour-long flight, reaching altitudes a little over 50 miles above the Earth.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

Popular benchmark site Geekbench has removed OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts due to allegations that the company designed Oxygen OS optimization tools in such a way that they could be viewed as cheating. Android Authority reports: Yesterday, AnandTech posted some information about "weird behavior" it spotted with the OnePlus 9 Pro. According to the team's research, Oxygen OS apparently limits the performance of some popular Android apps -- but none of those apps are benchmark suites. Geekbench, one of the more popular benchmarking sites, took these allegations seriously. After conducting its own investigation, Geekbench recently announced that it has removed all OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts. Geekbench, one of the more popular benchmarking sites, took these allegations seriously. After conducting its own investigation, Geekbench recently announced that it has removed all OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts. Geekbench called Oxygen OS's behavior a form of "benchmark manipulation." OnePlus has yet to issue a statement on the matter. In some of our own testing, we found that AnandTech's data is on the mark. We found that the OnePlus 9 series limits the performance of Google Chrome while older OnePlus phones do not. OnePlus issued a statement to Android Authority addressing the matter: "Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices' battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices' performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app's processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices' performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users."

This is reminiscent of when the company was caught pushing the OnePlus 5's performance capabilities when the OS detected a benchmark app. This resulted in artificially inflated scores that users would not see during real-world usage.

Former President Donald Trump, who has complained about censorship by social media giants, plans to announce class action lawsuits today against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Axios reported Wednesday. From the report: It's the latest escalation in Trump's yearslong battle with Twitter and Facebook over free speech and censorship. Trump is completely banned from Twitter and is banned from Facebook for another two years. Trump is scheduled to make an announcement at a press conference today at 11 am. Trump's legal effort is supported by the America First Policy Institute, a non-profit focused on perpetuating Trump's policies. The group's president and CEO and board chair, former Trump officials Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins, will accompany him during the announcement. Class action lawsuits would enable him to sue the two tech CEOs on behalf of a broader group of people that he argues have been censored by biased policies. To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them.

NASA announced on Monday that Ingenuity's ninth flight was a success, as it undertook a "high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain." The Hill reports: Ingenuity flew for 166.4 seconds at a pace of 5 meters per second over a terrain of high slopes -- all new records for the helicopter. In preparation for the flight, NASA said, "First, we believe Ingenuity is ready for the challenge, based on the resilience and robustness demonstrated in our flights so far. Second, this high-risk, high-reward attempt fits perfectly within the goals of our current operational demonstration phase. A successful flight would be a powerful demonstration of the capability that an aerial vehicle (and only an aerial vehicle) can bring to bear in the context of Mars exploration -- traveling quickly across otherwise untraversable terrain while scouting for interesting science targets."

Twitter no longer enjoys the liability protection against user-generated content in India, the government said in a court filing this week as tension escalates between the two over the South Asian nation's new IT rules. From a report: In a court filing on Monday, New Delhi said Twitter has lost its immunity in India after the American social network failed to comply with the new local IT rules, which were unveiled in February and went into effect in late May. Experts have said in recent weeks that the Indian court -- and not the Indian government -- holds the power to decide whether Twitter gets to keep its safe harbor protections in the world's second largest internet market.

Internet services enjoy what is broadly referred to as "safe harbor" protection that say that tech platforms won't be held liable for the things their users post or share online. If you insult someone on Twitter, for example, the company may be asked to take down your post (if the person you have insulted has approached the court and a takedown order has been issued) but it likely won't be held legally responsible for what you said or did. Without the protection, Twitter -- which according to mobile insight firm App Annie, has over 100 million users in India -- is on paper responsible for everything those users say on its platform.

Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet's Google have privately warned the Hong Kong government that they could stop offering their services in the city if authorities proceed with planned changes to data-protection laws that could make them liable for the malicious sharing of individuals' information online. From a report: A letter sent by an industry group that includes the internet firms said companies are concerned that the planned rules to address doxing could put their staff at risk of criminal investigations or prosecutions related to what the firms' users post online. Doxing refers to the practice of putting people's personal information online so they can be harassed by others. Hong Kong's Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau in May proposed amendments to the city's data-protection laws that it said were needed to combat doxing, a practice that was prevalent during 2019 protests in the city. The proposals call for punishments of up to 1 million Hong Kong dollars, the equivalent of about $128,800, and up to five years' imprisonment. "The only way to avoid these sanctions for technology companies would be to refrain from investing and offering the services in Hong Kong," said the previously unreported June 25 letter [PDF] from the Singapore-based Asia Internet Coalition, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.