Marco Arment, on Twitter:

Major new bugs introduced in iOS 13.2:

• background downloads often hang forever and never run

• apps get killed in the background so aggressively that iOS effectively doesn’t offer multitasking anymore

… continuing the iOS 13 pattern of breaking long-held basic functionality. I’m sure Apple has good excuses about why their software quality is so shitty again. I hear the same thing over and over from people inside: they aren’t given enough time to fix bugs.

Your software quality is broken, Apple. Deeply, systemically broken. Get your shit together.

This bug where apps are getting killed soon after they’re backgrounded is driving me nuts. Start a YouTube video in Safari, switch to another app, go back to Safari — and the video loads from scratch and starts from the beginning.

Follow @lamebook on instagram for more content!

Kari Paul, the Guardian:

Mark Zuckerberg touted Facebook as a champion of “free expression” in a wide-sweeping speech, offering a staunch defense of the social media giant following several rocky years characterized by allegations against the platform of censorship and bias.

Speaking at Georgetown University on Thursday, the Facebook CEO invoked Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr and Black Lives Matter as a means of positioning Facebook as a champion for freedom of speech.

Zuckerberg defended the company’s decision to allow misinformation in political advertising on the platform, despite high-profile pushback against the policy.

Jillian C. York, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writing for Vice:

But, to free expression advocates like me, Zuckerberg’s speech feels like empty words in the absence of any concrete changes to the company’s questionable policies on speech. Just this month, the company announced controversial exceptions to its fact-checking policies and prohibition on hate speech for politicians, effectively creating a separate and higher tier for those whose words have more power to harm than those of ordinary citizens. Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg — himself a former politician — stated that he didn’t believe it would be “acceptable to society at large to have a private company … become a self-appointed referee for everything that politicians say.”

In asserting a fresh stance on free expression, Zuckerberg might have, for instance, reconsidered Facebook’s long-criticized “authentic name policy” that puts users around the world at risk of harm, but which the company insists allows for greater civility, despite ample evidence to the contrary. He could have listened more closely to the women and non-binary users, as well as the artist communities of Facebook who have protested the company’s ban on “female nipples” as discriminatory and outdated (in his speech, he called pornography “harmful” but said nothing about nudity). Zuckerberg might have reconsidered the company’s ever-expanding use of AI to adjudicate hate speech, given its clearly negative impact on LGBTQ users. Or, when he was speaking pridefully about how the “Black Lives Matter” hashtag was first mentioned on Facebook, he might have also acknowledged his company’s role in silencing important speech related to the movement.

York’s piece is the article I was trying to write last night, but the right words didn’t appear in the right order. It’s a robust argument that the company does not support free speech to a meaningful degree, but it’s also not a well-moderated platform. Zuckerberg wants to be able to claim that Facebook is a champion of free speech when it’s convenient to them — for instance, when it’s making money by selling ads to liars — but doesn’t want to deal with the actual difficulties that a free-for-all platform enables — and it ends up being horrible at both.

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• Trump lawyer’s bank records examined • Witnesses questioned on work for Ukraine mayor • Feds probing efforts to oust U.S. ambassador

Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is the subject of a federal criminal investigation.

Southern District of New York (SDNY) prosecutors are reported by the Wall Street Journal to now be examining Rudy Giuliani's business dealings in Ukraine.

Investigators have examined Giuliani's bank records.

The areas of Giuliani's operations now under investigation include his personal finances, travel, meetings, and work for a city mayor in Ukraine, the WSJ reports citing people familiar with the probe.

Read more at the WSJ: Federal Prosecutors Scrutinize Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine Business Dealings, Finances

NEWS: Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are examining Rudy Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine, including his finances, meetings and work for a city mayor there. Investigators have also examined Giuliani’s bank records. w/@aviswanatha @rebeccadobrien https://t.co/01qKdTMsWW

— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) October 14, 2019

[WSJ, reporting by Aruna Viswanatha, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, and Rebecca Ballhaus, Oct. 14, 2019 6:32 pm ET, via] Read the rest

A family who were visiting South Carolina’s Fripp Island called authorities Sunday night when, during a peaceful stroll along the Atlantic ocean shore, they found a package containing 20 kilos of cocaine.

They carried the package up to their vacation home, then rendered it to the Beaufort County Sheriff's Office.

Beaufort County Sheriff’s Maj. Bob Bromage told media outlets the family, who is not named for obvious reasons, was walking along the beach when they saw something dark bobbing on the surface of the waves offshore.

From the Post And Courier:

They dragged the package out and took it to their vacation home in a golf cart before slicing it open and realizing it was filled with white powder, Bromage said.

Deputies who responded to the home recovered about $600,000 worth of the narcotics, a figure Bromage described as a “conservative estimate.”

Whether the matter ends up going to DEA or beyond, to an international enforcement agency -- depends on what is learned about the origin of the cocaine.

No word on how it got to the South Carolina beach, but similar events have happened -- drugs washing up on beaches -- after big storms, as recently as a bundle of cocaine on Florida's Cocoa Beach in September, after Hurricane Dorian.

There's video here of the South Carolina story.

More at the AP.

Corinthian Colleges, Inc. was yet another for-profit university that screwed over hundreds of thousands of people with pyramid schemes that promised a higher education at the end of some labyrinthine maze. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2015, and the U.S. government ruled that any students with outstanding debts should have those debts cancelled.

That was before Betsy DeVos became the U.S. Secretary of Education.

DeVos, the wife of pyramid scheme pioneer Dick DeVos and brother of famed mercenary Blackwater founder Erik Prince, was unsurprisingly unforgiving of the students who were conned by Corinthian. She stonewalled more than 100,000 loan forgiveness applications and continued pursuing debt payments from screwed-over students who couldn't pay them back. In 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim finally told her to knock it off (legally).

Spoiler alert: she didn't listen.

So they landed back in court earlier this week on Monday, October 7, 2019. Judge Kim was (understandably) quite irate at having her court order violated sixteen thousand times by Devos's department. While the issue is still not completely resolved, the judge did threaten the possibility of tossing someone behind bars. From Bloomberg:

"I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions," U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim told lawyers for the Education Department at a hearing Monday in San Francisco. "I'm not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability."

[…]

"At best it is gross negligence, at worst it’s an intentional flouting of my order."

I'm not holding my breath for DeVos to actually spend any time in jail or prison, of course. But sometimes it's nice to dream.

(Image via Flickr)