SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Google is going ahead with delayed plans to expand its London offices, saying it will build a 10-story building on the site in a move that the U.K. government called a vote of confidence in the country's post-Brexit future.

The company, the largest unit of Alphabet Inc., said it would be able to house as many as 7,000 workers at the London campus after the expansion -- 3,000 more than a spokesman said it currently employs in the U.K. Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai described the plan as a sign of the company's commitment to the country.

"Here in the U.K., it's clear to me that computer science has a great future with the talent, educational institutions, and passion for innovation we see all around us," he said in a statement.

Speaking at an event that included London's mayor Sadiq Khan and prominent entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, Pichai was optimistic about the U.K.'s future in technology despite the June vote to leave the European Union, and he said Google was committed to remaining in the country for years.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/google-affirms-plan-to-expand-london-campus-with-new-building
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/google-to-create-new-london-headquarters-and-3000-jobs-at-kings-cross-a3396496.htmlr

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MostCynical writes:

A Fairfax Media investigation can reveal Mumbai-based security firm AI Solutions is asking between $350 and $1000 in exchange for the private information, but even more if the target is an Australian "VIP, politician, police, [or] celebrity.

AI Solutions is just one of potentially several private companies selling phone records, home addresses and other private details of Australian telecommunication company customers. They in turn have received the information from employees of the call centres used widely by Australian businesses.

Security industry sources said the practice has been long-standing. AI Solutions has told customers it has sold people's personal data for several years.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/your-mobile-phone-records-and-home-address-for-sale-20161116-gsqkwe.html

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quintessence writes:

Senator Boxer Introduces Bill to Eliminate Electoral College

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Senator-Boxer-to-Introduce-Bill-to-Eliminate-Electoral-College--401314945.html

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3wLQz-LgrM

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mojo chan writes:

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months. It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals. Its selection follows June's Brexit vote [in the UK], and the US presidential election. Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right".

[...] Oxford Dictionaries says post-truth is thought to have been first used in 1992. However, it says the frequency of its usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared with last year.

Mr Grathwohl said: "Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37995600
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016

Would you have chosen something different?

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mrpg writes:

Debian has entered "Transition freeze".

Release Team Announcement
Release dates

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takyon writes:

Russia has repudiated the International Criminal Court (ICC) by withdrawing its signature from the founding Rome Statute, a day after the ICC published a report that called Russian's annexation of Crimea an "on-going state of occupation". Russia is not a member of the ICC because it had never ratified the treaty:

Russia has said it is formally withdrawing its signature from the founding statute of the international criminal court, a day after the court published a report classifying the Russian annexation of Crimea as an occupation. The repudiation of the tribunal, though symbolic, is a fresh blow to efforts to establish a global legal order for pursuing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In recent months, three African countries who were all full members of the ICC – South Africa, Burundi and Gambia – have signalled their intention to pull out, following complaints that ICC prosecutions focused excessively on the African continent.

The Russian foreign ministry made the announcement on Wednesday on the orders of the president, Vladimir Putin, saying the tribunal had failed to live up to hopes of the international community and denouncing its work as "one-sided and inefficient". Russia signed the Rome statute in 2000 and cooperated with the court, but had not ratified the treaty and thus remained outside the ICC's jurisdiction. This means that the latest move, though highly symbolic, will not change much in practice.

Also at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, NPR, NYT, RT, and Foreign Policy.

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takyon writes:

Kim Fat Fat Fat:

Chinese websites are censoring a phrase meaning "Kim Fatty the Third", a nickname widely used to disparage the North Korean leader, after officials from his country reportedly conveyed their displeasure in a meeting with Chinese counterparts. Searches for the Chinese words "Jin San Pang" on the search engine Baidu and microblogging platform Weibo returned no results this week.

The nickname pokes fun at Kim Jong-un's girth and his status as the third generation of the Kim family to rule the world's only hereditary communist dynasty. It's especially popular among young, irreverent Chinese who tend to look down on their country's would-be ally. [...] North Korean officials, fearing that Kim would find out about the nickname, lodged a formal request with China recently to prohibit names disparaging Kim from appearing in the media, according to Hong Kong newspaper reports.

Also at USA Today.

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CoolHand writes:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/almost-all-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers-run-linux/

Other than systems running Linux, there are two Chinese supercomputers running IBM AIX, a Unix variant. This pair, tied at 386 and 387, may not be long for the list. That's because supercomputers are growing ever faster.

[...] When the first TOP500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was just gathering steam. Since 1998 when it first appeared on the list, Linux has consistently dominated the top 10. Since June 2010, Linux has run 90 percent of the world's fastest computers.

Before Linux jumped ahead, Unix was supercomputing's top dog. Since 2003, the top operating system has flipped from being 96 percent Unix to being 96 percent Linux. By 2004, Linux had taken over the lead and has yet to surrender it.

By 2017, Linux may have eliminated all its competition.

[Continues...]

McGruber writes in with a story from The Wall Street Journal about Facebook's advertising metrics:

Facebook Inc. said it has uncovered several more flawed measurements related to how consumers interact with content, raising more questions about the metrics marketers lean on to decide whether to buy ads on the social media network.

The company publicly disclosed on Wednesday that a comprehensive internal metrics audit found that discrepancies, or "bugs," led to the undercounting or overcounting of four measurements, including the weekly and monthly reach of marketers' posts, the number of full video views and time spent with publishers' Instant Articles.

None of the metrics in question affect Facebook's billing, said Mark Rabkin, vice president of Facebook's core ads team.

[...] As part of its effort to assuage advertiser concerns about the soundness of its metrics, Facebook will provide viewability data from third-party metrics companies such as Moat and Integral Ad Science for display ad campaigns. Previously, this data was limited to video campaigns.

"We are doubling down on our efforts at third-party verification," said Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president of global marketing solutions.

Are Soylentils gratified that Facebook continues to be highly responsive to its customers? Is there a Facebook ad buy in your future? Or just an additional face-palm? Regardless of the issues, the product does seem to be selling like hotcakes.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A man with metal horns protruding from his forehead and a split tongue poking out between his teeth advanced toward me with a scalpel. "I've never done this before," he joked, inching closer.

A full-sleeve tattoo snaked out from beneath his black T-shirt, extending from a demon on his bicep to a skull on his fist. My eyes darted between skull and scalpel, then instinctively shut as I cringed, bracing for contact. Zack Watson, the inked-up body modification artist I'd hired — and drove seven hours from New York City to see — was about to sew a magnet under my skin.
...
Biohacking enthusiasts have tinkered with electronic tattoos and subdermal — underneath-the-skin — implants for two decades, sharing their efforts in videos on YouTube and internet forums to spread and encourage innovation. Proponents believe smart implants represent the future of wearable technology, potentially making humans healthier and more efficient while providing new opportunity to consumer-technology companies such as Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.34% and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, -0.71% GOOG, -0.57% that are investing heavily in technology that could revolutionize health care.

All of these predictions [quoted in the article] come as global adoption of wearables is forecast to boom. Juniper Research, which tracks consumer technology trends, expects world-wide wearable shipments to reach 420 million by 2020, more than four times the 80 million shipped in 2015. A similar surge is predicted for medical devices, with shipments projected to triple to 70 million over the next four years.

Trans-humanism has been around for a while, but the article focuses on the investment capital that is now flowing into the area.

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CoolHand writes:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/microsoft-yes-microsoft-joins-the-linux-foundation/

NEW YORK—At its first Connect event in 2013, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013. In 2014, it announced the open sourcing of .NET, and in 2015, the open sourcing of the Visual Studio Code editor. The big news this year? Microsoft, the company that has built an empire on proprietary, closed-source software, has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.

Microsoft has been a big contributor to Linux over the past several years, primarily focusing on improving support for its Hyper-V hypervisor. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said that in becoming a member, "Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."

Microsoft's increasing commitment to open source has been met with some cynicism (and please, beloved commenters—try to refrain from "embrace, extend, extinguish" posts, as the very concept is preposterous when it comes to Linux), but with projects such as Visual Studio Code and .NET, is starting to win hearts and minds. The company does appear to be a reasonably good open source citizen, not merely publishing source code repositories that are occasionally updated from an internal development branch, but actually performing development in the open, accepting community contributions, and seeking community consensus when it comes to new features.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Last month, in an interview with The Times, Illy Eckstein, chief executive of Robin Labs, creators of a virtual assistant and satnav known as 'Robin', said that 5% of interactions in their database are classified as "clearly sexually explicit".

Trawling the Internet for evidence of the above I discovered a Reddit forum titled: 'I masturbate to Siri and I feel disgusting'. The poster says he's a 20 year old male, who started talking to Siri sexually as a joke before realising that "it really turned me on."

The phenomenon clearly has farther reaches than one sole forum post. VA creators and chatbot companies predict such interactions and put algorithmic safeguards in place to deter feelings of emotional and sexual attachment from costumers.

Earlier this year one of the key writers for Microsoft's Cortana, Deborah Harrison, revealed at the Virtual Assistant Summit in San Francisco that "a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries" regarded Cortana's 'sex life' adding, "That's not the kind of interaction we want to encourage."

+1 Funny and Sad?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The young, perfectly healthy looking guy ahead of me in Panera Bread walked his fifty lb. dog to the front of the line - I can't tell you the breed since I don't know dogs - and was immediately told that the dog had to go. "Um, I have an anxiety disorder", he replied. The cashier turned around to consult with the manager, but people were still waiting to order, and soon it was conceded that the customer and his service dog/best friend could stay for lunch. And they did.

The Chicago Tribune reports that similar incidents are cropping up on airlines. Passengers dread having their pets locked up in a kennel in the cargo section, and airlines charge hefty fees for the service, so some of them are taking advantage of a legal loophole allowing service dogs of disabled people to ride in the passenger cabin free of charge; but in these cases the disability is "emotional distress" rather than, say, blindness. Many of these passengers pay a licensed therapist for the certificate of need required by airline gate attendants, and for an expensive vest for their "service animals".

From the Tribune story:

The story mentions that some fellow passengers and advocates for the (real) disabled are annoyed with the game-playing and lax enforcement. However, others perhaps side with the late Harry Nilsson, who famously sang "I'd take my puppy everywhere, la-la-la I wouldn't care. We'll stay away from crowds, signs that said 'No friends allowed'".

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AnonTechie writes:

A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique. On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.

Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into clinics across the world, says Carl June, who specializes in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and led one of the earlier studies.

"I think this is going to trigger 'Sputnik 2.0', a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product," he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-gene-editing-tested-in-a-person-for-the-first-time-1.20988

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Gaaark writes:

The resignation of Ukraine's police chief and a customs officer on November 13 is that latest twist in the country's exodus of reformist officials.

As reported by the Reuters news agency, Police chief Khatia Dekanoidze, a Georgian who was appointed on the strength of her reforms as a minister in Tbilisi, said political meddling in appointments had thwarted her efforts to bring meaningful change.

Yulia Marushevska, a 27-year-old who was appointed in 2015 to end rampant bribe-taking at the Odessa port customs, also resigned, accusing the government and her boss of blocking her reforms.

https://www.neweurope.eu/article/two-reformers-quit-ukraine/

It's looking like the crisis could continue for some time as an internal power struggle goes on and on:
http://ukraine.csis.org/

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