State Department apologizes for causing pronoun butthurt.

Washington Free Beacon: State Department Offers Counseling To Misgendered Employees Triggered By Email Pronoun Debacle.

The State Department will offer counseling to any employee "who feels hurt or upset" by a system-wide email glitch that temporarily assigned random and often incorrect gender pronouns to staff.

The State Department is offering free therapy to "any employee who feels hurt or upset as a result of this unfortunate mistake," according to an internal email that went out to employees on Friday. Many State Department employees were "triggered" on Thursday, when emails from colleagues suddenly began to include random pronouns, like, "She/her/hers" and "He/Him/His" in the "from" line.

The pronouns were randomly assigned, with men being given female pronouns and vice versa, due to a "pronoun glitch" in the department’s system, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.

Those upset by the misgendering are encouraged to contact the State Department’s Employee Consultation Service "to speak to a professional counselor."

"I want to stress that the intent behind making this feature available is to make our systems more inclusive and provide employees with options—not to make decisions for them," Kelly E. Fletcher, the State Department’s chief information officer, wrote in the email. "I recognize that this error had the opposite effect, and again, I am very sorry."

RT: US State Department offers counseling to staff after ‘pronoun glitch’. 

In a tweet later on Thursday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that “issues with user profiles on Microsoft Outlook” had caused the error.

State Department blames MS Outlook user profiles? 🤣 Sure, why not?

I'm very upset over this misuse of pronouns. Where do I go for my free therapy and, hopefully, benzos?

Gov. Cuomo welcomes Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation as public school overlords.

Yeah...Gates is the guy to solve defects in the educational system. He he has the "blueprint". 

The public school system can learn much from college dropout Bill Gates, who stole the DOS operating system (originally CP/M), whose vaccine killed thousands in India and whose entire lifetime of MS Win OS contained vulnerabilities inviting hacking, screen freeze, crashing and, of course, "turning it off and on again" to restore its functionality...sometimes...maybe, if the planets were all in the required alignment and high tide was at just the right amplitude.

Read through NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo thread @ NYGovCuomo:

Look, Gates is no Aristotle or Jonas Salk. He never will be. Not even close. Whatever he says on any issue, at best, can be interpreted as a casual observation and quickly dismissed; certainly nothing ever seriously considered and practiced in health, medicine and education.

Bill Clinton's remarks on NAFTA signing in 1993 at The American Presidency Project page scrubbed? Link result is "404 page not found."

Over 26 years ago The Left ushered the U.S. into NAFTA by then-president DEM Bill Clinton. Now, it seems all the DEMS, especially the presidential candidates, backtrack their being for NAFTA and now appear against it. Or, they suggest that an updated NAFTA will fix the problems with old NAFTA.

Adding another layer to a failed DEM initiative is always the answer. Always.

The link to The American Presidency Project page for NAFTA, titled "Bill Clinton's Remarks on Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act , December 8, 1993", leads to "404  Page Not Found."

Maybe it's a glitch? An overwhelmed slow server running Win7 or XP?

Thankfully, we have The Wayback Machine preserving this page. Hit the link, read the full story. I've intentionally oversized the screen cap:

The above entry now a "404 page not found".

Politifact: News site saying Donald Trump is wrong and that Bill Clinton didn't sign NAFTA is lying. Or maybe it's intentional disinformation.

NowThis, which spreads stories on social media, has accused Trump of getting it wrong — repeatedly.

On Aug. 10, 2016, NowThis posted a video on Facebook headlined "Fact Check: Everything Donald J. Trump says about NAFTA is wrong," and on YouTube titled "Donald Trump Can't Get The Facts Right About NAFTA.".
[.]
It turns out that Trump isn't wrong.

Clinton signed the deal on Dec. 8, 1993. His speech that day is available in print form and on YouTube.

How oddly coincidental that this link is a dead "404 Page not found" result.

The video of Bill Clinton's remarks on Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, as of this time, up and running at You Tube. Screen caps from the video:

If you find the link is restored at The American Presidency Project, leave a comment.

Bloated Windows 10

Extreme Tech: Win 10 requires 32GB storage space.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would begin using ~7GB of user hard drive space for the application of future updates. The advantage of this system is intended to be that it doesn’t break the update process halfway through by a system running out of space. The disadvantage is that it would eliminate virtually all of the storage available on small systems[.]

And more yadda yadda, blah blah the ExTech story writer goes on why Win 10 requiring 32GB storage isn't so bad...

But it's the comments at the link that are fun:

sola • 10 hours ago
What on Earth could need so much storage space for a baseline operating system?
[.]
Hard-core Linux people ridicule Ubuntu all the time for being bloated while a full blown Ubuntu x64 desktop installation is about ~8GB (1/4 of Windows) and that includes a full blown office suite, a proper web browser and a lot of usable cli and graphical tools.

ChromeOS also still works on 16GB machines and that includes a secondary partition for full-parallel, in-background OS updates.

Techutante @ sola • 5 hours ago
Eh, 2 TB hard drives are as cheap as 14-40 dollars. Get over it. Back when I started I ran my entire computer with Dos and Windows 3.1 on a 426 meg hard drive, of which windows took up approximately 35-50 megs[.]

John Galt @ Techutante • 4 hours ago
Sure thing, I'll just pop open that ultra slim laptop or tablet and de-solder the SSD and pop that 4TB drive in there... See the problem yet?

adamrussell @ sola 39 minutes ago
32 GB is pretty deep into the low end.

Uh, yeah - it sure as heck is deep in the low end.

@ Techutante, "Back when I started..." - - - then return to the days of DOS, Win 3.1, a 9.6 modem and those lovely, techno-gray dot-matrix printers. There's probably a good, used pre-owned horse and buggy for sale in Amish Country that may be of interest to you.

Fcuk...some people who defend Win and MS no matter how sub-par the OS. I do not understand.

 Ink well with Quill and Eight - and ONLY EIGHT- Crayons for you!

4Sysops: Windows 10 1903: defer upgrades in all editions, SAC-T removed, new reboot option:

After a lot of negative feedback about Windows 10 1809, which the manufacturer had to withdraw due to serious errors[.] ("A lot"? AYFKM? - DD)
[.]
Officially, the next release bears the version number 1903, but it will not be released until the end of May. Therefore, Microsoft also refers to it as the May 2019 update.

Well, MS has until midnight Tuesday to roll out their April patches. As for their May release being released during May, I wonder what Vegas odds are on that?

Tech News

Mashable: Microsoft partners with BMW for "smart factory" systems.

And, BMW's riderless bike (it takes a moment for the clip to load):

- - -
Tech Talks: AI can read and text can be weaponized.

“When people see typos right now, they don’t think it’s a security issue. But in the near future, it might be something we will have to contend with,” Stephen Merity, AI researcher and expert on machine learning–based language models, told me in a call last week.

And there’s ample reason to take his warnings seriously. In recent findings, scientists at IBM Research, Amazon and the University of Texas have proven that small modifications to text content can alter the behavior of AI algorithms while remaining unnoticeable to human readers.

- - -
Extreme Tech: Three stickers will make an autonomous Tesla veer into oncoming traffic.

Keen Security researchers reverse-engineered the software Tesla uses to see how easy it would be to fool those sensors. They didn’t need to make any changes to the car’s software — this is not a hack. They simply used three small reflective stickers on the roadway to trick Autopilot into thinking the lane had merged when it hadn’t.

I'd imagine covering exterior sensors on the car with duct tape would also put a big dent into Tesla's "autonomy".
- - -
Ubergizmo: Burger King's Non-Beef Whopper.

[Burger King] is staking its reputation on [a no beef patty], saying that the taste is identical to its beef patty.
[.]
It’s a protein that’s cultivated from soybean roots that can mimic the texture of meat.

It's not a real Whopper, then.

- - -
Ubergizmo: Fake alcohol; get the buzz but never drunk.

[S]cientist David Nutt’s...synthetic alcohol can allow drinkers to experience everything they enjoy about having a drink but not worry about getting a hangover. Nutt told the Guardian that he can design his synthetic alcohol molecule to interact with the body in a way that doesn’t induce any of the negative side effects.

Ars Technia: Study finds there is "something special" about Tennessee whiskey.

Scientists are beginning to unlock the scientific secrets of what makes so-called "Tennessee whiskey" so distinct from other whiskeys, bourbons, and similar spirits[.]

The success of Tennessee Whiskey has to have something to do with this guy, if only for his guile and name.
- - -
Ars Technia: Google's product shut-downs are damaging its brand.

We are 91 days into the year, and so far, Google is racking up an unprecedented body count. If we just take the official shutdown dates that have already occurred in 2019, a Google-branded product, feature, or service has died, on average, about every nine days.

Engadget: After eight years, Google+ is dead.

- - -

Digital Trends: Good bye metal; hello Soft Robotics.

Where previous soft robots have still required components like metal valves, this latest soft robot can function using only rubber and air — with pressurized air replacing the need for electronic innards. In doing so, it integrates memory and decision-making directly into its soft materials, using a kind of digital logic-based soft computer.

- - -
C|Net: The ethical issues of smart home cameras and facial recognition.

You might gain the peace of mind that comes with knowing who's at the door, but it could come at the cost of compromising your loved ones' privacy by sending their biometric data back to manufacturers or even hackers.
[.]
Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is the oldest legislation and the strictest. It regulates how biometric information is collected, stored, used and even destroyed. Texas followed a year later with the Texas Biometric Privacy Law, while Washington signed its own state House Bill 1493 two years ago.
[.]
When a homeowner adds facial recognition technology, multiple relationships come into play.

"There are deep ethical questions," [said Betsy Cooper, director of the Aspen Policy Hub]. "Because while the relationship between the individual and the person crossing their threshold is clear, the relationship between the person crossing the threshold and all those other companies and actors is less clear."

Tech Talks: Law firms, the digital age and the impact of Tech.

Lawyers need technology these days, but technology also needs lawyers.
[.]
Algorithms shape how people interact with news and entertainment media and how they research civic issues on the internet, and there are new questions arising about citizens’ “digital civil rights.”
[.]
What happens when a city decides to ban facial recognition technology?

- - -
Beta News: Linux Fedora 30 Beta is here.

Fedora is the best overall Linux distribution.
[.]
While Fedora maybe isn't the best distro for beginners, it should be the eventual choice for those that "level up" to being an experienced Linux user later.

As someone commented at the above link, it is unfortunate that Beta News didn't include any screenshots of Fedora 30. So, here's some. It's hot!

Tech News

AI:

TechTalks: In which direction is AI headed?

...we’ve reached a point where artificial intelligence algorithms can solve very complicated problems, and in many cases with speed and accuracy that is far superior to those of humans. But whether contemporary AI works likes the human mind is up for debate.

TechSpot: AI coming soon to a McDonald's drive thru near you.

McDonald’s will put its newfound technology to work in the drive thru. Working in conjunction with the company’s digital menus, Dynamic Yield technology will account for factors like weather, time of day, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items to display items that customers are more likely to purchase.
[.]
McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook said they have a really straightforward business. “People only come to us if they want something to eat, or something to drink. We’re not in the business of using technology to try to change people’s lives.”

McDonald's predictive menu ordering=here. Change people's lives? They'll get there sooner rather than later.

- - -
EU Articles 11 and 13 Copyright Reform:

Beta News: EU approves copyright reform despite massive opposition.

Known respectively as the "link tax" and the "upload filter", these two clauses have generated a great deal of interest from internet users and the technology industry alike. In particular, article 13 has proved especially controversial, holding websites responsible for material uploaded without a licence [sic] [.]

ZD Net: Social media platforms affected by new EU copyright regulations.

The European Parliament said the directive aims to ensure that copyright law also applies to the internet. It added that YouTube, Facebook and Google News are some of the internet household names that will be "most directly affected" by this legislation.

TechDirt: MEP's say mistaken in their vote on Articles 11 and 13. EU replies, "pound sand.".

...the key vote was whether to allow amendments that could have deleted those two articles. That vote failed by just five votes, 317 to 312. Unfortunately, soon after the vote was finalized, a few of the MEPs who voted against the plan for amendments -- Peter Lundgren and Kristina Winberg -- said they voted incorrectly and meant to vote for the amendments in order to get rid of Articles 11 and 13. Apparently, someone changed the vote order which threw them off[.]

- - -
Dark Reading: Russia regularly spoofs regional GPS.

A large-scale analysis of global positioning data has discovered widespread Russian spoofing over the past three years of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) used by ships and autonomous vehicle systems to find their positions and safely chart courses, according to a new report.

The report — published by the Center for Advanced Defense (C4ADS), a nonprofit intelligence firm focused on worldwide security issues — found that at least 9,883 instances of spoofing occurred near sensitive areas in Russia and Crimea and during times when high-ranking officials, such as President Vladamir Putin, were present.

- - -
Ars Technia: Microsoft discover Huawei driver that opened systems to attacks.

...it wasn't malware that was injecting and running code in a user process; it was a Huawei-written driver. Huawei's driver was supposed to act as a kind of watchdog: it monitored a regular user mode service that's part of the PCManager software, and if that service should crash or stop running, the driver would restart it. To perform that restart, the driver injected code into a privileged Windows process and then ran that code using an APC—a technique lifted straight from malware.

- - -
Technocracy: Sweden expected to force banks to handle cash transactions.

Technocrats pushing for a cashless society are seriously conflicted as its flagship experiment in Sweden is coming unravelled. The people in Sweden have spoken, and cash stays. ⁃ TN Editor

Sweden will likely push through a proposal to force banks to keep offering cash to customers who require it as the Nordic nation grapples with how to balance the rapid transformation into a cashless society.

- - -

Security Week: Ransomware hits aluminum giant Norsk Hydro.

Norwegian metals and energy giant Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s biggest aluminum producers, has been hit by a ransomware attack that has impacted operations, forcing the company to resort to manual processes.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Norsk Hydro representatives revealed that the attack, which they described as extensive, started on Monday at around midnight, Norway time, when the company’s security team noticed some unusual activity on its global network. They said the ransomware is designed to encrypt files, but they have yet to determine exactly which malware family it belongs to.

- - -
C|Net: Twitter birthday prank will lockout your account.

The hoax, which appears to have begun making the rounds on Monday, promises to make users' feeds more "colourful" if they change the birth year in their profile to 2007. An early tweet on the trick has been retweeted more than 13,000 times[.]

Tech News

Gizmodo: Big Tech is automating the climate crisis.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all struck lucrative arrangements—collectively worth billions of dollars—to provide automation, cloud, and AI services to some of the world’s biggest oil companies, and they are actively pursuing more.

- - -
Geek: Hot Abe Lincoln statue goes viral.

Someone recently discovered a shirtless Abraham Lincoln statue in California, and the Twitter community can’t handle it.
[.]
Zack Stentz posted a picture of the steamy statue on his Twitter account. “Reminder that the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse has a statue of Abraham Lincoln where he’s a shirtless young stud"[.]

 "Hot" Abe Lincoln statue; Photo Credit: Zack Stentz/Twitter

- - -
Technocracy: Pepsi massive layoffs sparked by automation.

By PepsiCo’s own estimates, the company’s layoffs are expected to be a multimillion-dollar project in 2019.

- - -
Tech Dirt: Google fesses up to hidden microphone in Nest.

The problem: more privacy-conscious Nest owners weren't aware that the Nest home security base stations had a microphone in the first place, raising questions about whether Google was using the microphone for data collection and monetization in some capacity.

- - -
Extreme Tech: Audi cars tell you what speed to drive to hit all green lights.

Audi is revving up its slick Traffic Light Information (TLI) system. Now Audi TLI can tell you the best speed to drive in order to hit a string of green traffic lights, without having to suddenly speed up to make a light on yellow, or brake hard if you can’t speed up enough.

- - -
19 Years Ago...Win2000 updates appear. Beta News:

Microsoft has announced a slew of updates for Windows 2000, just one day after their next flagship operating system hit store shelves.

And...MS has been releasing endless series of patches ever since then.
- - -
Gizmodo: Once thought extinct, world's giant bee found ALIVE.

[Since 1981], no one had documented any encounters with the huge bee.

That all changed when a search team visiting the North Moluccas last month laid eyes on the bee for the first time in 38 years.

More - C|Net: HUGE BEE alert.

The report describes the bee as being about the size of an adult thumb, with a wingspan of about 2.5 inches (6.35 centimeters). That means it's four times larger than the European honey bee.

BFB; Photo: Clay Bolt

- - -

Gizmodo: Ong's Hat got too real.

Ong’s Hat was once home to secret experiments led by the Dobbs Twins, a pair of Princeton scientists who’d been forced to build a secret lab out in the Pine Barrens after their work in “Chaos Studies” got them booted from the academy.
[.]
...Ong’s Hat has become a site of pilgrimage for fans of the supernatural.

- - -
Tech News World: JP Morgan-Chase issues dollar backed digital token.

JPMorgan Chase on Thursday announced that it has created and successfully tested a digital coin. Each JPM Coin represents US$1 in funds held in designated accounts at JPMorgan Chase N.A.

Tech News

The Technocralypse (Technocracy+Apocalypse) is upon us.

Engineering the end of Capitalism - The Independent:

The new era is characterised by inefficient fossil fuel production and escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age.
[.]
British economics journalist Paul Mason's...digital uprising is projected to consume evermore vast quantities of energy (as much as one-fifth of global electricity by 2025), producing 14 per cent of global carbon emissions by 2040.
[.]
... the driving force of the transition to postcapitalism is the end of the age that made endless growth capitalism possible in the first place: the age of abundant, cheap energy.

- - -
Technocracy: The Coming Technocracy.

Here are equivalent concepts: Technocracy, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Natural Capitalism. All of this is a grand deception[.]
[.]
It is a scam to twist the economic resources of the world out of your hands and give them to the global elite. It is a power grab to take over all means of production while dictating to you what you are allowed to consume. It is a Scientific Dictatorship designed to control you, your thoughts, your behavior, your consumption and your family from cradle to cradle.

- - -
Cyberwar outlook for 2019. ZD Net:

In the US, the September 2018 National Cyber Strategy adopted an aggressive stance, promising to "deter and if necessary punish those who use cyber tools for malicious purposes."
[.]
"The [Trump] Administration recognizes that the United States is engaged in a continuous competition against strategic adversaries, rogue states, and terrorist and criminal networks. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all use cyberspace as a means to challenge the United States, its allies, and partners, often with a recklessness they would never consider in other domains."

Cybersecurity in 2019. Tech Crunch:

Expect more data leaks and exposures — but not just breaches.

California’s privacy rules will come to a head.

Brexit will hamper U.K. tech, startup growth.

Australia’s draconian encryption laws will begin to hurt.

- - -
Surveillance of Your Gestures Coming Soon: Soli, by...(who else?) Google. Ivan Poupyrev, Project Soli:

Soli is a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions.

Soli sensor technology works by emitting electromagnetic waves in a broad beam. Objects within the beam scatter this energy, reflecting some portion back towards the radar antenna. Properties of the reflected signal, such as energy, time delay, and frequency shift capture rich information about the object’s characteristics and dynamics, including size, shape, orientation, material, distance, and velocity.

FCC Approves Google Gesture Tracking Soli. The Register:

...Google has received an exemption from the Federal Communication Commission that will allow the ad biz to run the system at higher power levels than regulations currently allow.

Project Soli sensors consist of hardware capable of tracking hand gestures or objects in a specific area of space. 

- - -
UberGizmo - Electric garage door malfunction crunches Jeep.

Image from UberGizmo

According to posters on Reddit, this Jeep Wrangler was crushed when the electric garage malfunctioned due to the control unit getting flooded. This tripped the power which presumably knocked out all of the sensors which would have prevented this to happen. The malfunctioning garage kept raising the lift even as the Jeep struck the roof and was crushed.

- - -
Computer World: Why MS Edge died.

EdgeHTML, in part because of its lackadaisical upgrade cadence, was rarely able to catch up, or if it did, maintain equality, with Chrome in properly rendering pages or rendering them at speed.

- - -
TechSpot: Wi-Fi 6 is Near.

Wi-Fi 6 will have a single-user data rate that is 37% faster than 802.11ac, but what's more significant is that the updated specification will offer four times the throughput per user in crowded environments, as well as better power efficiency which should translate to a boost in device battery life.
[.]
When Wi-Fi 6 is launched in full, the specification will be backward compatible with previous standards, incorporating both 2.4GHz and 5GHz along with eventually expanding that spectrum to include bands in 1GHz and 6GHz when they become available.

- - -
Beta News - Dark Mode Chrome.

An increasing number of apps and websites are gaining dark modes, often simply for the sake of aesthetics, but also because of power-saving considerations.

- - -
ZD Net: USB Type C for increased security.

The USB Type-C Authentication solution will include: a standard protocol of authentication for USB Type-C chargers, devices, cables, and power sources; support for authenticating over either USB data bus or USB power delivery communications channels; [and several other reasons].

- - -
PC World: Tech that Died in 2018.

The yawn-inspiring personal assistant Facebook M stopped working in January after a general launch in April 2017. Lastly, Yahoo Messenger, one of the last remaining classic instant messengers, went away in July. Messenger outlasted its more notable rivals, AOL’s AIM (1997-2017) and MSN/Windows Live Messenger (1999-2012).

Tech News

TechDirt - Students charged with terroristic threats for posting video of fictional school shooting.

Three students face felony charges of making a terroristic threat for posting online two brief videos where they act out a school shooting in someone’s house.
[...]
Content disturbing to others is present in a lot of content. Just because this dramatization happened to be produced by students and distributed by Instagram doesn't somehow entitle it to less First Amendment protection than a motion picture released by a major studio.
[...]
Sheriff Craig Apple's speech -- as moronic as it is -- is also protected by the same First Amendment he won't extend to these students.

    “There’s been enough shootings going on around the country. This is despicable artistic expression, if that’s what it was.”

Is the video protected under the First Amendment or is the sheriff's interpretation of the video consistent within the context of preventing a potential threat?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
- - -
Business Times: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it will fix years to FB's problems.

Who...knew?

Gadgets Now: India law misunderstood by FB moderators. 

[Facebook moderators are advised] that any post degrading an entire religion violates Indian law and should be flagged for removal.

[Another instructs moderators] to "look out for" the phrase "Free Kashmir" - though the slogan, common among activists, is completely legal.

- - -
Ars Technia: Residential home battery (power) not energy efficient in most cases.

"There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.

- - -
Caution - story contains AI created "scary" names (I'm looking out for the easily frightened Libs, here.); Ars Technia:

AI invents New Year fireworks names that sound more like the end of humanity.
[...]
Flaming Thundersplont Box
Red flashing cake
Machine Blinking Display
Black Moo
Original Cat Pix Budget 2 Boom

Yikes! Machine Blinking Display and Original Cat Pix Budget 2 Boom. Run Away ! Run Away !
- - -

Coffee? Tea? Lots of room?

Technology: What happens when almost no passengers show up for their flight?

- - -

Technology: Wind turbines hurting robins. 

...wind turbines are rather loud and robins have to adapt. In these areas where wind turbines are present, robins drop their lower pitch and go for the trademark puffed up red chest instead. Little birds cannot compete against the low hum of the wind turbine blades.

- - -
TechRadar: MS 2018 retrospective.

...the October 2018 Update has been the most problematic and buggy update ever released for Microsoft’s OS, outdoing even the infamous Anniversary Update.
[.]
Another major development for Microsoft in 2018 was that the firm finally admitted that it had got things wrong with the default web browser for Windows 10. The company has been pushing hard with Edge for a good while now, but to no avail[.]

WccfTech: Here comes Win 10 forced update v 1809.

We are still waiting for user reports to see if they have experienced any Windows 10 forced updates over the last few days. But, if you want to avoid Windows 10 version 1809, it would be wise to block it to avoid any surprises.

- - -
Gadgets Now: Elon Musk needs people to beta test Tesla's autonomous-driving cars.

Earlier this year [Tesla] reportedly sought hundreds of employees to test its full-driving system and offered free Autopilot upgrade with new purchases.

- - -

The Drive - Ford's 2019 preview and 2020(?) Bronco.

Ford "Super Duty"

Tech News

Why driving is hard for AI. ArsTechnia:

The Society for Automotive Engineering and the US Department of Transportation specify six degrees of autonomy, running from Level 0 (human drivers in complete control) to Level 5 (a fully self-driving vehicle). The commercially available car currently considered the most autonomous—the Cadillac CT6 with Super Cruise—makes it to Level 2... but only on the 130,000 miles (many of them highways) that its maps know. Tesla's Autopilot mode, the name notwithstanding, is also considered Level 2. Neither of them are anything like set-and-forget systems.

- - -
Duckduckgo discovers Google personalizing searches in incognito mode and when not signed in.
BetaNews:

[The study] found that even when people searched without logging into a Google account -- or when they used private browsing mode --  "most participants saw results unique to them".

- - -
China denounces U.S. as "despicable rogue" over Huawei CFO arrest. BGR:

The Chinese government has demanded [CFO Meng Wanzhou] be released and claimed that her arrest is a potential human rights violation.

The accusations, CBC.ca:

[CFO Meng Wanzhou, 46] is wanted for extradition from Vancouver to the U.S. on allegations of fraud, including using a shell company to skirt international American sanctions over five years, court heard.

The Justice Department affidavit painted a picture of a woman with immense financial resources who had already attempted to evade U.S. arrest warrants for allegedly violating American and European Union sanctions.

It said she possesses "no fewer than seven passports from both China and Hong Kong."

The lesson here is if you're going to have seven passports, mix-up more countries. Use Luxembourg, Lithuania, Liechtenstein and Monaco. No one will question them.
- - -
If you're looking at buying a new TV, a review on Smart display models at C|Net.
- - -

Here's a rare item. MicroSoft surrenders. Computer World: 

After a years-long pummeling, Microsoft this week surrendered in the browser war, saying that it will junk Edge's home-grown rendering engine and replace it with Blink, the engine that powers Google's Chrome.

More...

RIP MS Edge. ZD Net:

Microsoft today confirmed the rumors that have been swirling all week. As part of a sweeping change to one of the flagship components of Windows 10, it will rebuild its Microsoft Edge browser from the ground up, ripping out its proprietary EdgeHTML rendering engine and replacing it with the open-source Chromium code base.

Image: ZD Net

- - -

Are you a member of Quora? Looks like it was hacked. WIRED:

In a blog post on Monday, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo admitted that Quora was breached. The company discovered the problem last Friday, and more than 100 million accounts may have had their data taken.

- - -
Expired certificate causes millions to lose Ericsson network. TechSpot:

Certificates are software keys that enable certain functionality, but they can require occasional updates so that they don’t expire, something Swedish owned telecommunication equipment manufacturer Ericsson didn’t do.

They forgot to use a sticky-note.
- - -
Gizmodo - A free streaming service you didn't know you had. (Not Reddit?)

I want to tell you about a free streaming service that’s in many ways just as good as Filmstruck, offers Criterion films, and has at least one feature that no one else does.

Kanopy is not new, it got its start in Australia a decade ago and has slowly expanded its services around the globe.

- - -
UberGizmo: Teen electrocuted to death wearing charging headphones:

It has been suggested that you not use your headphones while they’re plugged into a phone that’s charging, or to use them if their wires are frayed and exposed.

The above never occurred to me. I'd never heard of anyone dying from this until now. Makes sense. What a way to go, geeez.
- - -
I can't quite make the stretch to classify this under Tech News, but here goes.

From The Independent:  Mom sends five-year old son to school nativity with...(plastic blowup, think adult) ...sheep doll.

Helen Cox said she had no idea what the real purpose of the product when she bought it for her son Alfie.

Yeeeaaahhhhhhhh....click the link and read the story.

 Image: The Independent.

I obscured the kid's face, I just had to. The image at the link is intact.

Tech News

Data breach at Amazon - ITPro Portal:

Amazon may have suffered a data breach that saw customer names and email addresses leaked.
[.]
...users confirmed on Twitter that they had gotten an email from Amazon, which the retailer later confirmed to be genuine, notifying them that the data has been shared, accidentally.

We don't know how it happened, exactly when it happened, or who the information was shared with / to. 

Who knew? No one saw this coming.
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No one saw this coming either: Is your CPAP machine spying on you? ArsTechnia:

Tony Schmidt discovered something unsettling about the machine that helps him breathe at night. Without his knowledge, it was spying on him.

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TechCrunch - Facebook an accomplice in 16-year-old girl sold for marriage in South Sudan.

A multimillionaire businessman from South Sudan’s capital city reportedly won the auction after offering a record “price” — of 530 cows, three Land Cruiser V8 cars and $10,000 — to marry the child, Nyalong Ngong Deng Jalang.

Disgusting. FB needs to be held accountable.
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C|Net: Leather clad, luxury laptop:

Instead of taking a slim laptop and sticking it in a leather sleeve, as one might do with any other similar system, the leather case here is built right in. No, it's not Corinthian leather, but it's still pretty nice.

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ZD Net - Everything you need to know about the cannabis industry:

...marijuana is one of the most exciting growth industries in the US as it becomes legal in some states, attracts investment, and becomes a vertical that can utilize multiple technologies ranging from the internet of things to cloud to analytics.

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When to hire a cyber security expert? Tech News World:

[Cyber security] itself is increasing in importance, it remains a truism that many smaller organizations (and in fact, some mid-sized ones) don't have specialized security expertise on staff.

Is is too late for Amazon?
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Time-travel into the past. 13 years ago, Microsoft trashes Linux. BetaNews:

Linux bashing is nothing new for Microsoft, which has set up a dedicated Web site to detail why customers should choose Windows Server over the open source operating system. This week at the IT Forum, Microsoft announced the results of a new study that shows Windows as more reliable and easier to manage than Linux.

What a joke. Keep releasing "patches", MS, for your wonderful OS.
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'Smart Watch' tracker of children easy to hack. TechDirt: 

A location-tracking smartwatch worn by thousands of children has proven... you guessed it... rather trivial to hack. The MiSafes Kid's Watcher Plus is a "smart watch for kids" that embeds a 2G cellular radio and GPS technology, purportedly to let concerned helicopter parents track their kids' location at all times. But security researchers at UK's Pen Test Partners have issued a report calling the devices comically unsecure.

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Technology.Org - 64 SpaceX satellites ready to launch:

...the U.S. kicked around the idea of putting large reflectors in orbit during the Vietnam war, effectively abolishing night over southeast Asia. There have also been ideas to put advertising in space… though for now, you won’t have to worry about Pepsi or McDonald’s logos drifting through your astrophotos.

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Five songs that could make you a dangerous driver. The Drive:

British car loan financier Moneybarn recently released a study outlining how our choice in music can affect our driving. It found that songs with tempos that exceed 120 beats per minute (bpm) can make people subconsciously drive faster, which makes them more liable to draw negative attention from law enforcement.
[.]
...the 12th most common song on driving (or riding) playlists, AC/DC's "Back In Black" has the misfortune of being the cliche soundtrack for Baby Boomers on Harley Davidsons. Again, it doesn't tip the scales for high-energy lyrical content, but its tempo of 188 bpm is eclipsed by just one song on the chart.

Make it so loud that my ears bleed! 
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Bleeping Computer - Firefox 65 improvements in Content Blocking settings:

Firefox 65, Mozilla is overhauling how users can configure the Content Blocking settings. With this version, the previously confusing configuration is replaced by three different modes that a user can select that offer varying degrees of blocking and customization.

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Technocracy - Are Smart-Meters spying on you?

“What limits have been placed on data collection and permissions for data collection beyond monthly billing cycle totals?” [asks Smithfield Township supervisors in a] letter dated Nov. 14, to FirstEnergy’s president, regional president, state president, the state Office of Consumer Advocates and the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. “The notice sent to our residents makes no mention of this, yet is it is of prime concern to us in order to protect and secure data of our residential households.”

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Ubergizmo - Future Apple watches may monitor UV exposure.

Apple has filed for a patent that describes how future Apple Watches could come with a built-in UV sensors that are embedded around the frame of the Apple Watch. These sensors will alert the wearer when they’ve been exposed for too long.

Because...everything is dangerous and we need Apple to save us.