Several new features are on the way to Microsoft Edge this month, including vertical tabs, startup boost, and modern Microsoft Bing search experiences. The new features were recently shown off by Microsoft in a recent blog post. Windows Central reports: First up is vertical tabs. This feature allows you to move the tabs from across the top of your browser over to the side. The feature lets you see more of your tabs at once. We recently saw the option to resize vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge Canary, but it is now rolling out to Dev too.

Next, are Microsoft's new Bing search experiences. Microsoft's new experiences help you see the information that you'd like without having to click around and fish through content as much. For example, when searching for a recipe, the new recipe experience will show ingredient lists, substitutions, and more information just by hovering over a search result. The experience will also play any video if you hover over a result. There are similar new experiences for other content, like DIY projects and gardening. Microsoft also announced improvements to how it aggregates information for topics you search.

Lastly, startup boost is a new feature that should cut down how long it takes Edge to launch after you reboot your PC. The feature will roll out this month, and Microsoft says that it will cut down launch times by between 29% -- 41%.

Google is testing a new feature that will surface Instagram and TikTok videos in their own dedicated carousel in the Google app for mobile devices -- a move that could help the company retain users in search of social video entertainment from fully leaving Google's platform. From a report: The feature itself expands on a test launched earlier this year, where Google had first introduced a carousel of "Short Videos" within Google Discover -- the personalized feed found in the Google mobile app and to the left of the home screen on some Android devices. To be clear, this "Short Videos" carousel is different from Google's Stories, which rolled out in October 2020 to the Google Search app for iOS and Android. Those "Stories" -- previously known as "AMP Stories" -- consist of short-form video content created by Google's online publishing partners like Forbes, USA Today, Vice, Now This, Bustle, Thrillist and others. Meanwhile, the "Short Videos" carousel had been focused on aggregating social video from other platforms, including Google's own short-form video project Tangi, Indian TikTok competitor Trell, as well as Google's own video platform, YouTube -- which has also been experimenting with short-form content as of late.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: There's an old truism in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere is that they aren't measured very well. The ultimate solution to this problem-- the killer app, as it were -- would be real-time tracking of all global greenhouse gases, verified by objective third parties, and available for free to the public. Now, a new alliance of climate research groups called the Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) Coalition has launched an effort to make the vision a reality, and they're aiming to have it ready for COP26, the climate meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021 (postponed from November 2020). If they pull it off, it could completely change the tenor and direction of international climate talks. It could also make it easier for the hundreds of companies, cities, counties, and states that have made ambitious climate commitments to reliably track their process.

In addition to [Al Gore, who had been looking for more reliable ways to track emissions] and WattTime, [which intends to create a public database that will track carbon emissions from all the world's large power plants using AI], the coalition now contains:

-Carbon Tracker uses machine learning and satellite data to predict the utilization of every power plant in the world;
-Earthrise Alliance aggregates and organizes publicly available environmental data into a format meaningful to journalists and researchers;
-CarbonPlan uses satellite data to track changes in aboveground biomass (especially forests) and the associated carbon emissions, down to a spatial resolution of 300 meters;
-Hudson Carbon uses satellite data to track changes in agricultural cover, cropping, and tilling, down to the level of the individual field, and compares that data against ground-level sensors;
-OceanMind uses onboard sensors to track the global movement of ships in real time and combines that with engine specs to extrapolate carbon emissions;
-Rocky Mountain Institute combines multiple sources of data to quantify methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure;
-Hypervine uses spectroscopic imagery to track vehicle usage and blasting at quarries;
-Blue Sky Analytics uses near-infrared and shortwave infrared imagery from satellites to track fires.

The coalition will also be gathering data from a variety of other sources, from power grid data to fuel sales, sensor networks, and drones. Gore acknowledges that "this is a work in progress," but says the coalition is aiming big: "everything that can be known about where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from will be known, in near-real time."

With a little help from Peter Thiel's controversial company Palintir, America's Department of Health and Human Services is building a powerful new tool to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Verge reports: The tool, which is reportedly called HHS Protect Now, is already up and running as of April 10th and it helps officials compile reports on the coronavirus' spread through the U.S. by collecting data from state and local governments, healthcare institutions, and colleges. It is unclear what exactly this data is, where it comes from, or how it's being used. It's also unclear if Palantir is the sole technology provider of the tool, or if other partners are involved...

According to a new report from The Daily Beast, here's an at least partial description of the kind of data we're talking about here:

HHS said it has 187 data sets integrated into the platform, with inputs that include hospital capacity and inventories, supply chain data from the government and industry, diagnostic and geographic testing data, demographic statistics, state policy actions, and coronavirus and flu-like emergency department data. The spokesperson also said HHS was relying on "private sector partner contributions of data."

"We are using the data aggregated... to paint a picture for the Task Force, and state and local leaders to show the impact of their strategic decisions," the HHS spokesperson told The Daily Beast in a statement... HHS Protect Now was intended to become the "the single source for testing data by April 20th," according to an internal Trump administration document obtained by The Daily Beast, though it's unclear if that's now true. Currently, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, is making use of data the tool aggregates, and that data and Birx's presentations are factors for how Trump and his administration plan to reopen parts of the country, The Daily Beast reports.
The article notes Palantir is controversial "in part because it has provided profiling tools to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and because it generally operates with extreme secrecy and with little oversight regarding the tools and data it provides to military operations, governments, and hedge funds."

Earliest this year Palantir claimed the #4 spot on Slate's list of the 30 most evil tech companies, because, they wrote, "almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms "waste CO2" into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant's flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily. Carbon Upcycling UCLA is one of 10 teams competing in the final round of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize. The global competition aims to develop breakthrough technologies for converting carbon emissions into valuable products.

The UCLA initiative began about six years ago, as researchers contemplated the chemistry of Hadrian's Wall -- the nearly 1,900-year-old Roman structure in northern England. Masons built the wall by mixing calcium oxide with water, then letting it absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The resulting reactions produced calcium carbonate, or limestone. But that cementation process can take years or decades to complete, an unimaginably long wait by today's standards. "We wanted to know, 'How do you make these reactions go faster?'" Gaurav Sant, a civil engineering professor who leads the team, recalled. The answer was portlandite, or calcium hydroxide. The compound is combined with aggregates and other ingredients to create the initial building element. That element then goes into a reactor, where it comes in contact with the flue gas coming directly out of a power plant's smokestack. The resulting carbonation reaction forms a solid building component akin to concrete. The UCLA system is unique among green concrete technologies because it doesn't require the expensive step of capturing and purifying CO2 emissions from power plants. Sant said his team's approach is the only one so far that directly uses the flue gas stream. The group has formed a company, CO2Concrete, to commercialize their technology with construction companies and other industrial partners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Cigna plans to expand a system that uses artificial intelligence to identify gaps in treatment of chronic diseases, such as patients skipping their medications, and deliver personalized recommendations for specific patients. The product, called Health Connect 360, integrates data from a combination of sources and analytical tools, some developed at Cigna and others brought in as part of its $54 billion acquisition of pharmacy-benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co., completed late last year. Express Scripts, which began developing the service two years ago, rolled out portions of it to some customers this year.

Health Connect 360 was developed for treatment of chronic diseases, including diabetes and heart disease, as well as for pain management. The system aggregates medical, pharmacy, lab and biometric data -- such as information from glucometers, which measure blood-sugar levels -- into a dashboard that is accessible through an online interface. The dashboard will be visible to the service's customers and to Express Scripts case managers and nurses with access rights. The system can also feed information to electronic-medical record systems for physicians. Cigna is already using AI to predict whether patients might abuse or overdose on prescription opioids. Another Cigna tool, One Guide, provides personalized help to health-insurance holders on their benefit plans, appointments and health coaching. The new Health Connect 360 system combines algorithms that analyze data such as clinical and pharmacy information with predictive models to generate recommendations and ways to best engage a patient, whether through an app or in person.

New submitter popcornfan679 shares a report: Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir's other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. (Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis.) The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir. Fusion centers have become a target of civil liberties groups in part because they collect and aggregate data from so many different public and private entities.

The guide doesn't just show how Gotham works. It also shows how police are instructed to use the software. This guide seems to be specifically made by Palantir for the California law enforcement because it includes examples specific to California. We don't know exactly what information is excluded, or what changes have been made since the document was first created. The first eight pages that we received in response to our request is undated, but the remaining twenty-one pages were copyrighted in 2016. (Palantir did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives.

A new report from the open source security company WhiteSource asks the question, "Is one programming language more secure than the rest?"

An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: To answer this question, the report compiled information from WhiteSource's database, which aggregates information on open source vulnerabilities from sources including the National Vulnerability Database, security advisories, GitHub issue trackers, and popular open source projects issue trackers. Researchers focused in on open source security vulnerabilities in the seven most widely-used languages of the past 10 years to learn which are most secure, and which vulnerability types are most common in each...

The most common vulnerabilities across most of these languages are Cross-SiteScripting (XSS); Input Validation; Permissions, Privileges, and Access Control; and Information Leak / Disclosure, according to the report.
Across the seven most widely-used programming languages, here's how the vulnerabilities were distributed:

• C (47%)
• PHP (17%)
• Java (11%)
• JavaScript (10%)
• Python (5%)
• C++ (5%)
• Ruby (4%)

But the results are full of disclaimers -- for example, that C tops the list because it's the oldest language with "the highest volume of written code" and "is also one of the languages behind major infrastructure like Open SSL and the Linux kernel."

The report also notes a "substantial rise" across all languages for known open source security vulnerabilities over the last two years, attributing this to more awareness about vulnerable components -- thanks to more research, automated security tools, and "the growing investment in bug bounty programs" -- as well as the increasing popularity of open source software. And it also reports a drop in the percentage of critical vulnerabilities for most languages -- except JavaScript and PHP.

The report then concludes that "the Winner Of Most Secure Programming Language is...no one and everyone...! It is not about the language itself that makes it any more or less secure, but how you use it. If you are mitigating your vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle with the proper management approach, then you are far more likely to stay secure."

Coincidentally, WhiteSource sells software which monitors open source components throughout the software development lifecycle to provide alerts about security (and licensing) issues.

Comcast announced a $5-a-month streaming video service Thursday called Xfinity Flex, an offering that aggregates on-demand video from your subscriptions like Netflix Amazon Prime Video and HBO, as well as offering free ad-supported shows to watch and options to rent and buy programming. From a report: It essentially replicates some of the features of a cable service but delivers over the internet rather than... well, cable. But it won't have live channels or DVR, and it won't let you watch a live-TV streaming service like YouTube TV or Sling TV, keeping Flex squarely in the realm of on-demand viewing that's less threatening to Comcast's traditional -- and lucrative -- cable TV packages. Instead, Flex will have built-in ways to upgrade to live TV from Comcast. Xfinity Flex comes with a 4K and HDR-ready wireless set-top box with an X1 voice remote, Engadget adds. It's scheduled to launch March 26th, and will be available to customers who have Comcast internet.

TuballoyThunder writes: According to The Intercept, it appears that the LinkNYC free Wi-Fi might be designed to track users. This and other concerns were raised during a 2015 discussion on Slashdot. While many people are comfortable in trading their privacy for ostensibly free services, it is disheartening when municipalities collaborate with business to make it happen. "In May of this year, Charles Meyers, an undergraduate at New York City College of Technology, came across folders in LinkNYC's public library on GitHub, a platform for managing files and software, that appear to raise further questions about location tracking and the platform's protection of its users' data," reports The Intercept. "Meyers made copies of the codebases in question -- 'LinkNYC Mobile Observation' and 'RxLocation' -- and shared both folders with The Intercept."

Meyers says the "LinkNYC Mobile Observation" code collects the user's longitude and latitude, browser type, OS, device type, device identifiers, and full URL clickstreams (including data and time) and "aggregates this information into a database," the report says. Meyer's believes the company is interested in tracking the location of Wi-Fi users in real time. "If such code were run on a mobile app or kiosk, he said, the company would be able to make advertisements available in real time based on where and who someone was, and that this would constitute a potential violation of the company's privacy policy," reports The Intercept.

Following the revelations, LinkNYC said the code was never intended to be released and was part of a longer-term R&D process. "In this instance, David Mitchell, Intersection's CTO, told the Intercept in an email. "Intersection was prototyping and testing some ideas internally, using employee data only, and mistakenly made source code public on Github. This code is not in use on the LinkNYC network." [Intersection is the "key player" in CityBridge, "a chameleon-like consortium of private companies" that New York City contracted to turn the city's payphone booth network into Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks.]

Materials-science researchers are finding that plant fibres can add durability and strength to substances already used in the construction of buildings and in goods that range from toys and furniture to cars and aircraft. From a report: A big bonus is that, because plants lock up carbon in their structure, using their fibres to make things should mean less carbon dioxide is emitted. The production of concrete alone represents some 5% of man-made global CO{-2} emissions, and making 1kg of plastic from oil produces 6kg of the greenhouse gas. Start with the carrots. These are being investigated by Mohamed Saafi at Lancaster University, in England. Dr Saafi and his colleagues do not use whole carrots, but rather what they call "nanoplatelets" that have been extracted from carrots discarded by supermarkets or as waste from food-processing factories. Sugar-beet peelings are also a useful source of nanoplatelets.

The researchers are working with CelluComp, a British firm that produces such platelets for industrial applications, including as an additive that helps toughen the surface of paint as it dries. Each platelet is only a few millionths of a metre across. It consists of a sheet of stiff cellulose fibres. Although the fibres are minute, they are strong. By combining platelets with other materials a powerful composite can be produced. Dr Saafi is mixing the platelets into cement, which is made by burning limestone and clay together at high temperature. To turn cement into concrete it is mixed with aggregates such as sand, stones and crushed rocks, which act as reinforcement, and with water, which reacts with the chemicals in the cement to form a substance called calcium silicate hydrate. This starts off as a thick gel, but then hardens into a solid matrix that binds the aggregates together.

Google is pulling a software tool that let small companies access search information on airfares, a potential blow to online travel newcomers. From a report: Google's tool was opened in 2011 after its $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, an online airfare broker. In approving the deal, a federal judge required that Google keep an ITA flight search and pricing software, called QPX, accessible to third parties for at least five years. In 2014, Google created a cheaper version of the QPX software, called QPX Express, meant to target smaller companies and startups. Google shut that service down due to "low interest," according to a company spokeswoman. Google said it is keeping intact a version of the original software tool for corporate customers. Google used ITA's tool to create Google Flights, which aggregates airline prices directly inside its powerful search engine.

An anonymous reader shares a Financial Post report: Beijing ByteDance Technology is the brainchild of entrepreneur Zhang Yiming. The company is best known for a mobile app called Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, which aggregates news and videos from hundreds of media outlets. In five years, the app has become one of the most popular news services anywhere, with 120 million daily users. Toutiao is on pace to pull in about US$2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than US$20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX. In China, the Beijing company is controversial because of its recruiting. ByteDance hires top performers from such giants as Baidu and Tencent Holdings, sometimes raising salaries 50 per cent and tossing in stock options. "Our philosophy is to pay the top of the market to get the best," says the slight 34-year-old in an interview at the company's headquarters, his first with foreign media. "The company that wants to achieve the most, you need the best talent." Top performers can make US$1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with its hiring. Total compensation can exceed US$3 million.

Income inequality in the United States is growing, but the most common economic statistics hide a significant portion of Americans' financial instability by drawing on annual aggregates of income and spending. An article on the Harvard Business Review adds: Annual numbers can hide fluctuations that determine whether families have trouble paying bills or making important investments at a given moment. The lack of access to stable, predictable cash flows is the hard-to-see source of much of today's economic insecurity. We came to understand this after analyzing the U.S. Financial Diaries (USFD), an unprecedented study to collect detailed cash flow data for U.S. households. From 2012 to 2014 we set up research sites in 10 communities across the country. The USFD research team engaged 235 households that were willing to let us track their financial lives for a full year. We tried to record every single dollar the households earned, spent, saved, borrowed, and shared with others. [...] Our first big finding was that the households' incomes were highly unstable, even for those with full-time workers. We counted spikes and dips in earning, defined as months in which a household's income was either 25% more or 25% less than the average. It turned out that households experienced an average of five months per year with either a spike or dip. In other words, incomes were far from average almost half of the time. Income volatility was more extreme for poorer families, but middle class families felt it too.

Samsung recently unveiled its latest flagship televisions at CES 2017, the QLED series. The company is challenging the notion that OLED TVs represent the pinnacle of picture quality in the living room. According to Samsung, the QLED TV represents its best achievement in image quality and viewing experience yet. The Verge reports: Of course Samsung would say that at an event meant to showcase said product. But the company insists it's made very real improvements compared to the flagship TVs it unveiled only a year ago. One of those upgrades pertains to brightness. The QLED TVs reach a peak brightness between 1,500 and 2,000 nits -- up from the 1,000 peak from 2016's lineup. Color reproduction has also been improved. The QLED sets handle DCI-P3 "accurately" and are capable of reproducing "100 percent color volume" -- something Samsung claims to be a world first. "This means they can express all colors at any level of brightness -- with even the subtlest differences visible at the QLED's peak luminance -- between 1,500 and 2,000 nits." Samsung says all of this is possible because it's using a new metal material along with the quantum dot nanocrystals. On the software end, Samsung's 2017 TVs are still powered by Tizen and feature basically the same user interface as last year. But there are some new additions like a sports mode that aggregates scores and other content from your favorite teams and an expanded Music section that lets you Shazam music as it's playing in a TV show and immediately launch that track in Spotify another streaming services. Samsung is also looking to clean up how its TVs look in your living room. New this year is a clear-colored "Invisible Connection cable" that runs from the TV to an external breakout box where you'll find all the HDMI ports and other critical connections (besides power, which is a separate input).

An anonymous reader writes: According to CVE Details, a website that aggregates historical data on security bugs that have received a CVE identifier, during 2016, security researchers have discovered and reported 523 security bugs in Google's Android OS, winner by far of this "award." The rest of the top 10 is made up by Debian (319 bugs), Ubuntu (278 bugs), Adobe Flash Player (266 bugs), openSUSE Leap (259 bugs), openSUSE (228 bugs), Adobe Acrobat DC (227 bugs), Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (227 bugs), Adobe Acrobat (224 bugs), and the Linux Kernel (216 bugs).

When it comes to software vendors, the company for which the largest number of new CVE numbers have been assigned was Oracle, with a whopping 798 CVEs, who edged out Google (698 bugs), Adobe (548 bugs), Microsoft (492 bugs), Novell (394), IBM (382 bugs), Cisco (353 bugs), Apple (324 bugs), Debian Project (320 bugs), and Canonical (280 bugs).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from a centralized source to the crowd. Instead of cables and satellites, BitTorrent piggybacks on the internet bandwidth of its users. Since P2P live streaming is so much cheaper than traditional ways to deliver live content, BitTorrent could pay channel owners more for distribution per viewer. And BitTorrent can offer that content to viewers for free or much cheaper than a cable subscription. The transfer technology and the app that aggregates these channels are both called BitTorrent Live. Now, almost a year after the protocol's debut on smart TVs, and six months after it was supposed to arrive on iPhone, the BitTorrent Live app quietly became available on iOS this week. Until now it's only existed on Mac, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV -- much less popular platforms. And that's after being in development since 2009. The app features 15 channels, including NASA TV, France One, QVC Home and TWiT (This Week In Tech) that you can watch live. The latency is roughly 10 seconds, which could be faster than terrestrial cable, as well as systems like Sling TV that can delay content more than a minute. The problem right now is that BitTorrent Live has a pretty lackluster channel selection. It's still working on striking deals with more name-brand channels. It could offer some for pay-per-view, but cheaper than the same content on traditional TV due to the reduced broadcasting costs.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Scientific American: Eating beef from an animal infected with mad cow disease can lead to an untreatable condition that attacks the brain and is universally fatal, but symptoms can take decades to emerge. Thankfully, Claudio Soto, a neurologist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston, and her team, as well as a team led by Daisy Bougard of the French Blood Establishment in Montpellier, France, have developed new blood-screening technology that can spot Mad Cow Disease (known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) with 100 percent accuracy -- perhaps years before it attacks. From the Scientific American: "Misfolded proteins called prions cause both mad cow and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Once they invade the brain, they begin recruiting normal proteins and forcing them to adopt the same abnormal shape. The prions and the blighted proteins clump together forming increasingly large aggregate deposits that wreak havoc on the brain and invariably lead to death. The disease, however, has a long incubation period. In the interim, the prions hang out in non-brain tissues such as the appendix and tonsils, and because they do not cause symptoms, the infected person becomes a silent carrier. [The two teams] ran the test on blood samples from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease patients in the U.K. and France. The two teams used slightly different methods, but the basic idea was the same: the test essentially mimics the progression of the disease in an accelerated, artificial environment. First the prion proteins are separated from the blood and combined with normal proteins, which take on an abnormal shape, forming aggregate clumps. Then, the aggregates are pulled apart and recombined with more normal proteins. The process is repeated over and over again, in effect replicating the prion proteins until very small quantities are amplified enough to be easily detected. If there are no prions present in the blood, nothing happens. Between the two studies, the test was able to identify a total of 32 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with 100% percent accuracy, and there were no false positives among the 391 controls, which included regular blood donors, patients with a different form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and patients with other neurological diseases. In addition, Bougard's group was able to diagnose variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the blood of two patients 1.3 and 2.6 years before they developed clinical symptoms." The two studies -- "Detection of prions in blood from patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" and "Detection of prions in the plasma of presymptomatic and symptomatic patients with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" -- were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

New submitter troublemaker_23 writes: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, submitted a detailed draft to a key Clinton aide on April 15, 2014, outlining his ideas for a possible run for the presidency and stressing that "The key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them." The ideas, in an email released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, were sent to Cheryl Mills, former deputy White House counsel to Bill Clinton. Mills forwarded it to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook and Barack Obama's 2012 campaign manager David Plouffe. The email is one of a trove from Podesta's gmail account that was obtained by WikiLeaks. About two weeks prior to this, Podesta wrote to Mook that he had met Schmidt and that he (Schmidt) was keen to be the "top outside adviser." In the April 15, 2014 email, Schmidt emphasized that what he was putting forward was a draft, writing, "Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016." It was titled "Notes for a 2016 Democratic campaign." He divided his comments into categories such as size, structure and timing; location; the pieces of a campaign; the rules; and what he called the key things. With regard to size, structure and timing, Schmidt wrote: "Let's assume a total budget of about US$1.5 billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire start-up ceases operation four days after 8 November 2016." As to location, he did not like the idea of using Washington DC as a base and was keen on low-paid workers. "The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly young and hard-working and enthusiastic. It's important to have a very large hiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic, smart and low-paid permanent employees," he wrote. "DC is a poor choice as it's full of distractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhere guarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help."

An anonymous reader writes: Brave, a new privacy and speed focused web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, backed by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich, will pay its users in bitcoin to watch ads. From a PCWorld article, 'Under this plan, advertisers pay for a certain number of impressions, and Brave aggregates those payments into one sum. Websites that participate in the scheme get 55 percent of the money, weighted by how many impressions are served on their sites. For both users and publishers, Brave deposits the money into individual bitcoin wallets, and both parties must verify their identity to claim the funds. This requires an email and phone number for users, and more stringent identification steps for publishers. Users who don't verify will automatically donate their share of the funds back to the sites they visit most.' It appears Brave's strategy hinges on, among other things, collecting your browsing data to display relevant ads. The aforementioned article also says that users will have an option to block all ads by paying a monthly subscription to Brave. Not sure how many people would want to buy that.