Walmart Moves To Require Customers to Wear Masks At All of its Stores

The company said the policy will go into effect on Monday to allow time to inform stores and customers.

Walmart is now requiring customers to wear masks at all of its stores, as well as its Sam’s Club locations, making it the largest retailer to introduce a policy, that has seen as difficult to enforce without federal and state mandates.

Walmart has said the policy will go into effect Monday, allowing time for them to inform stores and customers. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based company said that currently about 65% its more than 5,000 stores and clubs are located in areas where there is already some form of government mandate on face coverings.

The retailer also said it will create the role of health ambassador at its Walmart stores and will station them near the entrance to remind customers without masks of its new requirements. These workers, who will be wearing black polo shirts, will receive special training to “help make the process as smooth as possible for customers.”

The moves come as new COVID-19 cases are spiking in many states, particularly Arizona, California, Florida and Texas. Retailers have been challenged with striking a balance between keeping shoppers safe while making them feel comfortable.

Last week, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, which represents Walmart, Best Buy and other major chains, publicized a letter it sent to state governors to mandate store customers to wear face coverings. It said the hodgepodge of rules around the country have created confusion for shoppers and that has led to conflict between customers and workers trying to enforce store rules.

Brave Browser Privacy Scandal Goes Right to the Heart of Brave

Part I

Part II

Tracking across the web is not something new. That’s one of the reasons why many users use Mozilla Firefox and Brave over Chrome. However, one of those browsers, Brave, is under scrutiny. Allegations from Decrypt are that they are changing affiliate URLs, which are normal URLs, to something that they can track. Gizmodo states that the changes that Brave has made to these affiliate URLs allows them to track 15 million users on the web.

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Brandon Eich, the Brave CEO said on Twitter that it was a mistake, that they fixed it, and that they were using an auto-complete feature, that the auto-complete feature should not add any code and that it should be opt-in. He is stating that it’s just part of business. Original reporting is intimating that Brave was doing it for a cut, at least 50% off of each trade that a user may make, in this case, it was sending affiliate links to cryptocurrency.

The verge says that there is nothing wrong with using affiliate links. The issue is that most URLs tell a user that they are using it. The reason for the wording in the original GIzmodo article is that Brave proports to be a private browser. By not telling their users, they are not being transparent, as the verge suggests, but, not everyone will accept the apology.

Brave recently made headlines when they were trying to make their own private video chatting software. Brave builds privacy-focused video chat right into its browser. It is using an open source video chatting software jitsi to try to compete with the likes of Google Meet and Zoom. They currently don’t have end-to-end encryption on their platform, but, they are working on it. Their reputation is built upon the idea that privacy matters. So, anything that might be atypical of that nature, could be criticized.

Kids’ Screen Time has Increased 500% During the Pandemic

by Lawrence Lease July 21, 2020

Surfshark Review

by Lawrence Lease July 18, 2020

LinkedIn, Reddit, others, caught reading user clipboard data with iOS 14 beta release

by Jacob Siegel July 6, 2020

In April and May, Brave added 1.5 million users, and they also have reported improvements with their Brave Ads programs, which takes Basic Attention Tokens as a means of a currency to provide web browsers with compensation for users who use ad-blocking software.

It would not be the first time that a company violated users trust. Avast was caught using a subsidiary which allowed them to see what links that users were clicking on. So, while they were allegedly protecting your machine, they were profiting off of it. They claim they were GDPR compliant, but, it would be safe to say that they shut down that program in a hurry after news about it broke. It’s almost a similar trend here.

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NASA Postpones Historic SpaceX Crew Dragon Launch

Bad weather halted the historic SpaceX rocket launch, which was set to be the first time a private company sent humans into orbit. While also being the first time in a decade that the U.S. launched astronauts into orbit from American soil.

Veteran NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley were prepared to launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A at 4:33 p.m. aboard the brand-new Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

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The planned backup dates for the mission known as Crew Dragon Demo-2 are Saturday at 3:22 p.m. EDT and Sunday at 3 p.m. EDT. The weather for both backup dates stands at 60% “go,” according to the Space Force’s latest forecast.

The former space shuttle astronauts went through the paces for their mission, including a traditional breakfast of steak and eggs, suit-up at the historic Operations and Checkout Building and a 20-minute ride to pad 39A in two Tesla SUVs.

Severe weather brought wind, rain and lightning to the Space Coast throughout the day Wednesday, leading to a tornado warning and a weather advisory hours before the planned launch.

Because the capsule has to intercept the International Space Station about 250 miles overhead, the capsule needed to launch at 4:33 p.m. Wednesday.

President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, at least half a dozen current and former astronauts and other VIPs were at the space center to witness the historic launch.

When the liftoff occurs, it will mark the beginning of a roughly 19-hour journey to the orbiting outpost, where astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner are waiting to help open Crew Dragon’s hatch. Once there, Behnken and Hurley will spend one to four months on board, depending on the demonstration mission’s needs.

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During their journey to the ISS, Vega said, the astronauts will have two opportunities to manually pilot Crew Dragon if schedules allow. One will be a “far-field” attempt from the space station, and the second will be much closer – about 720 feet from the ISS.

The manual flying will give Behnken and Hurley a chance to use the touchscreens and take over from the computers, giving them real-world experience outside the simulators they’ve used until this point.

“Doug is ready for anything all the time. He’s always prepared,” Behnken, an Air Force colonel, said last week of his co-pilot and longtime friend. “When you’re going to fly into space on a test mission, you couldn’t ask for a better person or a better type of individual to be there with you.”

Hurley, meanwhile, said Behnken has “every potential eventuality already thought about five times ahead of almost anybody else.”

“There’s no question I can ask him that he doesn’t already have the best answer to. It’s such an asset to have somebody like that on the crew with you,” the retired Marine Corps colonel said.

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Delta Forced to Pay Massive Fine

Delta Air Lines is being fined $50,000 by the Department of Transportation after it ordered three Muslim passengers off planes after they had been cleared to travel by the airline’s own security team.

The department claimed Delta violated anti-bias laws by removing the passengers in two separate incidents and ordered the airline to provide cultural-sensitivity training to the employees who were involved.

The first incident took place in July 2016 before a U.S.-bound flight from Paris. A passenger told a flight attendant that a couple, a man and a woman wearing a headscarf, was making them nervous. The flight attendant reported walking by and seeing the men write “Allah” several times while texting.

Delta security interviewed the couple outside the plane at the captain’s request. The couple, U.S. citizens from Cincinnati, “raised no red flags” and was cleared to fly but the captain refused to let them reboard. The flight left without them and they flew home the next day.

The second incident occurred prior to a flight from Amsterdam to New York. Passengers and flight attendants complained about a Muslim passenger who was cleared by Delta’s security office.

The captain returned to the gate, had the man and his bags removed from the plane and had the area near his seat searched.

The government did not explain how the size of the fine was determined but said that it “establishes a strong deterrent against future similar unlawful practices by Delta and other carriers.”

“Delta does not dispute that each of these two incidents could have been handled differently,” the government said.

The airline said it did not act in a discriminatory manner and its employees were reacting to the passengers’ behavior, not their identities.

The company also said it improved its procedures for investigating suspicious behavior to make it “more collaborative and objective” following the two incidents.

Gannett Takes A Stand, Rejects Buyout

NEW YORK — Gannett is a media company that owns USA Today along with several other media outlets. The company’s mission statement makes it clear that they value communities. Recently, they took a stand for their own business community when approached by Digital First Media. Digital First Media is known for its policy of cutting jobs and market-driven tactics. They refer to themselves as a leader in local, multi-platform news.

Clash of The Titans

Both media companies are hugely successful. Last year, Gannett made seven-hundred and thirty-eight million dollars in their second quarter. They own eight-hundred non-daily publications in addition to owning USA Today. They also own twenty-one television stations in the United States.

Digital First Media is in a different business from Gannett. They are a hedge fund which invests in newspapers and media companies. They have been severely criticized for their practices. A UNC study describes it this way:

“At the most extreme, their strategies have led to the closure of hundreds of local papers and diminished the important civic role of newspapers in providing reliable news and information that helps residents of a community make important decisions about governance and quality of life issues. “

Their second quarter profits in 2018 were almost one-hundred sixty million dollars. One example of the cost-cutting measures they use to maximize profit is the laying off of one-hundred and seven workers from a facility in Colorado Springs. After the editor at Daily Camera, a newspaper in Boulder, CO, published a piece critical of the company they fired him. The editor, David Krieger, had this to say about his firing:

“The grounds for firing me I would have understood in the traditional sense was the claim that I disparaged my employer. I certainly did that, although it was in defense of my immediate employer, the Camera, that I disparaged its private equity owners. But this is one of those cases where the very essence of what we are about comes into play. When do we serve our readers, and our obligation to tell them what’s going on? When do we stand up for telling them the truth? When do we quit covering for the unaccountable hedge fund we work for?”

A Game of Newsrooms

The clash between Gannet and Digital First Media has perhaps been inevitable. On January 15th, Digital First Media made the first move in what is sure to be a long struggle. They submitted a proposal to buy out Gannett for twelve dollars per share. Already owning seven point five percent of the company, they apparently desire more. Critics have accused them of reinvesting cash from local news stations into their under-performing assets.

Gannett’s board of directors soundly rejected Digital First Media’s attempt at a takeover. J. Jefferey Louis, chairman at Gannett, stated that:

“Our board of directors is confident that Gannett has significant value creation potential. Our vision and pursuit of our digital transformation, combined with our USA Today Network strategy, enables us to serve more directly and efficiently the persistent demand of our audiences and customers to engage with their communities.”

This clearly signaled Gannett’s intention to resist any attempts at being bought out.