The Portmanteau and Rhyme Generator accepts two input words and produces weird coinages that are often surprisingly funny. "Rhino" and "Hospital", for example, produces "Boarphanage" and "hotelephant" among other things.
I tried "chaste caravaggio" and got "Vermeerotic". "Moist carpet" yielded "flavorniture". "Lube barrel" turned into "bluebrication". Magic.
Samsung and Huawei wowed early-adopters (and their creditors) this week with cutting-edge designs for foldable tablet-phones. LG's genius answer is to just clip two screens together. The BBC:
It has created a second display as a detachable accessory. The end result may look less elegant thanks to the gap between the screens, but it is likely to cost less. The 6.2in (15.7cm) V50 ThinQ handset and its matching Dual Screen add-on both use OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology.
I have a friend who drives seven hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco instead of flying, just so he doesn't have to take off his shoes at the TSA checkpoint.
I would rather fly than drive, but I can understand where my friend is coming from. TSA security is the worst part of flying for me - the lines, the liquids in a clear plastic bag, the laptop and kindles out, etc.
Fortunately, I pay for TSA Pre, so I don't have to take my shoes off, but my belt buckle always set off the metal detector. Last year I bought a belt with a plastic buckle on Amazon, which allows me to walk through the metal detector without taking it off. I fly a lot, so it's worth it. As an added bonus, there are no holes in the belt. I can make the belt exactly as tight as I want it, rather than deciding between using a slightly too lose, or to tight belt hole.
So you think American authorities' taste for asset seizure is bad? Try the city fathers of Ahlen in Germany, who seized a pedigree pug and sold it on eBay.
Frank Merschhausm, spokesman for the city of Ahlen, told NPR in an email that the seizure of "the valuable pet" was "legally permissible," because of open claims by the city's treasury office.
However, he acknowledged that the method used to sell the animal might be open to criticism.
"Obtaining the proceeds of the sale through a private eBay account was a very questionable decision by the enforcement officer," Merschhaus said in the email translated from German. He added that the city is undertaking an internal investigation.
Today I learned you can buy dogs on eBay Germany.
How could so much misinformation be packed into so few words?
A “bombshell” psychological report in the latest National Enquirer reveals that “Princess Meghan” is a “ticking time bomb who could explode at any moment, according to royal insiders!” “She’s emotionally tortured!” screams the Enquirer cover, touting “The Secret Psych Report!" Setting aside for a moment that the former Meghan Markle is not a Princess but only a Duchess, one wonders: How did the Enquirer get their hands on such an incendiary top secret report? Simple. They commissioned it.
Might I suggest that it’s not a “secret report” if you’re the ones who order it, pay for it, and are the first to know its results? But it’s “royal insiders” who put the report together, according to the Enquirer’s opening sentence. Except the story makes it clear that no royal insider, let alone any member of the royal family, ever contributed to this report. It’s been compiled "at the Enquirer’s request” by the dubious Institute of BioAccoustic Biology in Ohio, which claims to diagnose patients by analyzing their voice.
That’s right: Duchess Meghan suffers from “huge emotional conflicts, trauma and confusion,” according to a report by analysts who have never met with or spoken to her. But they have listened to recordings of her talking, and they have a “computer algorithm to diagnose health issues and psychological characteristics.” It couldn’t be more high-tech if the Institute shot out laser beams and read her brainwaves – which is why we should all be wearing tin foil hats.
And yet the Enquirer claims to have found a “royal mole” who warns that the analysis indicates that Meghan could pursue an extra-marital affair with an older man, divorce Prince Harry, “smuggle her child out of Britain,” and “slip into drug dependency.” Well, that certainly seems like a balanced and rational scientific analysis. No wonder Donald Trump believed that the Enquirer should win a Pulitzer Prize.
Sister publication the Globe goes over the top with its apoplectic outrage over former President Obama’s “Wild Child Malia, 20, OUT OF CONTROL! . . . Underage & Caught Drinking.” The Harvard University student appears to have been caught on camera holding a bottle of wine, pouring a glass, and taking a genteel sip. Shock, horror!
“Her parents must be going crazy!” says a “renowned family relations expert.” It makes you wonder what the Globe would say if they ever caught Malia smoking crack or shooting heroin. The end of the world as we know it? Worse yet, Malia wasn’t drinking a bottle of Ripple from a brown paper bag, but was allegedly “boozing with $80 bottle of wine.” Well, why wouldn’t she?
More scrutiny for the Royals in the Globe, revealing the “Bizarre Secret Life of Meghan’s Mom!” Meghan’s mother Doria Ragland reportedly quit her job at a mental health clinic “to start her own counseling practice.” Bizarre! She quit teaching at a yoga studio to instead give private lessons “in clients’ homes.” Even more bizarre!
“When she’s not practicing yoga, Doria socializes with a small group of friends at a monthly book club and weekly dinners.” Get outta here! This woman is crazy. It’s clear there’s nothing in the least bit bizarre – or secret – about the life of Meghan Markle’s mother, until you realize the point of the story is discreetly hidden away in a photo caption tucked away to the side: “Doria is being supported financially by her daughter, insiders believe.” Yet there’s not a word suggesting that in the story itself. Now that’s bizarre.
People magazine devotes its cover to Duchess Meghan: “Ready to Be a Mom!” Yet its coverage of Meghan’s New York baby shower, her “cozy new home” with Harry, and their “romantic” overseas trips, amount to an uninspired clippings job with nothing new. Us magazine also goes Royal on its cover, offering a twofer: “Changing the Royal Rules! . . . Kate & Meghan Tell All.” As if.
Neither Kate nor Meghan say a word to Us mag, which simply regurgitates frothy gossip: the Duchess of Cambridge’s “cheesy pasta, TV time & date nights!” The Duchess of Sussex’s “A-list parties . . . & forbidden PDA with Harry!” So inspired. Of course, both glossy mags bring us more Oscars coverage than we could ever want: 11 pages of celebrities in Us mag, and a staggering 35 pages of stars in borrowed gowns and borrowed jewelry and borrowed smiles in People magazine.
Thankfully we have the crack investigative team at Us magazine to tell us that Heidi Klum wore it best (Kat Graham was robbed!), that director Ava DuVernay “can’t chew gum because I always bite the inside of my mouth,” that singer Betty Who carries a Nintendo Switch, a Lego Santa keyring and a medical mask with a “bear nose on it” in her AllSaints backpack, and that the stars are just like us: they walk around holding their Academy Awards, sip champagne, and smile for the cameras until it hurts – oh wait, that’s the Oscars coverage. No, the stars are just like us, really they are: they make phone calls, drink water, and shop at Target. “They walk and talk!” says Us, though clearly they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time if they’re Ava DuVernay.
The most bizarre offering from this week’s tabloids comes in the shape of an ad, however, for “Cat-tain Kirk” – a 4-inch figurine of a smirking green-eyed cat wearing Captain James T Kirk’s signature captain’s jersey, with its paw on a USS Enterprise communicator. It’s evidently a “hand-numbered limited edition” and an “officially licensed Star Trek collectible.”
“Set your phasers for fun,” says the ad, which appears in both the Globe and National Examiner. It’s as if Captain Kirk and a tabby cat’s molecules became accidentally intermingled in the Transporter, and like an unfortunate sequel to The Fly, their DNA was mixed. The only unrealistic part of this figurine is the fact that the cat isn’t wearing a girdle and appears to fit perfectly into its captain's jersey complete with Starfleet insignia.
Onwards and downwards . . .
The Yonhap News Agency reports that a 6,000 ton cargo ship under the command of a drunk Russian captain ran into the Gwangan Bridge in Busan today before "turning back to head in the opposite direction."
The lower part of the bridge sustained damage, but no injuries were reported.
The captain had a blood alcohol content of 0.086 percent. The legal limit is 0.03 percent.
"Authorities were also trying to determine why the ship was heading toward the bridge in the first place, when it should have been going in the opposite direction," reports the paper.
Image: YouTube
This is my favorite Baby Shark remix by default. I do like it a lot tho.
Pretty active driving song.
You’d think a song that is everywhere on the Internet — exploding on music charts, racking up billions of streams and downloads and YouTube plays, and even making it into the celebrity zeitgeist as it did this week on Cardi B’s Instagram — would be making its creator filthy rich. But “Baby Shark,” the viral children’s song that’s taken 2019 by storm, isn’t paying out piles of cash to anyone, because no single songwriter has been able to claim ownership over it.
The tune first started bubbling up among U.S. music fans on YouTube a few years ago, when Pinkfong, a South Korean educational band, posted it in 2015 and then remixed it with an absurdly catchy new beat and melody in 2016. But the core song in both versions — the second of which was quickly popularized by K-pop stars and an American social media challenge, and has now been adapted into more than 100 versions in 11 different languages, according to SmartStudy, the company behind Pinkfong — stems from an old singalong chant that seems to date back dozens of years to multiple sources.
A number of parties are currently embroiled in copyright disputes, in court or otherwise, over who first created the song. Johnny Only, a kids’ musician who uploaded the song to his YouTube channel in 2011, filed a complaint in a Seoul court saying that the latest version of the Pinkfong song is too close to his own. Pinkfong, though, says it got the song from an old nursery rhyme, not from any other artist. Then there’s the existence of “Kleiner Hai,” a German dance version of “Baby Shark” that became popular in 2007. “Kleiner Hai” composer Alexandra Müller, told Vulture that she has been singing that song for nearly two decades: “It’s a popular children’s song in Germany. We never found out where it came from. We checked the rights and it was public law, like a Christmas song, so there were no royalties,” she said. Recording rights for specific tracks are one thing, but as far as songwriting goes, the origin of “Baby Shark” seems more mysterious than that of “Happy Birthday.”
The "Phoenix Checklist" is a set of questions developed by the CIA to define and think about a problem, and how to develop a solution.
THE PROBLEM
Why is it necessary to solve the problem?
What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?
What is the unknown?
What is it you don’t yet understand?
What is the information you have?
What isn’t the problem?
Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?
Where are the boundaries of the problem?
Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?
Have you seen this problem before?
Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?
Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown
Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?
Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?
What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?
=====
THE PLAN
Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?
What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?
How much of the unknown can you determine?
Can you derive something useful from the information you have?
Have you used all the information?
Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem?
Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step?
What creative thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques?
Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see?
How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem?
What have others done?
Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result?
What should be done? How should it be done?
Where should it be done?
When should it be done?
Who should do it?
What do you need to do at this time?
Who will be responsible for what?
Can you use this problem to solve some other problem?
What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other?
What milestones can best mark your progress?
How will you know when you are successful?
From the book, Simply Brilliant: Powerful Techniques to Unlock Your Creativity and Spark New Ideas, by Bernhard Schroeder
Image: @333333333433333
A team of scientists went to Peru's lowland tropical forest to document invertebrates and saw an uncommon sight: a large tarantula, the size of a "dinner plate" with "massive fangs" catching and eating a baby opossum. Although they didn't capture on video the part where the tarantula caught the animal, they were the first to ever record a tarantula feasting on an opossum.
“When we do surveys at night, some of the spiders we see will have prey, typically other invertebrates like crickets and moths," said one of the scientists, Rudolf von May from the University of Michigan, according to National Geographic.
Via NG:
But one night [the survey revealed a sight none of the researchers had seen before: A tarantula the size of a dinner plate preying upon a small opossum.
"The opossum had already been grasped by the tarantula and was still struggling weakly at that point, but after about 30 seconds it stopped kicking,” co-author Michael Grundler, a Ph.D. student says in a statement.
"We were pretty ecstatic and shocked, and we couldn't really believe what we were seeing," Grundler says.
Later, Robert Voss, a mammologist at the American Museum of Natural History, confirmed they had captured the first documentation of a large mygalomorph spider—commonly known as a tarantula—hunting and eating an opossum.
Ken Gude, senior fellow at Center for American Progress in Washington DC, wrote a Twitter thread listing all the felonies Trump may have committed, based on Michael Cohen's congressional testimony yesterday.
Image: Federico Fazzini/Shutterstock
In 2019 a single bluefin tuna, weighing 279 kilograms, sold at auction in Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market for $3.1 million dollars. That comes out to $315/ounce, making for a very expensive piece of sashimi.
In this video from Abroad in Japan, we take a trip to the northern coast of Honshu, where Japan's prized tuna are caught.
Image: YouTube/Abroad in Japan
Facebook is reported to be developing a cryptocurrency pegged against “fiat currency” and to be shared on Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Executives have been talking with various exchanges, reports the New York Times, and WhatsApp competitors Telegram and Signal are said to be developing coins of their own that would function similarly.
Nathaniel Popper and Mike Isaac at the NYT report that Facebook, Telegram and Signal all plan to “roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders.”
Excerpt:
The most anticipated but secretive project is underway at Facebook. The company is working on a coin that users of WhatsApp, which Facebook owns, could send to friends and family instantly, said five people briefed on the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
The Facebook project is far enough along that the social networking giant has held conversations with cryptocurrency exchanges about selling the Facebook coin to consumers, said four people briefed on the negotiations.
Telegram, which has an estimated 300 million users worldwide, is also working on a digital coin. Signal, an encrypted messaging service that is popular among technologists and privacy advocates, has its own coin in the works. And so do the biggest messaging applications in Korea and Japan, Kakao and Line.
The messaging companies have a reach that dwarfs the backers of earlier cryptocurrencies. Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users.
READ MORE: Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed
SALEM, OREGON: State lawmakers today voted to make Oregon become the first U.S. state to have statewide limits on how much landlords can raise rents.
“There is no single solution — not one entity, or one person — that can solve Oregon’s housing crisis,” Governor Kate Brown (Democrat) said in a statement Tuesday.
“This new legislation is one of many actions Oregon needs to take to address our housing crisis. While it will provide some immediate relief, we need to focus on building supply in order to address Oregon’s housing challenges for the long term.”
The legislation would generally limit rent increases to 7 percent annually plus the change in the Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation. Some smaller and newer apartment buildings would be exempt.
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 35 to 25, largely along party lines. It had already been approved by the State Senate, and Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, plans to sign the bill, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
The median rent in Oregon has increased by over 14% statewide in recent years. Rents in Portland rose by 30 percent since 2011, adjusted for inflation.
IMAGE: Oregon House of Representatives
The Arch Mission Foundation is nano-etching 30,000,000 pages' worth of "archives of human history and civilization, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods" onto 25 DVD-sized, 40-micron-thick discs that will be deposited on the surface of the moon in 2019 by the Beresheet lander.
Included in the archive are about 200GB worth of content, including the text and XML of English Wikipedia, and tens of thousands of books of all kinds.
The Arch Mission Foundation is seeding copies of this archive around our planet and elsewhere in our solar system.
An accompanying white-paper gets into more detail.
The first four layers contain more than 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photographs, illustrations, and documents - etched as 150 to 200 dpi, at increasing levels of magnification, by optical nanolithography.
The first analog layer is the Front Cover and is visible to the naked eye. It contains 1500 pages of text and images, as well as holographic diffractive logos and text, and can be easily read with a 100X magnification optical microscope, or even a lower power magnifying glass.
The next three analog layers each contain 20,000 images of pages of text and photos at 1000X magnification, and require a slightly more powerful microscope to read. Each letter on these layers is the size of a bacillus bacterium.
Also in the analog layers of the Library is a specially designed “Primer” that teaches over a million concepts in pictures and corresponding words across major languages, as well as the content of the Wearable Rosetta disc, from the Long Now Foundation, which teaches the linguistics of thousands of languages.
The Lunar Library: Genesis [Arch Mission Foundation]
Android should let users deny and revoke permissions; Apple should let people encrypt Icloud backups, Twitter should end-to-end encrypt DMs; all these and more appear on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's #FixItAlready page, which calls out Big Tech's biggest players for their biggest security and privacy fumbles, and explains in clear terms why these changes are needed.
Science will open the floodgates on cheap, reliable high-volume production of THC and CBD. Yeast's rapid growth and ease of culturing will likely enable new stronger-better-faster variants of both.
UC Berkeley College of Chemistry:
UC Berkeley synthetic biologists have engineered brewer’s yeast to produce marijuana’s main ingredients—mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD—as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself.
Feeding only on sugar, the yeast are an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa.“For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast,” said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids.”
In Sweden, officers of the Swedish Security Service have arrested a person who worked “in a high-technology sector” and is believed by investigators to be a Russian agent.
"This individual is suspected of having been recruited as an agent by a Russian intelligence officer who was working under diplomatic cover in Sweden," Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service Head of Counter-Intelligence, said in a statement.
The Swedish tabloid Dagens Nyheter first reported the spy bust.
From NPR:
The individual, whose name has not been disclosed, was passing information to Russia since 2017, the Swedish Security Service says. He or she was working in a high-technology sector "on tasks known by our Service to be the type of intelligence sought after by foreign powers," the agency said.
Swedish police officers working with security service agents arrested the suspect on Tuesday evening, in the midst of a meeting in central Stockholm.
(...)
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov did not comment on the arrest and instead redirected an inquiry to Russia's Foreign Ministry. Its embassy in Sweden has not made public remarks.
Video footage that appears to show the suspect led out of a restaurant by 'Säpo' (Sakerhetspolisen) officers is circulating on Swedish media, as the BBC reported.
A witness quoted by Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet said several officers of the Swedish security police, known as Sapo, stormed the restaurant and surrounded a table where two people were sitting having a meal.
Swedish media said a second person was also detained in the operation but later released after claiming diplomatic immunity.
The Aftonbladet headline: “Another [Russian] Spy has been Arrested.”
Here is the Swedish government's news release about the arrest of the suspected Russian agent.
Individual arrested on suspicion of having carried out unlawful intelligence activities against Sweden2019-02-27
An individual has been arrested on suspicion of having carried out unlawful intelligence activities against Sweden. A criminal investigation into this matter, headed by a national security prosecutor, is being run by the Security Service.
The individual in question was arrested with the assistance of the Swedish Police in the evening of 26 February 2019 during a meeting in central Stockholm.
“This individual is suspected of having been recruited as an agent by a Russian intelligence officer who was working under diplomatic cover in Sweden," explains Daniel Stenling, Head of Counter-Intelligence at the Swedish Security Service.
The Service has been carrying out intensive intelligence and investigative work in this matter for a long time: it is suspected that the criminal activities have been going on since 2017.
The arrested individual was working in a high-technology sector in Sweden on tasks known by our Service to be the type of intelligence sought after by foreign powers.
“The threat to Sweden is greater than it has been for several years. Technological developments have made state actors’ efforts to gather intelligence in cyberspace more sophisticated. At the same time, the more traditional intelligence-gathering approach, using recruited agents to collect information, is still being used. This combination enables state actors to broaden and deepen their collection of classified information,” says Daniel Stenling.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Rolling Stone interview with Alex Morris paints a portrait of a politician and activist whose brilliance as a tactician is matched by an unwavering, uncompromising commitment to principle.
Whether talking about media strategy, theories of political change, the institutional structure of the two major US political parties, or the role demographics play in political consciousness, AOC reveals herself to be both entirely premeditated, working according to a well-developed internal playbook; and entirely motivated by a well-articulated principle.
Plenty of politicians are good orators and good horse-traders, but AOC is playing a much bigger game here, not merely angling for power-for-its-own-sake, or carrying water for corporate paymasters, or showing off her debate skills: she's trying to change the entire political system, having recognized both the urgency and potential of our current political moment. She is keenly aware of the limitations of a freshman Member of Congress, but she's also aware that those limitations are grossly overestimated by the political establishment, who imagines that the freshman arrival in Congress is constrained by a need to forge alliances with the establishment as the opening act of a lucrative life in the political-industrial complex. AOC doesn't want to make friends, she's come to Congress to kick ass and chew bubble-gum, and she's fresh out of etc etc.
If you doubt it for a moment, just compare her performance at yesterday's Michael Cohen hearing with those of her compatriots on both sides of the aisle -- while others merely politically grandstanded, AOC got new and devastating facts into the record, while still producing material perfectly tailored for sharing and repeating. She's so, so good at this.
WATCH: Complete exchange between @RepAOC @AOC and Michael Cohen. pic.twitter.com/dBpwzeEYRY
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 27, 2019
How much of what you’re talking about is trying to move the Overton window [the range of ideas accepted in public discourse] so that Democrats can compete with the way Republicans have moved it?
A huge part of my agenda is to move the Overton window, because it’s a strategic position. I’m a first-term freshman in an institution that works by seniority. Procedurally, it is kind of like high school. You’re the new kid on the block. So, as a freshman, you have to look at the tools available to you, and in my first term, if we have the opportunity to frame the debate, then that is one of the ways to have the most power. If I’m here for four days, then the most powerful thing I can do is to create a national debate on marginal tax rates on the rich.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big [Alex Morris/Rolling Stone]
“YouTube is disabling all comments on videos featuring young children as it attempts to head off an organised ring of paedophiles who were using its site to trade clips of young girls in states of undress,” says the Guardian's Alex Hern.
In a YouTube blog post addressing the issue to creators, the company wrote: “We recognize that comments are a core part of the YouTube experience and how you connect with and grow your audience. At the same time, the important steps we’re sharing today are critical for keeping young people safe. Thank you for your understanding and feedback as we continue our work to protect the YouTube community.”
“The company also says it has launched a new machine learning system that it says will remove twice as many comments as the old one,” tweeted Alex Hern.
YouTube will turn off comments on all videos that contain young children, the company says, as well as a number of other enforcement actions designed to stave off an advertiser boycott sparked by the discovery of an organised paedophile ring operating in plain sight on the video sharing platform.
The company will disable all comments on videos featuring younger children, and will also disable comments on those videos of older children that have some risk of attracting predatory behaviour, YouTube says.
It has also prioritised the launch of an AI moderator that is “more sweeping in scope, and will detect and remove two times more individual comments” than its predecessor, in an attempt to identify and remove predatory comments before they can cause harm.
The new policies follow the discovery last week of a paedophile ring that used the platform to find and share clips of videos featuring young children in states of undress. The group, discovered by YouTuber Matt Watson, would post comments in videos of young girls doing exercises, dancing, or performing gymnastics, often adding details like the time stamps at which underwear was visible.
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was even co-opted by the group: after a viewer watched enough videos favoured by the ring’s members, the algorithm would automatically start to recommend other videos featuring young children.
This is a real thing that has been happening, while half the British media was focusing on a creepy doll. https://t.co/gexOqXY758
— alex hern (@alexhern) February 28, 2019
Oh! And in an ENTIRELY SEPARATE child protection issue to both the organised paedophile ring AND the weird doll, YouTube has also removed a number of channels that were attempting to harm children by splicing shock content in with innocuous children's cartoons.
— alex hern (@alexhern) February 28, 2019
Also all of this happened just one day after an entirely separate app was fined $6m for illegally collecting the personal data of young children https://t.co/viaE4JE7Ne
— alex hern (@alexhern) February 28, 2019
Yet another idiot calling the cops on a black person for doing normal person things. In this case, a white woman is on the phone reporting to the police that a black man's dog humped her dog at a dog park. You can hear the woman's friend saying about his dog, "That's inappropriate for the dog park." I double checked to see if this was a satire on racist people who call police on black people for made up non-crime reasons, but as far as I can tell, this is real.
The GOP-led U.S. Senate today confirmed ex-coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run Environmental Protection Agency, in a 52-47 vote mostly along party lines.
Wheeler has been serving as “acting” administrator of Trump's EPA since Scott Pruitt resigned over alleged ethics violations in July, 2018.
On the GOP side, only Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) opposed Wheeler, and voted against him. She described his policies as “not in the best interest of our environment and public health."
https://twitter.com/Zhirji28//1101180867278524416
Senate Republicans just overrode bipartisan opposition to confirm ex-coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to be Trump Administration's next EPA Administrator.
As with Wheeler's predecessor Scott Pruitt, it will be vital that Congress exercise oversight. House Democrats will be vigilant. https://t.co/U6ytctesl3
— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) February 28, 2019
Andrew Wheeler, former energy lobbyist, confirmed as nation’s top environmental official. w/@eilperin https://t.co/oP2J628U5n
— Brady Dennis (@brady_dennis) February 28, 2019
PHOTO: (EPA) Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler addresses staff at EPA headquarters in Washington, U.S., July 11, 2018. REUTERS/Ting Shen
"We'll send him back to Kenya, or wherever it is," GOP Rep Mark Meadows said about President Obama, while laughing hard. This is the second video to surface today where Meadows promotes the racist birther conspiracy theory. Uncovered by @TheDemCoalition. pic.twitter.com/USxMc8U98F
— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) February 28, 2019
North Carolina's Rep. Mark Meadows was aghast that Rep. Rashida Tlaib found his parading HUD official Lynne Patton, a black woman, before congress as prop, to be racist. He insisted he is not a racist.
There is plenty of video of displaying Meadows smugly spreading racist "birther" theories about President Obama.
TPM:
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) was very indignant Thursday when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) accused him of using HUD official Lynne Patton, a black woman, as a prop to counter Michael Cohen’s accusations of racism.
He retorted loudly, saying that her implication was racist and citing black people in his life.
Unfortunately for the self-righteous congressman, videos have surfaced since the fracas that show him espousing the thoroughly debunked “birther” theory about President Barack Obama.
Towards the end of the Michael Cohen's Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) was highly insulted when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) suggested he had committed a racist act by bringing in one of his black employees "as a prop."
“And it is insensitive..." Tlaib said, "the fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”
Meadows immediately reacted, insisting with high emotion that he was not a racist, and that somehow having nieces and nephews of color proved his point. He and Tlaib went back and forth in a heated exchange, with Meadows saying she called him a racist, and with Tlaib saying no, she only pointed out that he had committed a racist act. The scene was was pretty much smoothed over within about five minutes or so.
However, just hours later, videos of Meadows resurfaced that show that yes, sir, you ARE a racist.
The Washington Post put together the video above, where we can hear Meadows saying about President Barack Obama (while he was in office), "We son't have to worry about it. We'll send him back home to Kenya, or where it is. We'll send him back home." And, in another location on a different day, "2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is."
Here's Mark Meadows, who just sidetracked the entire House Oversight Committee to assure him he's not racist, saying that "2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is" pic.twitter.com/90L1xnWf6v
— Steve Morris (@stevemorris__) February 27, 2019
Back in 2016, a "reputation management" company called Profile Defenders was caught forging court orders in order to get complaints about its clients removed from the site Pissed Consumer. This was a monumentally stupid thing to do, as judges are consistently unamused with people who forge their signatures.
The latest reputation management shenanigans involve a lower-stakes legal forgery. Pissed Consumer has found that the notarized documents from people who'd complained about New York's Luxsport Motor Group (a used car dealership) asking to have their complaints removed were fraudulent. Though they were apparently notarized by a real notary public, Stephanie Chrysten Lynch, the people whose signatures were supposedly on these documents denied ever having signed them.
It's not clear who is behind the fraud, nor whether Lynch was duped by someone using fake ID to impersonate someone, whether her seal was forged, or whether she was in on the fraud. But the fraudulent letters were supposedly signed by people from across the USA and even overseas, and Lynch is located in the same state as Luxsport's head office.
After Pissed Consumer restored the fraudulently removed review, it got another notarized letter, supposedly signed by the original author, this one vouched for by a notary in Washington state.
And so we started digging and investigating further. We found out that:
* 4 notarized letters according to which we removed the reviews about Luxsport Motor Group were notarized by one and the same notary public from New York – Stephanie Chrysten Lynch coincidentally, Luxsport Motor Group is headquartered in New York
* interestingly, the posters whose letters were notarized by the same New York notary public, Stephanie Chrysten Lynch, posted their reviews not just from different parts of the US but from different continents
* when we checked correspondence we received from, allegedly, the authors of the above-mentioned 4 notarized letters – it turns out that it was their 2nd notarized letter that was accepted in 3 cases; we did not accept the initial notarized letters and wrote them about it, they did not respond and then some time later the second “good” notarized letter came in.
We confronted Luxsport Motor Group about them deceiving Pissed Consumer into removing content on the basis of fake notarized letters. We let them know that such unlawful and deceptive actions constitute fraud and abuse of process. Here are just some statements that we received in response:
* “… Pissed Consumer has wrongly claimed that reviews were improperly removed…”
* “… [the owner] feels [Pissed Consumer] is pursuing meritless claims…”
* “…Pissed Consumer is actively trying to damage LuxSport’s reputation and negatively affect its business by trying to facilitate disparaging comments about LuxSport..”, etc.
How NOT To Remove Reviews − a Story about Fake Notarized Letters [Pissed Consumer]
Pissed Consumer Exposes New York Luxury Car Dealer's Use Of Bogus Notarized Letters To Remove Critical Reviews [Tim Cushing/Techdirt]
Last November, the Pentagon's Inspector General presented Congress with a "little-noticed" report on whistleblowing in the US military, revealing that those who come forward with claims of misconduct including sexual harassment and safety problems face a "culture of retaliation" including black marks on their service records, demotion, and suspension of security clearance; the IG also reported that in nearly every case, the officers who retaliated against whistleblowers faced no consequences for their actions.
The report also finds that the vast majority of wrongdoers whose crimes were revealed by whistleblowers did not face consequences for their bad acts, even after these acts were confirmed by investigators.
The IG also found that the military had previously been warned about these deficits and had been given recommendations for reforming its practices, and had consistently ignored these recommendations, despite promises from top officers to act on them.
The story appears in Roll Call, parent company of the political dirty tricksters suspected of sabotaging the FCC's Net Neutrality process by stealing the identities of millions of Americans in order to submit millions of comments supporting the corporate objectives of the country's largest telcoms operators.
Ironically, the Pentagon IG is increasingly effective at processing a surging number of complaints of wrongdoing at the Defense Department — about sexual harassment, procurement fraud and other unethical behavior.
The office is also speedily processing more and more allegations of retaliation against those who blow the whistle. But it’s had little impact on the culture of retribution within the Defense Department.
The acting Pentagon inspector general, Glenn Fine, not only reports to Congress and the public the results of his office’s investigations on whistleblower reprisals and other matters, he also regularly talks to the military services, defense agencies, major commands and the services’ IGs to follow up once retaliation investigations are completed, said Dwrena Allen, a spokeswoman for Fine, in a statement.
Pentagon harbors culture of revenge against whistleblowers [John M. Donnelly/Roll Call]
Fortnite Battle Royale Season 8 is here!
Season 7 drew to a close with free Valentine's battle passes for everyone willing to brave holiday challenges. Season 8 lands with map changes, new weapons, and winter put in the vault.
There be pirates and cannon balls!
I haven't had a chance to check out Murder Island today, but after a short 11GB update I'll hop on the Battle Bus and see what madness Epic has achieved.
Seattle's immensely popular business tax was designed to do something about the city's epidemic of desperate homelessness, but then Amazon threw its muscle around to get the tax canceled, mostly by threatening not to occupy its new offices in Ranier Square, a 30-story building currently under construction that Amazon was to be sole tenant of, with 3,500-5,000 employees working out of the building.
Now, Ranier Square is advertising for new tenants to fill its 722,000 square feet, because Amazon has canceled its plans (though not the lease - the new tenants will sublease from Amazon, likely for 10-15 years). Unconfirmed reports have it that Amazon will instead expand its rentals in neighboring Bellevue.
Seattle has upcoming municipal elections and some city councillors are signalling that they'll campaign on reinstating the tax and raising money to help fix the city's housing crisis.
When Mayor Jenny Durkan and a council majority sought to compromise with business leaders in May by passing a smaller version of the tax, Amazon announced it would move ahead with Block 18, one of several new buildings going up in the Denny Triangle. But the company never recommitted to the Rainier Square space, even after an effort to nix the measure through a referendum, backed by Amazon and other local businesses, pressured the council into repealing the tax less than a month later.
The annual tax of $275 per employee on companies grossing at least $20 million per year would have raised about $47 million in 2019 for low-income housing and homeless services. Kshama Sawant, one of two council members who opposed the repeal, described Amazon’s Rainier Square announcement Wednesday as a “told you so” moment.
“This is a good reminder for us that backing down to the bullying of corporations never stops their bullying,” said Sawant, praising activists in New York City who protested tax breaks for Amazon, causing the company to pull out from its campus plans there. (Two Seattle council members, Teresa Mosqueda and Lisa Herbold, spoke at a New York event organized by Amazon opponents in January.)
“As the next step, people in Seattle should gather courage and renew our fight to tax big business for social housing,” Sawant said.
Amazon abandons plan to occupy huge downtown Seattle office building [Benjamin Romano and Mike Rosenberg/Seattle Times]
Amazon backs out of massive Seattle office tower as questions swirl about growth plans [Monica Nickelsburg/Geekwire]
Researchers from Dojo/Bullguard investigated the security model of the Ring smart doorbell -- made by Amazon -- and discovered that the video was sent "in the clear" (without encryption) meaning that people on the same network as the doorbell, or on the same network as one of its owners, can easily tap into its feeds.
Additionally, the researchers found that it would be easy to alter the feed coming from the doorbell (for example, you could insert a feed of an empty porch while you were breaking down the door).
The security risks arose because Ring's designers chose not to encrypt their Realtime Protocol (RTP) packets. This means that an attacker who joins a network that is carrying the video feed (for example, the wifi at a conference center or coffee shop that Ring owner is using to monitor the feed from their home) can view or hijack the video streams.
The latest version of the Ring app (version 3.4.7) corrects this error, but the release notes do not mention this fact, so some users may not have upgraded.
This report is part of a growing pattern of serious security problems with Ring's products, which is particularly troubling, given that they are intended as security measures themselves.
The main takeaway from this research is that security is only as strong as its weakest link. Encrypting the upstream RTP traffic will not make forgery any harder if the downstream traffic is not secure, and encrypting the downstream SIP transmission does not thwart stream interception. When dealing with such sensitive data like a doorbell, secure transmission is not a feature but a must, as the average user will not be aware of potential tampering.
One Ring to rule them all, and in darkness bind them [Dojo/Bullguard]
(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY)
The Tiny Type Museum is a limited-edition handmade box set of traditional printing tech, including hot metal and wooden type, custom-made linotype slugs, plate molds, phototypes, plates, Monotype matrixes, other stuff besides, and a book about six centuries of reprographic technology that fits nice and kentucky in a slot.
Glenn Fleishman:
I realize the museum’s price isn’t low, but the intent is for it to be comprehensive, authentic, and long-lasting. Sourcing and commissioning material, building a custom case designed to last centuries (and likely longer), and having the book printed in a historically accurate and archival method adds up quickly.
I wanted to do this right, have it be meaningful, and produce a treasure that will last the ages, and you’ll be proud to own, examine, and share.
London's estate agents were notorious profiteers of the property bubble, listing on the stock exchanges and rewarding investors with soaring share-prices that reflected the human misery of a city where life got harder and more expensive every day, where communities were shattered, and where subprime lending and other sleazy financial practices helped to destroy the global economy in 2007-8, triggering more than a decade of crisis from which we have yet to recover.
The princes of London's property-market hell were, undoubtably, Foxtons (previously), the most prominent and vicious and profiteering of all the estate-agents (I named the villain in my novel Pirate Cinema after them), and today, Foxtons announced that it would suffer a loss of £17.2 million in fiscal 2018, partly because it was forced to shutter six of its offices last year.
Foxtons blames the losses on a "prolonged downturn" in London's housing market, exacerbated by Brexit.
It's not just Foxtons, either: the Nationwide, a lender, confirms that housing prices are sinking.
London is one of the most leveraged housing markets in the world, with many "owners" holding virtually no stake in their homes, having relied on capital appreciation to offset mortgage interests and low- or no-deposit purchases. Even a small dip in housing prices could put many of these homes "under water," with their owners owing more to the bank than the notional value of the property that secures their loans, and this could trigger forced sales. The flood of new inventory on the market will further reduce property values by adding to the supply of available properties, lowering prices, triggering more forced sales and panic selling -- lather, rinse, repeat.
"Our performance in 2018 was impacted by a further deterioration in the sales market, with transaction levels falling for another year from their already low levels," said chief executive Nic Budden.
However, the company said that in the long term, London remained "a highly attractive property market".
Foxtons warns London housing market in 'prolonged downturn' [BBC]
(Image: SteveBaker, CC-BY)
What happens when a stoppable force hits an immovable object? The stoppable force stops. The Korea Herald reports:
The Korea Coast Guard (KCG) said the 5,998-ton Seagrand sailed into the side of the Gwangan Bridge at around 4:20 p.m. before turning back to head in the opposite direction. ... The KCG nabbed the vessel and questioned the crew aboard. It said the ship's Russian captain, whose identity is being withheld, had a blood alcohol content of 0.086 percent. The legal limit is 0.03 percent.
I feel there must be more to the story, as 0.08 isn't very drunk—it's the legal limit for driving in most U.S. states and surely the tare weight for Russian sailors.
You may recognize the bridge, in Busan, from Black Panther.
It's been 20 years since Napster burst on the scene, and after decades of lawsuits, draconian criminal penalties, even no-knock gunpoint search warrants, there remains no evidence that "copyright enforcement" has a measurable impact on copyright infringement -- and at the same time, there's persistent, credible evidence that infringement goes down when product offerings get better and prices get more reasonable.
The latest example comes from New Zealand, where a survey of 1,000 people found that copyright infringement is in freefall, and that the biggest predictor of whether someone pays for something is whether it is available at a good price and in a timely manner (AKA "Netflix is killing content piracy").
A couple important caveats: the study was paid for by telcoms company Vocus, and I can't find the survey's raw data or sampling methodology online.
But the headline findings are pretty compelling: 75% of respondents use free-to-air TV as their preferred video service, 58% pay for movie tickets, and 55% subscribe to Netflix or one of its competitors; while only 11% use illegal streams and only 10% download infringing torrents.
The findings replicate earlier research, and more importantly, they come at a critical juncture, when NZ is contemplating internet censorship orders inspired by the catastrophic Australian law that was recently rammed through Parliament.
NZ has been a hotbed of copyright activism, with the country experiencing an uprising a decade ago that killed a proposal to have households disconnected from the internet if a single member was accused (without proof) of copyright infringement -- and then the law was revived by an MP who threatened to hold up aid to earthquake-stricken Christchurch if the disconnection orders were not attached to the emergency bill as a rider.
Today, the EU is just weeks away from enacting the worst internet censorship law in the history of the western world, in the name of fighting infringement -- a rule that will reduce competition in both the online and media industries, leading to higher prices and more "market windowing" that delays releases of popular works. And since pricing and availability are the biggest drivers of copyright infringement, the EU is on a collision course with much higher levels of infringement, and drastically curtailed internet freedom.
Bridy pointed to a number of international, US, and EU studies that all show that users will quickly flock to above-board options when available. Especially given the potential privacy and security risks involved in downloading pirated content from dubious sources.
“This is especially true given that “pirate sites” are now commonly full of malware and other malicious content, making them risky for users,” Bridy said. “It seems like a no-brainer that when you lower barriers to legal content acquisition in the face of rising barriers to illegal content acquisition, users opt for legal content.”
Studies Keep Showing That the Best Way to Stop Piracy Is to Offer Cheaper, Better Alternatives [Karl Bode/Motherboard]
(via /.)
40+ years ago, extremists from the Chicago School of Economics destroyed antitrust law, pushing a bizarre theory that the antitrust laws on America's books existed solely to prevent "consumer harm" in the form of higher prices; decades later, we live in a world dominated by monopolists who use their power to crush or swallow competitors, suppress wages, reduce choice, increase inequality and distort policy outcomes by making lawmakers and regulators dependent on their lobbyists for funding and future employment.
The Federal Trade Commission recently solicited comments on how it could update the Consumer Welfare Standard for the 21st century -- a move that represents an odd alliance of left-wing, latter-day trustbusters, and right wing operatives who woke up one day to discover that being blacklisted by 5 companies would make them disappear from the public eye forever.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted an excellent and cogent set of comments to the FTC on the subject, and in a highly readable, plainspoken post, EFF activist Shahid Buttar and EFF lawyer Mitch Stoltz explain the substance and background of the comments (disclosure: I am a special consultant to EFF).
EFF makes two main points here: first, that even if you're going to limit your antitrust analysis to "consumer welfare," that the power of the Big Tech platforms to surveil users, influence their behavior and censor their speech should be factored into "consumer welfare," because all of these activities materially and measurably reduce the welfare of the users of these services.
Second, EFF argues that the blocks on interoperability harm consumer welfare: earlier internet eras were filled with startups that allowed users to grab the parts of existing services that they liked (think of Web 2.0 "mashups") without subjecting themselves to the authority and abuse of those services. This created a natural market mechanism for correcting abuses by incumbents: if your company behaved badly enough, then potential competitors could raise money to start rivals by arguing that your users were only using your service because there weren't better alternatives, and that they could raid those users by allowing them to import the useful parts of your service (messages from their friends, say, or content they'd produced and uploaded), while escaping your exploitation.
To improve interop, EFF points to the "essential facilities" doctrine, a longstanding feature of antitrust that allowed regulators to order that railroad companies couldn't block competitors from using the only bridge that led to a certain region, or that newspaper owners couldn't block advertising of products that competed with their other investments.
This is a great and sensible set of recommendations, grounded both in the history and current doctrine of antitrust law, and EFF's deep expertise on the nuts-and-bolts of how technology actually works and what it is capable of (Stoltz, the attorney on the brief, was trained as an engineer; and Buttar, the activist on the brief, was trained as an attorney -- it's interdisciplinary all the way down).
Applications of essential facilities doctrine might appear aggressive, but applying the doctrine need not impose the kinds of obligations that constrain common carriers. Indeed, common carrier restrictions on social networks would risk imposing harms on speech. In contrast, recognizing essential facilities claims by competitors hampered by an anticompetitive denial of access would promote a diversity of approaches to content moderation, and other platform conduct (such as predatory uses of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) that harms users. Essential facilities claims would also encourage the development of new social media platforms and expand competition.
We have argued that the FTC should consider harms to consumers beyond price manipulation, and the essential facilities doctrine, to inform and revive its enforcement of antitrust principles. We anticipate making similar arguments to the Department of Justice (DOJ), and before courts evaluating potential claims in the future. And we hope the new task force, through its work monitoring technology markets, helps focus federal regulators at both the FTC and DOJ on these opportunities.
Properly understood, and liberated from the constraints of an outmoded economic theory that defers to the abuses of corporate monopolies, antitrust laws can be a crucial tool to protect the Internet platform economy—and the billions of users who use it—from the dominance of companies wielding monopoly power.
Antitrust Enforcement Needs to Evolve for the 21st Century [Shahid Buttar and Mitch Stoltz/EFF Deeplinks
If you love to travel, you love reminiscing about the places you've been. Aside from the photos, you might turn maps into keepsakes, putting pins or stickers onto each country you've visited. World Travel Tracker Scratch Off Maps® take that pastime and ramp up the fun, making it easy to keep tabs on your adventures by literally scratching each country off your list.
Like all good ideas, this one is pretty simple. What you've got is essentially a 17" by 24" scratch-off ticket version of the entire world. Every country is covered in gold foil that rubs off to reveal a different color, highlighting your visit. Stateside road trippers can also keep a tally of their itinerary, with the US, Canada, and Australia broken down into different sections for their own states and provinces. There's also a gallery of scratch-off flags below the map - one for each of 210 countries.
The World Travel Tracker Scratch Off Map® is available in gift-ready packaging for $22.99, 48% off the MSRP.
Fox has been ordered to pay $179m to profit participants on the longrunning TV show Bones; the judgment includes $128m in punitive damages because the aribitrator that heard the case found that Fox had concealed the show's true earnings and its execs had lied under oath to keep the profit participants from getting their share of the take.
The arbitrator singled out Fox execs Dana Walden, Gary Newman and Peter Rice for "giving false testimony to conceal their wrongful acts."
The suit turned on Fox's "self-dealing," whereby one division would make a program and sell it to another division at well below market rates, then claim that the show hadn't earned very much money, thus denying payouts to those with a share of the profits: the show's stars, the author of the novels the show was adapted from, and the show's exec producer.
Fox has vowed to appeal.
Two of the Fox execs singled out by the arbitrator are set to move into executive roles at Disney after the Disney acquisition of Fox is complete. Disney CEO Bob Iger gave a statement in their defense.
Liguori headed Fox at the time the series debuted in 2005. In 2009, he wrote a memo that may have outlined Fox’s efforts to avoid self-dealing liability as Fox considered giving “Bones” a three-season renewal in 2009. Quotations from what is described as the “Legal Action Plan” memo are heavily redacted in the arbitration filing. Liguori left his post as chairman of Fox Broadcasting in 2009, amid a shakeup in the TV division.
Lichtman also held that Fox executives were deceptive in testifying about the process of determining a license fee for “Bones.”
“The testimony of both Mr. Newman and Ms. Walden regarding ‘marketplace information’ is not only troubling but extremely disconcerting,” the arbitrator states. “The more these individuals testified the more incredulous their testimony appeared.”
Fox Ordered to Pay $179 Million to ‘Bones’ Profit Participants [Gene Maddaus/Variety]
After a raid in Miami, police Sgt. Manuel Regueiro approached and punched an 18-year-old cuffed suspect in the face. The victim warned the officers they were being filmed by the home security system. So officer Alex Gonzalez stole the evidence. But he had in fact taken the system's battery, and now both officers are being charged with crimes.
Regueiro for misdemeanor battery ... Gonzalez with tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony, and misdemeanor petty theft.
“Shameful we have to take these actions,” the department’s director, Juan Perez, said in a Tuesday tweet. “However, any officer violating the law will face the consequences, including arrest and prosecution.”
Consider in silence how ignorant of modern technology you'd have to be to think that a modern surveillance camera's battery was a tape.
A man who took radioactive medication in his final days was cremated in 2017, a mistake that released potentially dangerous Lutetium 177 into the environment.
This alarming case, reported in a new research letter this week, illustrates the collateral risks potentially posed by on average 18.6 million nuclear medicine procedures involving radiopharmaceuticals performed in the US every year.
While rules regulate how these drugs are administered to living patients, the picture can become less clear when those patients die, thanks to a patchwork of different laws and standards in each state – not to mention situations like the 69-year-old man, whose radioactive status simply slipped through the cracks.
"Radiopharmaceuticals present a unique and often overlooked postmortem safety challenge," researchers from the Mayo Clinic explain in a case note.
IMAGE: 3000 Kifer Road, a site of layoffs reported by Apple to the State of California, believed to involve Apple's self-driving car division. Google Street View via SF Chronicle.
Apple confirmed today that it is laying off about 190 people from its self-driving car division. Most of the people who are losing their jobs in Santa Clara/Sunnyvale are engineers, and they'll be departing in April.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
The layoffs were disclosed, along with new details, in a letter this month to the California Employment Development Department. CNBC reported last month that layoffs were occurring in the self-driving car division, known as Project Titan. Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, confirmed that the letter to the state referenced the same layoffs.
Most of the affected employees are engineers, including 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers. The layoffs will take effect April 16, according to the filing.
In China, technology firms are working with the government to push voice and facial recognition to help pigs, many of which have been dying from a swine disease that's sweeping the country.
African swine fever has spread quickly through China in recent weeks, affecting the world’s top pork producer and the reliability of supply for other nations.
Today, the government announced plans to divide its hog industry into five zones in an attempt to halt the swine fever's spread.
More on facial and voice recognition technology in the China swine story, from Sui-Lee Wee and Elsie Chen in the New York Times:
Chinese companies are pushing facial and voice recognition and other advanced technologies as ways to protect the country’s pigs. In this Year of the Pig, many Chinese hogs are dying from a deadly swine disease, threatening the country’s supply of pork, a staple of Chinese dinner tables.
So China’s ebullient technology sector is applying the same techniques it has used to transform Chinese life — and, more darkly, that the Chinese government increasingly uses to spy on its own people — to make sure its pigs are in the pink of health.
“If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick,” said Jackson He, chief executive officer of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a “future pig farm” with facial and voice recognition technologies.
China’s biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and JD.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs’ faces. Alibaba also uses voice-recognition software to monitor their coughs.
Many in China are quick to embrace high-tech solutions to just about any problem. A digital revolution has transformed China into a place where nearly anything — financial services, spicy takeout, manicures and dog grooming, to name a few — can be summoned with a smartphone. Facial recognition has been deployed in public bathrooms to dispense toilet paper, in train stations to apprehend criminals and in housing complexes to open doors.
China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces [nytimes.com]
[IMAGE: A system made by Yingzi Techology, a small Chinese company, scanning a barn to recognize pig faces. PHOTO: Yingzi Technology]
Photo: Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump in happier times, via the congressman's Twitter.
The Florida Bar is investigating Republican congressman Matt Gaetz one day after he tweeted a threat at Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen.
Cohen is testifying before Congress today.
Separately, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) says the tweet by Gaetz (R-FL) should be referred to the Justice Department, so prosecutors may examine whether the notorious Trump supporter's tweet was foul play or witness tampering.
On Tuesday night, just hours before Cohen's public testimony before the House Oversight Committee taking place today, Gaetz tweeted at Cohen, "Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot..."
Gaetz later deleted the tweet and apologized.
Asked on Tuesday if the Cohen tweet amounted to witness tampering, Gaetz told television news reporters -- he really said this -- it was “not witness tampering, but witness testing.”
The Florida Bar Association is investigating Rep. Matt Gaetz for his Michael Cohen tweet, and one potential result could be that he loses his license to practice law in the state.
The Florida Bar on Wednesday said they would send Gaetz a letter outlining the allegation against him. Gaetz will have 15 days to respond.
The Daily Beast first reported the investigation.
"It seems that the Florida Bar, by its rules, is required to investigate even the most frivolous of complaints," said Jillian Lane Wyant, a spokeswoman for Gaetz, when asked for a response to the investigation.
Witness tampering. So frivolous.
Roger Stone: I have never met #MattGaetz in my life.
pic.twitter.com/11diE0XQJP
— Chilal (@cwyyell) February 26, 2019
“WHILE FACEBOOK’s scale might as well be infinite, the actual universe of people arguing about vaccinations is limited and knowable,” writes Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic in a piece that examines data about Facebook Pages and related Facebook Posts on the topic of vaccines.
Using the web-monitoring tool CrowdTangle, I analyzed the most popular posts since 2016 that contain the word vaccine. I found that a relatively small network of pages creates most of the anti-vaccine content that is widely shared. At the same time, a small network of “pro-science” pages also experiences viral success countering the anti-vax posts.
While there is no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year.
The distribution is heavy on the top, particularly for the anti-vax position. Just seven anti-vax pages generated nearly 20 percent of the top 10,000 vaccination posts in this time period: Natural News, Dr. Tenpenny on Vaccines and Current Events, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, March Against Monsanto, J. B. Handley, Erin at Health Nut News, and Revolution for Choice.
“The crucial factor is the huge audience that just a few social-media platforms have gathered and made targetable through regular posts as well as advertisements,” Alexis writes, and you're going to want to read the whole piece.
The point of it all?
It's actually way easier than we think for platforms to stamp out this kind of abuse.
Anti-vaccine posts coordinated in this manner by these kinds of shady entities is misinformation. It may be political or military-origin disinformation, if recent reports that Russia pushes anti-vaxx stuff online are true.
The Small, Small World of Facebook’s Anti-vaxxers [www.theatlantic.com]
IMAGE: Francis R Malasig/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
The Federal Trade Commission today fined Musical.ly, now known as TikTok, $5.7 million dollars for violating children’s privacy laws.
The FTC press release says this means the Commission has obtained the “largest monetary settlement in a COPPA case.”
The FTC also notes there were reports of adults trying to contact children in Musical.ly Until October 2016, there was a feature that users view others within a 50-mile radius.
“The operators of Musical.ly—now known as TikTok—knew many children were using the app but they still failed to seek parental consent before collecting names, email addresses, and other personal information from users under the age of 13,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons, in a statement. “This record penalty should be a reminder to all online services and websites that target children: We take enforcement of COPPA very seriously, and we will not tolerate companies that flagrantly ignore the law.”
From Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:
In an app update being released today, all users will need to verify their age, and the under 13-year-olds will then be directed to a separate, more restricted in-app experience that protects their personal information and prevents them from publishing videos to TikTok .
In a bit of bad timing for the popular video app, the ruling comes on the same day that TikTok began promoting its new safety series designed to help keep its community informed of its privacy and safety tools.
The Federal Trade Commission had begun looking into TikTok back when it was known as Musical.ly, and the ruling itself is a settlement with Musical.ly.
The industry self-regulatory group Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) had last spring referred Musical.ly to the FTC for violating U.S. children’s privacy law by collecting personal information for users under the age of 13 without parental consent. (The complaint, filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the Commission, is here.)
Musical.ly, technically, no longer exists. It was acquired by Chinese firm ByteDance in 2017. The app was then shut down mid-2018 while its user base was merged into TikTok.
But its regulatory issues followed it to its new home.
According to the U.S. children’s privacy law COPPA, operators of apps and websites aimed at young users under the age of 13 can’t collect personal data like email addresses, IP addresses, geolocation information or other identifiers without parental consent.
But the Musical.ly app required users to provide an email address, phone number, username, first and last name, a short biography and a profile picture, the FTC claims. The also app allowed users to interact with others by commenting on their videos and sending direct messages. In addition, user accounts were public by default, which meant that a child’s profile bio, username, picture and videos could be seen by other users, the FTC explained today in its press release.
Insanely popular with the youngs, TikTok is slammed for COPPA violations by FTC.
(It goes largely unmentioned when folks talk about TikTok that the Chinese government has unfettered access to user data because it is stored and processed there.) https://t.co/5NePmdeE9q pic.twitter.com/7hHl4tHHna
— David Carroll
(@profcarroll) February 27, 2019
I've written about melamine foam (sold as Magic Erasers) before. They're great for quickly removing mars, scuffs, and stains from almost any surface. I recommend buying 100 at a time.
Latest use case: Some old stickers on my laptop that I wanted to remove. After peeling them off, the sticky, tough, adhesive remained on the laptop. Magic eraser knockoff to the rescue! It took about 90 seconds of gentle rubbing with a damp magic eraser to remove all traces.
Before:
After:
Watch the video below to see different ways to use this wonder material.
