Apocalypse Now

Baitullah Mehsud

in May 2014, a small group of young Taliban gunmen stormed a Kabul hotel and executed nine people in the restaurant

pressure plate IED

Only when Sweden stops being blind to its Nazi past will it be able to confront the threat posed by the rise of the far right today.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Katarina Wennstam

Woody Guthrie’s guitar slogan: “this machine kills fascists.”

Hellboy’s origin story

The Cramps

Jesus and Mary Chain

Missandei, too, was failed. As one of the only two central people of colour in the entire series, her exit – her fridging, frankly – at the hands of a white woman was nothing short of woeful. She deserved so much more.

And that's not all. In 'The Last of the Starks' alone, the writers stuck two fingers up at Brienne after using her to service Jaime's internal struggle regarding his twisted devotion to Cersei. Then there was Sansa Stark's conversation with The Hound about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Ramsay Bolton, Littlefinger, and Joffrey, and the way in her suffering was, in the words of actor Jessica Chastain, used as "a tool to make a character stronger".

Following Rhaegal's death at the hands of Euron, Dany abandoned all reason to charge at him head on, endangering both herself and her last remaining dragon. Rather than attack from behind at speed, showering the fleet and their men in flames, she acted on impulse. Reason abandoned her.

That also does Jaime a disservice, implying that his love cannot possibly be as great and all-encompassing as Cersei's because she is their mother, and he is merely their father. He remains pragmatic, Cersei is deranged.

there has been one constant throughout: when women experience loss, they lose their minds.

The writing staff on Game of Thrones has always been male-dominated, with only four episodes in the show’s history being credited to female writers. Season eight is written and directed entirely by men (only one woman, Michelle MacLaren, has ever directed Thrones), although there has been at least one woman in the writer’s room, Gursimran Sandhu, this time around.

I forgave the show for its cruel treatment of Sansa a season ago, when it became clear that her story was one of survival rather than victimhood. But Thrones rarely passes up an opportunity to remind us of her rapes. It undermines a character who has refused to be beaten or defined by her suffering, especially when, in the latest episode, she credits her abuse for transforming her from a ‘little bird’ into what she is now. As Jessica Chastain pointed out on Twitter, it was Sansa and Sansa alone who transformed herself into the strong and savvy leader she is – not the men who abused and manipulated her. If the writers don’t understand that, how can we trust them to tell Sansa’s story properly?

To hear Tyrion and Varys – characters who have always been portrayed as egalitarian – say that Jon’s gender would make him a better leader than Daenerys is just depressing.

In its early years it might have lured in the typical male fantasy crowd with sex, violence and alpha-male characters like Ned and Robb Stark, Robert Baratheon and Jaime Lannister, but before you knew it a woman was on the Iron Throne, her main challenger was also a woman, and Westeros was stuffed full of female assassins, knights, wily politicos and Dame Diana Rigg.

“On the ground in Syria,” he continued, “Assad is doing everything he can to make sure the physical evidence [of potential human-rights violations] is destroyed, and the digital evidence, too. The combination of all this—the filters, the machine-learning algorithms, and new laws—will make it harder for us to document what’s happening in closed societies.” That, he fears, is what dictators want.

Google and Facebook break out the numbers in their quarterly transparency reports. YouTube pulled 33 million videos off its network in 2018—roughly 90,000 a day. Of the videos removed after automated systems flagged them, 73 percent were removed so fast that no community members ever saw them. Meanwhile, Facebook removed 15 million pieces of content it deemed “terrorist propaganda” from October 2017 to September 2018. In the third quarter of 2018, machines performed 99.5 percent of Facebook’s “terrorist content” takedowns. Just 0.5 percent of the purged material was reported by users first.Those statistics are deeply troubling to open-source investigators, who complain that the machine-learning tools are black boxes.

“We were collecting, archiving, and geolocating evidence, doing all sorts of verification for the case,” Khatib recalled. “Then one day we noticed that all the videos that we had been going through, all of a sudden, all of them were gone.”It wasn’t a sophisticated hack attack by pro-Assad forces that wiped out their work. It was the ruthlessly efficient work of machine-learning algorithms deployed by social networks, particularly YouTube and Facebook.

Do not kid yourself – your business is never, never safe with PayPal. Move away or at least have a plan B in place so that you don’t lose your business over their arbitrary actions.

In recent months, Monsanto’s most controversial and notorious product — the pesticide glyphosate, branded as Roundup, and linked to cancer in recent U.S. court rulings — has threatened Bayer’s financial future as never before, with a litany of new court cases barking at Bayer’s door. It appears that many of the forces in the U.S. now seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government are hoping that a new Guaidó-led government will provide Bayer with a fresh, much-needed market for its agrochemicals and transgenic seeds, particularly those products that now face bans in countries all over the world, including once-defoliated and still-poisoned Vietnam.

while Article 127 of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution prohibits the creation of patents on the genome of any living being, it does not explicitly ban the planting, use, or consumption of GMOs.

Despite Hugo Chavez's ad hoc ban on transgenic crops in 2004, large multinational corporations, like Monsanto, are trying to use the current economic climate to negotiate for the arrival of GM seed in Venezuela.

in Conversation

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Pokémon Go-style smartphone game co-developed by Niantic and WB Games

If we’re speaking of garden-variety errors, the most common error I’ve observed that manages to get past any number of sets of expert eyes and wind up printed in books is the use of “lead” where “led” is meant—that is, the past tense of the verb “to lead.”

They mistake the apostrophe for a piece of punctuation when it is a spelling issue. 

MN: You can have friends or you can correct people’s grammar.

I still firmly believe that copy editors need only enough grammar to get them through the demands of their particular manuscripts; being a grammarian is entirely beside the point. Or to put it another way, grammar is part of what you do as a copy editor, but only a part. That said, it’s fun to know about the subjunctive, so I’ll concede that particular pleasure.

The report also noted a 27 percent increase in the number of foreigners whose communications were targeted by the NSA during the year. In total, an estimated 164,770 foreign individuals or groups were targeted with search terms used by the NSA to monitor their communications, up from 129,080 on the year prior.

The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28 percent rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications.

we get some of it by collecting data about your interactions, use and experiences with our products. The data we collect depends on the context of your interactions with Microsoft and the choices that you make, including your privacy settings and the products and features that you use. We also obtain data about you from third parties.

I natt länkade Thåströms officiella facebooksida till en artikel om utspelet, med kommentaren ”Beväpna er …”.

drivers delivering Amazon packages have reported feeling so pressured that they speed through neighborhoods, blow by stop signs, and pee in bottles in the trucks or outside

Amazon's system tracks a metric called "time off task," meaning how much time workers pause or take breaks, The Verge reported. It has been previously reported that some workers feel so pressured that they don't take bathroom breaks.

Amazon employs a system that not only tracks warehouse workers' productivity but also can automatically fire them for failing to meet expectations.

He is known for his heavily opinionated editorial column in the school newspaper, in which he writes in all-capital letters to reflect his shrill voice

Facebook said on Wednesday that it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. The penalty would be a record by the agency against a technology company and a sign that the United States was willing to punish big tech companies.

So far, according to the Times and other outlets, this technique is being used by the FBI and police departments in Arizona, North Carolina, California, Florida, Minnesota, Maine, and Washington, although there may be other agencies using it across the country.

In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)

If what I’ve written resonates with some people, I think this is a very lucky accident, and it’s very meaningful to me to be able to communicate that way. Also, on page two, one of the co-workers says something about looking like a hipster, which really dates the book to 2016 — this is how fast things move. I wasn’t thinking about millennials at the time, and I’d rather people approach the book fresh, respond to the content without any expectations, draw their own meaning (or not! that’s fine, too) from the direct experience of the read. You know, the same way you should approach life. [Laughs.]

I don’t think it’s mentally ill to have existential thoughts, or any kind of philosophical thoughts. This should be the root of a healthy, inquisitive mind. What’s harmful is her isolation.

Another thing I was thinking about when I started the book was maybe “apartment thrillers” like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, where the space of the home becomes antagonistic, so having this loop of violence and murder in the background, and her occasional thoughts of home invasions (Tom Jordan, Elodie and the dog walker, et cetera) fit that, too. Maybe there’s something about lack of safety going on there.

I think I often feel like, “What the hell am I supposed to be doing again?” So that’s probably why I’m drawn to writing about people who are making lamebrained decisions, or are pseudo-valiantly refusing to make decisions, or some combination of that.

When you get started, you get signed up by default for the FREE Gaia storage provided by Blockstack PBC. Yes, that's right, you get FREE encrypted storage.

Per a Wednesday report in Business Insider, Facebook has now said that it automatically extracted contact lists from around 1.5 million email accounts it was given access to via this method without ever actually asking for their permission. Again, this is exactly the type of thing one would expect to see in a phishing attack.

Amazon said it was using automated technology to weed out false reviews.It said it invested "significant resources" to protect its review system "because we know customers value the insights and experiences shared by fellow shoppers". /**/ (function() { if (window.bbcdotcom && bbcdotcom.adverts && bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync) { bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync('mpu', [1,2,3]); } })(); /**/ "Even one inauthentic review is one too many," it added.But Which?'s probe suggested fake reviews were commonplace.

Then another email. “Thank you very much, just one more question, for technical reasons, would it suffice if we credit D. A. Kaplan or Kaplan ink?” I wrote back and said no, photo credit should be Deborah Abrams Kaplan. And then I asked what the technical reason was for the requested change. I wondered to myself if my name was too long. And then I wondered if it was because I am a woman. But I dismissed that thought as ridiculous, because they’re not using a photo of a woman, but rather a photo of matzah. For those who aren’t familiar with aspects of orthodox Jewish practice, some require keeping a strict separation between men and women, so as not to tempt the men.

the ANZI z535 standard for admonitions

April 15, the day when you pay your taxes, gives you a good index of how democracy is functioning. If democracy were functioning effectively, April 15 would be a day of celebration. That’s a day on which we get together to contribute to implementing the policies that we’ve decided on. That’s what April 15 ought to be. Here it’s a day of mourning. This alien force is coming to steal your hard-earned money from you. That indicates an extreme contempt for democracy. And it’s natural that a business-run society and doctrinal system should try to inculcate that belief.

Women in science are cited less than their male colleagues. They have a harder time getting work published in notable journals, including the flagships Science and Nature. They are likely paid less than their peers (a 2013 study found that women working in physics and astronomy were paid 40 percent less than men). And they are more likely to face workplace harassment.

Researchers are protesting grant processes that overwhelmingly fund male-led projects, and scientific societies are reforming their sexual harassment policies.

“In contrast to Dr. Wood’s claims, bias found in one system is cause for concern in the other, particularly in use cases that could severely impact people’s lives, such as law enforcement applications,” they wrote.

“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.

Richard Liu, chief executive of Alibaba arch-foe JD.com Inc., said in a recent post on his WeChat moments that, while he would never force staff to work a 996 schedule, people who slacked off were not considered his “brothers.”

Risks Related to Our Business The personal mobility, meal delivery, and logistics industries are highly competitive, with well-established and low-cost alternatives that have been available for decades, low barriers to entry, low switching costs, and well-capitalized competitors in nearly every major geographic region. If we are unable to compete effectively in these industries, our business and financial prospects would be adversely impacted.

The development of our autonomous vehicle technologies is highly dependent on internally developed software, as well as on partnerships with third parties such as OEMs and other suppliers.

Our Autonomous Driving Strategy We are investing in technology to power the next generation of transportation.

The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seriously concerned about the idea that cisgender women and transgender editors could be repelled from Wikipedia by online abuse.

The highlight of today’s announcements is the beta launch of the company’s AI Platform. The idea here is to offer developers and data scientists an end-to-end service for building, testing and deploying their own models.

After introducing it in preview last year, the company also today launched the beta of its Contact Center AI. This service, which was built with partners like Twilio, Vonage, Cisco, Five9, Genesys and Mitel, offers a full contact center AI solution that uses tools like Dialogflow and Google’s text-to-speech capabilities to allow its users to build a virtual agent system (and when things go awry, it can pass the customer to a human agent).

China’s tech sector is notorious for treating workers like machines, with extremely long working hours being the norm. The phrase 996 refers to 9am - 9pm, 6 days per week, and is an unspoken rule in a lot of Chinese tech companies. The CEO of Youzan, a large Chinese e-commerce company, seemingly didn’t get the memo about keeping 996 as an “unspoken” rule, and surprised his employees at their 2019 yearly company party by telling them Youzan is officially switching to 996.

AMP is a set of rules that publishers (typically news and analysis content providers) must abide by in order to appear in the “Top Stories” section of Google’s search results, a lucrative position at the top of the page.

“But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book,” he explained. “To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.”

I’m using this solution now

Most people can close their eyes and conjure up images inside their head such as counting sheep or imagining the face of a loved one. But Ed Catmull, 74, has the condition aphantasia, in which people cannot visualise mental images at all. And in a surprising survey of his former employees, so do some of the world's best animators.

Det är tydligt att den moraliska kompassen trängs undan i jakten på vinst.

En rekommendation kan vara att välja en bank som har samhällsintresset i fokus och inte vinsten som drivkraft.

Svenska skattebetalare har räddat bankerna flera gånger och finns där om det kniper igen. Går det dåligt för banken så vet ägarna att skattebetalarna finns där. Staten tar över, rensar upp och sen säljs banken vidare till nya privata ägare som ordnar nya skandaler och riskerar den finansiella stabiliteten.

Bråanser inte att förändringen ärpåkallad med hänsyn till hur det dödliga våldet utvecklats under de senaste decennierna. Straffskärpning för mord har intehellernågon belagd brottsförebyggande verkan.

År 2014 skärptes dock straffet för mord ytterligare, och livstids­straffet ska numera utgöra normalstraffet för detta brott. – Sannolikt kommer de straffskärpningar för mord som genomfördes 2014 att leda till att antalet livstidsdomar ökar igen, säger Lisa Westfelt. Den strafftid som livstidsdomarna omvandlats till har blivit längre över tid.

Skillnaden mellan den kortaste och längsta strafftiden har ökat under 2000-talet och var som störst år 2013, med 33 års skillnad.

Strafftiden vid tidsomvandlade livstidsdomar har ökat

Maximalt har livstidsstraffet i Sverige kunna innebära upp till 34 år i fängelse. Det rekordet sattes när den dömde Leif "Myran" Axmyr 2016 sattes på fri fot i hög ålder. Hans straff för ett brutalt dubbelmord och mordbrand i Gävle 1982 hade ursprungligen omvandlats från livstid till 51 års fängelse.

Efter att ha avtjänat minst tio år av straffet kan den dömde ansöka om att få sitt livstidsstraff tidsbestämt. Om tingsrätten går med på ansökan, får det tidsbestämda straffet inte vara kortare än 18 år, som är det längsta tidsbegränsade straff som kan dömas ut i Sverige.

Despite the controversy Rumisa doesn't regret making the poster. "I'm kind of happy that my poster got a lot of attention," she says.

Amazon.com Inc. is positioning Alexa, its artificial-intelligence assistant, to track consumers’ prescriptions and relay personal health information, in a bid to insert the technology into everyday health care.

XML pioneer and early blogger Tim Bray says that Google maybe suffers of deliberate memory loss. I may have found more evidence that this is the case.

“They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions. “[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. “They #dontgiveazuck” wrote Edwards.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Thursday that Motel 6 shared the information of about 80,000 guests in the state from 2015 to 2017. That led to targeted investigations of guests with Latino-sounding names, according to Ferguson. He said many guests faced questioning from ICE, detainment or deportation as a result of the disclosures. It's the second settlement over the company's practice in recent months.

Oops, I think that one might even be exploitable… I think I’m going to stop here. This needs a structured effort, not spending ten minutes every now and then. As I said, the codebase isn’t bad. But there are obvious issues that shouldn’t have been there. As always, spotting the issues is the easy part – proving that they are exploitable is far harder. I’m not going to spend time on that right now, so let’s just file these under “minor quality issues” rather than “security problems.”

LastPass has always been stressing that they cannot access your passwords, so keeping them on their servers is safe. This statement has been proven wrong several times already, and the improvements so far aren’t substantial enough to make it right. LastPass design offers too many loopholes which could be exploited by a malicious server. So far they didn’t make a serious effort to make the extension’s user interface self-contained, meaning that they keep asking you to trust their web server whenever you use LastPass.

Some of these actions will prompt you to re-enter your master password. That’s merely security theater

LastPass is run by LogMeIn, Inc. which is based in United States. So let’s say the NSA knocks on their door: “Hey, we need your data on XYZ so we can check their terrorism connections!” As we know by now, NSA does these things and it happens to random people as well, despite not having any ties to terrorism. LastPass data on the server is worthless on its own, but NSA might be able to pressure the company into sending a breach notification to this user.

In particular, the decision to fall back to server-provided pages for parts of the LastPass browser extension functionality is highly problematic.

Should you be concerned about LastPass uploading your passwords to its server?

As I listen to this album again and again I find myself reaching for roundly-voweled, softly consonanted words. Words like ‘home’. It’s welcoming, there’s comfort here. But it's full of feelings that are not uncomplicated. This is also Freud’s home, and ETA Hoffmann’s. It has secrets. The great warmth of these songs, their strange aching languor, is always tinged with a seam of anxiety. Listen to the uncertain syncopation between drums and high plucked bass strings at 03:40 in on the album opener, like a murmur tinged with regret, the careful bottling of a rising panic. Listen to the way Dougall’s uniquely bruised voice swells forward and almost catches against itself a minute into ‘Simple Things’, the tiny pause just after that feels like a cliff edge you just stepped over unawares. Here is both the little luxury you reach for to take the edge off things. It is also the edge itself.

Amazon’s technology struggles more than some peers’ to identify the gender of individuals with darker skin, prompting fears of unjust arrests. Amazon has defended its work and said all users must follow the law.

U.S. securities regulators shot down attempts by Amazon.com Inc to stop its investors from considering two shareholder proposals about the company’s controversial sale of a facial recognition service, a sign of growing scrutiny of the technology.

technology companies have made it work that way. Ebook stores from Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble all follow broadly the same rules. You’re buying a licence to read, not a licence to own.

There’s bad news for users of Microsoft’s eBook store: the company is closing it down, and, with it, any books bought through the service will no longer be readable.To soften the blow, the company has promised to refund any customers who bought books through the store (a clue that there may not have been that many of them, hence the closure. Microsoft did not offer further comment).

Facebook users are being interrupted by an interstitial demanding they provide the password for the email account they gave to Facebook when signing up. “To continue using Facebook, you’ll need to confirm your email,” the message demands. “Since you signed up with [email address], you can do that automatically …”A form below the message asked for the users’ “email password.”

After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers, regarding a license agreement. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project.

He watched an hour-long lecture by Dr. Joy DeGruy on what she called “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.” He listened to the work of Tim Wise, an activist who speaks on college campuses and with corporations on fighting racism. He watched Morgan Freeman’s National Geographic series, The Story of Us. He watched Noam Chomsky’s documentary on American wealth distribution, Requiem for the American Dream. He watched Ava DuVernay’s examination of incarceration, the Netflix documentary, 13th. “13th turned the light bulb on,” Stills says.

Liner notes, narrated audio, and all physical rewards will also be exclusive to subscribers.

Release Lucky #13: A thirteenth live album, collecting the band’s upcoming 2019 tour, delivered as a bonus at the conclusion of the subscription

Please note: These albums are NOT available on public streaming services.

Limited edition t-shirt of William Schaff’s A Dream in the Dark cover design.

A Dream in the Dark is a collection of twelve digital live albums spanning two decades – from Okkervil River’s earliest shows up to the present day. It presents a comprehensive history of the band through the lens of concerts instead of studio albums, and it draws from a massive archive of recordings catalogued by Will Sheff and by fans throughout the years.

FidoNews from May 1989

Wayne Pearson

Gretchen McCulloch

LOL - Laughing Out Loud

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.

This was Bateman’s “greatest fear,” Ellis writes in White. “What if no one was paying him any attention?” Ellis does not realize he is talking about himself, an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book.

For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.

Bret Easton Ellis would like you to know that he thinks “boys will be boys.” He thinks #MeToo is pathetic.

You might have also seen that our podcasts are no longer available on certain Google products - including the Google Podcast app and Google assistant. I want to explain a little bit about why that has happened. Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users - they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice - an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

Simon Parkin

Nimatron

Karl Marx

Jamie Woodcock

Office Depot, Inc. and a California-based tech support software provider have agreed to pay a total of $35 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the companies tricked customers into buying millions of dollars’ worth of computer repair and technical services by deceptively claiming their software had found malware symptoms on the customers’ computers.Office Depot has agreed to pay $25 million while its software supplier, Support.com, Inc., has agreed to pay $10 million as part of their settlements with the FTC. The FTC intends to use these funds to provide refunds to consumers.

Many customers who took their computers in for a free “PC Health Check” at Office Depot or OfficeMax stores between 2009 and November 2016 were told their computers had malware symptoms or infections — but that wasn’t true. The FTC says Office Depot and OfficeMax ran PC Health Check, a diagnostic scan program created and licensed by Support.com, that tricked those consumers into thinking their computers had symptoms of malware or actual “infections,” even though the scan hadn’t found any such issues. Many consumers who got false scan results bought computer diagnostic and repair services from Office Depot and OfficeMax that cost up to $300.

At The Economist, we take data visualisation seriously. Every week we publish around 40 charts across print, the website and our apps. With every single one, we try our best to visualise the numbers accurately and in a way that best supports the story. But sometimes we get it wrong. We can do better in future if we learn from our mistakes — and other people may be able to learn from them, too.

Algorithms that simply magnify human errors now appear almost quaint. In 2012, the Financial Times had a headline, “Knight Capital glitch loss hits $461m”; those were innocent times.

If you do not like the price you’re being offered when you shop, do not take it personally: many of the prices we see online are being set by algorithms that respond to demand and may also try to guess your personal willingness to pay. What’s next? A logical next step is that computers will start conspiring against us. That may sound paranoid, but a new study by four economists at the University of Bologna shows how this can happen.

Mention McDonald’s to someone today, and they're more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced machine learning, in a fittingly super-sized way.McDonald’s is set to announce that it has reached an agreement to acquire Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven "decision logic" technology. When you add an item to an online shopping cart, it’s the tech that nudges you about what other customers bought as well. Dynamic Yield reportedly had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald’s offer put it at over $300 million. That would make it the company's largest purchase since it acquired Boston Market in 1999.

Data integrity is the overall completeness, accuracy and consistency of data.

Consistency - The property of a transaction that guarantees that the state of the database both before and after execution of the transaction remains consistent (i.e., free of any data integrity errors) whether or not the transaction commits or is rolled back.

As one of 13 million officially designated “discredited individuals,” or laolai in Chinese, 47-year-old Kong is banned from spending on “luxuries,” whose definition includes air travel and fast trains.

Discredited individuals have been barred from taking a total of 17.5 million flights and 5.5 million high-speed train trips as of the end of 2018, according to the latest annual report by the National Public Credit Information Center.The list of “discredited individuals” was introduced in 2013, months before the State Council unveiled a plan in 2014 to build a social credit system by 2020.

Experts say any filters introduced will likely be error-prone and ineffective. They also note that given the cost of deploying such filters, the law may have the opposite effect to politicians’ intent — solidifying the dominance of US tech giants over online spaces.

Twitter locks all new user accounts in order to force them to give up their phone numbers

But it’s far more that just a cultural signpost. The reason Coney Island of the Mind has held up so well is that it also marks the first full flowering of Ferlinghetti’s considerable poetic gifts. Employing open elastic lines that often seesaw across the page, Ferlinghetti’s verse is a unique combination of Whitmanesque proclamation and Dionysian celebration, where a deep love for life and art is interlaced with call for the human race to finally begin living up to its potential. … Fifty years on, Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti’s artistic and commercial breakthrough, still stands as an excellent example of both his social and poetic contributions, and is not only a worthy but probably a necessary volume for the library of anyone truly serious about understanding where English-language poetry has been and where it is going.

This article is a new law that was appended to Penal Code in 2011, and in Japan, it is generally known as the "Offense of Creating Virus".  Although the law calls it virus, the wider definition of this law was set with an  intension to crack down on developing and distributing malware.

“Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but they’re wrong. For thousands of years, cannabis has been at the very heart of Japanese culture,” Japan’s leading expert on cannabis, Takayasu Junichi, told the Asia Pacific Journal in an interview.

Japan today has some of the harshest drug laws of any advanced democracy. If you are found in possession of cannabis in Japan for personal use you could receive a maximum prison sentence of five years, and if you are caught growing it, you can be sent to prison for up to seven years. Each year, the laws are enforced against 2000 people, who are brutally publicly shamed before, during and after their prison sentence.[2] For example, when the actress Saya Takagi was caught with cannabis, all reruns of the dramas she appeared on – like the popular detective series Aibo - were scrubbed from the TV schedules.[3] She had written the theme song for another TV show: it was immediately ditched. Or to give another example, when a rugby player for Japan’s national team was caught with the drug, he was banned from ever playing again, and the electronics giant Toshiba suspended all sponsorship of his regional team.[4] To be associated with cannabis in Japan is to be destroyed.

Amazon has been beta testing the ads on Apple Inc.’s iOS platform for several months, according to people familiar with the plan. A similar product for Google’s Android platform is planned for later this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to share the information publicly.

Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent. Clinicians should be conscious of privacy risks in their own use of apps and, when recommending apps, explain the potential for loss of privacy as part of informed consent. Privacy regulation should emphasise the accountabilities of those who control and process user data. Developers should disclose all data sharing practices and allow users to choose precisely what data are shared and with whom.

To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.

However, emerging organizations are starting to build bridges into the old technology in an effort to re-decentralize.

Carson Farmer noted that GMAIL is fundamentally a better user experience because individuals didn’t need to run their own protocols or set up their own servers.

Is it possible to reverse the deterioration we are experiencing today? I spoke with individuals who are working actively within the values of the decentralized web and are building towards this panacea.

While employees were up in arms because of Google’s “Dragonfly” censored search engine with China and its Project Maven’s drone surveillance program with DARPA, there exist very few mechanisms to stop these initiatives from taking flight without proper oversight. The tech community argues they are different than Big Pharma or Banking. Regulating them would strangle the internet.

Webb also foresees a future of stifling individual privacy where our personal information is locked in the operating systems of these tech giants, now functioning oligopolies, fueling a “digital caste system,” mimicking a familiar authoritarian system in China.

Amy Webb, Author of  “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines could Warp Humanity” refers not only to G-MAFIA but also BAT (the consortium that has led the charge in the highly controversial Social Credit system to create a trust value among its Chinese citizens). She writes: We stop assuming that the G-MAFIA (Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon) can serve its DC and Wall Street masters equally and that the free markets and our entrepreneurial spirit will produce the best possible outcomes for AI and humanity

An estimated 13.1 million people in Congo are now in need of humanitarian assistance.

Bunia, where more than 61,000 internally displaced persons are now registered

An even larger number of Congolese from Djugu territory have been displaced inside their own country.

Between March 3 and March 5 alone, 2,043 Congolese fled to neighboring Uganda, bringing the total for the year to 48,105, according to figures provided by UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.

Some local Hema activists suggested that up to 85 percent of Hema people from the Djugu region have been made homeless

In recent weeks, a wave of armed assaults has spread across Djugu territory in Ituri Province in the east of this nation, emptying whole villages. While the overall death toll is uncertain, there is reason to believe it may reach into the hundreds; witnesses and activists said that 34 villages had been attacked. Since December, an estimated 150,000 people have fled their homes, according to humanitarian workers in the region.

A speech-detecting accelerometer recognizes when you’re speaking and works with a pair of beamforming microphones to filter out external noise and focus on the sound of your voice.

William S. Burroughs

Casey Rae

Some children have it bad. Some are miraculously unaffected. But millions of seven- to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males.