An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Magazine: As Softpedia reports, the independent IT security institute AV-TEST spent May and June continuously evaluating 20 home user security products using their default settings to see which offered the best protection. Only four of those products achieved a top score, and one of them was Windows Defender. The other three are F-Secure SAFE 17, Kaspersky Internet Security 19.0, and Norton Security 22.17. The big difference between these and Windows Defender is the fact Microsoft includes Windows Defender for free with Windows 10, where as the others require a paid subscription to continue being fully-functional. "Of the other products evaluated, Webroot SecureAnywhere 9.0 came last," adds PC Magazine. "Those just missing out on the top score while still earning an AV-TEST 'Top Product' award include Avast Free AntiVirus 19.5, AVG Internet Security 19.5, Bitdefender Internet Security 23.0, Trend Micro Internet Security 15.0, and VIPRE AdvancedSecurity 11.0."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is eliminating the DirecTV Now brand name it uses for its struggling Internet-based TV service. DirecTV Now will become "AT&T TV Now" later this summer, AT&T announced today. DirecTV Now (the future "AT&T TV Now") offers a bundle of linear TV channels, similar to traditional cable or satellite services, and AT&T said its core offering won't be changed. AT&T's 2015 purchase of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV network, doesn't seem to be paying off as AT&T hoped. AT&T launched DirecTV Now -- a stripped-down, online-only version of DirecTV -- in 2016, and it was immediately plagued by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels.

While the technical problems got sorted out, AT&T's subscriber gains were short-lived. As we wrote last week, AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019 after announcing a series of price increases. The 946,000-subscriber loss consisted of a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in AT&T's DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services, as well as 168,000 lost subscribers to DirecTV Now. The losses are much bigger when you look at the past year instead of just the past three months. Including all three services, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2018 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. DirecTV Now subscribers dropped from 1.8 million to 1.3 million in the past year. The report notes that the satellite TV service will still keep the DirecTV name, at least for the time being. AT&T said the actual DirecTV Now service will remain the same despite the name change. "Our DirecTV Now subscribers will simply need to re-accept the terms of service and their streaming will continue as usual without interruption," AT&T said.

Authorities in the United Kingdom have made unauthorized copies of data stored inside a EU database for tracking undocumented migrants, missing people, stolen cars, or suspected criminals. From a report: Named the Schengen Information System (SIS), this is a EU-run database that stores information such as names, personal details, photographs, fingerprints, and arrest warrants for 500,000 non-EU citizens denied entry into Europe, over 100,000 missing people, and over 36,000 criminal suspects. The database was created for the sole purpose of helping EU countries manage access to the passport-free Schengen travel zone. The UK was granted access to this database in 2015, even if it's not an official member of the Schengen zone. Further reading: EU Votes To Create Gigantic Biometrics Database.

An anonymous reader writes: To stay on Beijing's good side, U.S. filmmakers are willing to kowtow to China's authoritarian regime, and there seems no limit to their willingness to acquiesce. Take Top Gun: Maverick, a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic action film that made Tom Cruise a superstar. After the sequel's trailer was unveiled at San Diego's ComicCon last week, alert fans noted that the iconic leather flight jacket worn by Cruise's character in the original film had been altered. All of the patches from the original film were there except for flags representing Chinese adversaries Japan and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Those flags were missing. The culprits were soon pretty obvious. The Hollywood Reporter found that the Chinese company Tencent is co-financing the sequel. Co-producing the film along with Paramount Pictures is Skydance, which is partially owned by Tencent.

"Top Gun is an American classic, and it's incredibly disappointing to see Hollywood elites appease the Chinese Communist Party," Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lamented to the Washington Free Beacon. "The Party uses China's economy to silence dissent against its brutal repression and to erode the sovereignty of American allies like Taiwan. Hollywood is afraid to stand up for free speech and is enabling the Party's campaign against Taiwan." Senator Lindsey Graham, a colleague of Cruz's, chimed in. "I hate to see the flag removed because of Chinese financing," he said in an interview with TMZ. "It's nothing the government can do, but I think it sucks." Nor is Top Gun: Maverick the only example of genuflection. China is almost uniformly portrayed in American movies as a technologically advanced superpower (see movies such as The Martian, 2012, and Looper). In Looper, a science-fiction drama, a time-traveler is learning French and saving his money so that he can move to Paris. But his boss, who is from the future, says he is making a mistake.

For those of us who live in places where driving directions are available at our fingertips, it might be surprising to learn that millions of miles of roads around the world have yet to be mapped. From a blog post: For more than 10 years, volunteers with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project have worked to address that gap by meticulously adding data on the ground and reviewing public satellite images by hand and annotating features like roads, highways, and bridges. It's a painstaking manual task. But, thanks to AI, there is now an easier way to cover more areas in less time". With assistance from Map With AI (a new service that Facebook AI researchers and engineers created) a team of Facebook mappers has recently cataloged all the missing roads in Thailand and more than 90 percent of missing roads in Indonesia. Map With AI enabled them to map more than 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand in only 18 months, going from a road network that covered 280,000 miles before they began to 600,000 miles after. Doing it the traditional way -- without AI -- would have taken another three to five years, estimates Xiaoming Gao, a Facebook research scientist who helped lead the project.

"We were really excited about this achievement because it has proven Map With AI works at a large scale," Gao says. Starting today, anyone will be able to use the Map With AI service, which includes access to AI-generated road mappings in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with more countries rolling out over time. As part of Map With AI, Facebook is releasing our AI-powered mapping tool, called RapiD, to the OSM community. RapiD is an enhanced version of the popular OSM editing tool iD. RapiD is designed to make adding and editing roads quick and simple for anyone to use; it also includes data integrity checks to ensure that new map edits are consistent and accurate. You can find out more about RapiD at mapwith.ai.

DRAM is just as much a commodity as oil. But manufacturers can only dream about the benefits of negotiating supply together. From a report: You've got to feel for the world's biggest suppliers of DRAM. Makers of these chips, which temporarily store information in PCs, smartphones and services, endured years of boom-bust profit swings and bruising competition long before the trade war began. The sector finally consolidated into just three companies holding 95% of global supply of DRAM. And yet earnings stability still eludes them. SK Hynix early Thursday posted an 88% drop in second-quarter net income, the lowest in three years and missing estimates. Investors cheered when the South Korean company concurrently announced that it will slow expansion.

SK Hynix supplies around 30% of DRAM. As much as manufacturers would like to tell you otherwise, these chips are all pretty similar, which is why they're considered a commodity. And with most commodities, like oil, prices shift with supply and demand. Profits, in turn, depend on balancing price and supply against the cost of the multi-billion dollar factories required to churn out these chips. It's no easy task. In fact, profitability is as much a function of game theory as capacity and cost management. If you cut supply while your competitor maintains output, prices may rise -- but most of that benefit goes to your rival and you miss out. If no one cuts supply even when demand is falling, then you're all likely to suffer lower prices, which could drag you into the red.

There's a collection of 14 nations well aware of how this works that came up with an ingenious solution: Sit down and negotiate supply together. Except they're peddling oil, not chips, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries can't always see eye to eye.

HMD is bringing the latest version of the Nokia 2, called the "Nokia 2.2," to the U.S. For $139, it features a notched camera design, a plastic body, and a removable battery. Ars Technica reports: HMD is delivering a good package for the price, with a fairly modern design, the latest version of Android, and a killer update package with two years of major OS updates and three years of security updates. On the front, you have a 5.71-inch, 1520x720 IPS LCD with a flagship-emulating notch design and rounded corners. There's a sizable bezel on the bottom with a big "Nokia" logo on it, but it's hard to complain about that for $140.

This is a cheap phone, so don't expect a ton in the specs department. Powering the Nokia 2.2 is a MediaTek Helio A22 SoC, which is just four Cortex A53 cores at 2GHz. The U.S. version gets 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage version with an option to add a MicroSD card. The back and sides are plastic, and on the side you'll find an extra physical button, which will summon the Google Assistant. The back actually comes off, and -- get this -- you can remove the 3000mAh battery! Speaking of unnecessarily removed smartphone features from the past, there's also a headphone jack. Unfortunately, it's missing some key features to keep the price down. There's a microUSB port instead of a USB-C port, no fingerprint reader, and cameras that have low expectations.

Since it is a GSM phone, it will be supported by T-Mobile and AT&T networks, along with all their MVNOs.

Amazon workers around the world are going on strike today to bring attention to the working conditions they endure. "Some are arguing that buying from Amazon during Prime Day is akin to crossing a picket line," reports Quartz. From the report: As the two-day bacchanal of discounted Amazon offerings begins, workers at its fulfillment centers around the U.S. continue to complain of extremely odious quotas, limited bathroom breaks, mandatory holiday shifts, and the need for pain medication just to get through their 10-hour work days.

The U.S.: Workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center will be walking out during a six-hour period that overlaps with the end of the facility's morning shift and the start of its evening shift. There are about 1,500 full-time employees at the facility, according to the Daily Beast.

Germany: Hundreds of employees at seven facilities will be striking today and tomorrow, over longstanding issues with employee pay. âoeWhile Amazon holds a giant Prime-Day bargain hunt, employees are deprived of a living wage,â Orhan Akman, a representative from the German labor union Ver.di, said in a statement shared with Quartz.

The UK: The GMB trade union will be staging protests at Amazon facilities across the country. Some of the most shocking accounts issues of issues faced by Amazon warehouse workers have come out of the UK. One undercover writer said they witnessed co-workers urinating in bottles to avoid missing quotas by taking bathroom breaks.

Elsewhere in Europe: Workers in Spain and Poland will also be organizing demonstrations at Amazon facilities across their countries throughout the week. Here's what Amazon had to say about the demonstrations and walkouts: "Events like Prime Day have become an opportunity for our critics, including unions, to raise awareness for their cause, in this case, increased membership dues. These groups are conjuring misinformation to work in their favor, when in fact we already offer the things they purport to be their cause -- industry leading pay (full-time employees at our Shakopee facility make $16.25 - $20.80), benefits, and a safe workplace for our employees. We can only conclude that the people who plan to attend the event on Monday are simply not informed. If these groups -- unions and the politicians they rally to their cause -- really want to help the American worker, we encourage them to focus their energy on passing legislation for an increase in the federal minimum wage, because $7.25 is too low."

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

IQ test scores have been increasing for 100 years, reports a senior journalist at BBC Future. He also writes that there's evidence "that we may have already reached the end of this era -- with the rise in IQs stalling and even reversing."

But this raises an even larger question: did a century of increasing scores on IQ tests bring benefits to society? You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are, but it's not quite this simple... Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as "95% fat-free" sounds healthier than "5% fat", for instance -- a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages. People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias -- our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That's a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.

Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias -- the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses -- a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.) Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of "temporal discounting", which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That's essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.

Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills -- such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people's degrees. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction," and suggests "we might also make a more concerted and deliberate effort to improve those other essential skills too that do not necessarily come with a higher IQ..."

"Ideally, we might then start to see a steep rise in rationality -- and even wisdom... If so, the temporary blip in our IQ scores need not represent the end of an intellectual golden age -- but its beginning."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Another very minor kerfuffle has broken out in the community for the Go programming language. When its official Twitter account asked for feedback on the new look of its web site, one developer suggested that it had been a mistake to add the Google logo to the lower-right of the home page. "A lot of people associate it with a commercial Google product."

Following the suggested procedure, he then created an issue on GitHub. ("Go is perceived by some as a pure Google project without community involvement. Adding a Google logo does not help in this discussion.") The issue received 61 upvotes (and 30 downvotes), eventually receiving a response from Google software engineer Andrew Bonventre, the engineering lead on the Go Team.

"Thanks for the issue. We spent a long time talking about it and are sensitive to this concern. It's equally important to make it clear that Google supports Go, which was missing before (Much like typescriptlang.org). Google pays for and hosts the infrastructure that golang.org runs on and we hope the current very small logo is a decent compromise." He then closed the issue.

The developer who created the issue then responded, "I get that you've discussed this internally. This is a great opportunity to discuss it with the community. I'm thankful to Google for financing the initial and ongoing development of Go but Google is not the only company investing [in] Go. I would like to move the Google logo into an separate section, together will the major stakeholders of the project."

In a later comment he added "I value Google's participation in Go and I'm not arguing to change that. Having the Google logo in the corner of each golang.org page suggests that this is a pure Google project when it is not..."

For some perspective, another Go developer had also suggested "animate the gopher's eyes on the website."

"Thanks, but we're not going to do this," responded the engineering lead on the Go Team. "We've discussed it before and it would be way too distracting."

A combination of climate change, bad policies and political apathy is steadily pushing India into a catastrophic water crisis that threatens stability in South Asia. From a report: Recent studies document that glaciers feeding the Indian subcontinent's rivers will recede rapidly, while rapid ground water depletion poses an existential challenge to agriculture. The southwest monsoons remain the biggest source of water in the subcontinent. The monsoons lead to a combination of water sources supporting human habitats that includes glaciers, surface irrigation and ground water. But redundancy and surplus have gone missing from this once abundant system. Taking their place are galloping shortages.

Even the best-case scenarios are "scary," water researcher Aditi Mukherjee told Asia Times. Mukherjee is one of the editors of a landmark study that was published earlier this year. It predicts a terrible loss of the glaciers that dot the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region. "The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment [PDF]" says that even if urgent global action on climate change is able to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees centigrade, it will still lead to a loss of a third of the glaciers in the region by the year 2100.

If the temperatures rise by 2.7 degrees centigrade, then half the glaciers will be gone. And if the current rate of global warming continues and temperatures rise by 6 degrees centigrade, then two-thirds of the glaciers will melt away. This has major implications for India, China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. While the nearly 250 million who live in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region will be most impacted from the outset, another 1.65 billion people who depend on the glacier-fed rivers are primarily at risk. "Even if we look at the best case scenario, which means limiting global warming by 1.5C, we are looking at a 36% loss of glaciers," said Mukherjee. Further reading: Nearly two dozen cities in India will be out of water by next year.

The Chromium-powered Edge browser is now available on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 for testing today. The Verge reports: The release comes two months after Chromium Edge first debuted on Windows 10, and a month after it appeared on macOS. Microsoft is releasing the daily Canary builds initially, and plans to support the weekly Dev channel "soon." You can download the installer over at Microsoft's Edge Insider site. "You will find the experience and feature set on previous versions of Windows to be largely the same as on Windows 10, including forthcoming support for Internet Explorer mode for our enterprise customers," explains a Microsoft Edge team blog post. While most features will be the same, dark mode is missing and Microsoft says there is no support for AAD sign-in.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's disappearance in March 2014 instantly become a global news phenomenon, as multiple countries joined the search for the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew. But the mystery is still swirling five years on. The Atlantic's July cover story looks at all of the known evidence about how MH370 vanished into the Indian Ocean to deliver the clearest picture to date of what happened: that in all likelihood the plane was intentionally crashed by the pilot. From the report: In truth, a lot can now be known with certainty about the fate of MH 370. First, the disappearance was an intentional act. It is inconceivable that the known flight path, accompanied by radio and electronic silence, was caused by any combination of system failure and human error. The story also tracked down Blaine Gibson, an American who has taken it upon himself to recover pieces of MH370 wreckage. Gibson has collected more plane fragments than any other person or entity -- and on beaches hundreds of miles apart. What Gibson's discovery of so many pieces of debris has confirmed is that the signals analysis was correct. The airplane flew for six hours until the flight came suddenly to an end. There was no effort by someone at the controls to bring the plane down gently. It shattered. Amid the bizarre conspiracy theories that continue to surround the disappearance of MH370, Gibson has become a target of threats and abuse. Yet his work to recover pieces of MH370 continues.

How many words can you fit in a subtitle? For a slew of modern books, the answer seems to be as many as possible. From a report: Just look at Julie Holland's "Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy," Erin McHugh's "Political Suicide: Missteps, Peccadilloes, Bad Calls, Backroom Hijinx, Sordid Pasts, Rotten Breaks, and Just Plain Dumb Mistakes in the Annals of American Politics" and Ryan Grim's "We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement." Blame a one-word culprit: search.

Todd Stocke, senior vice president and editorial director at Sourcebooks, said that subtitle length and content have a lot to do with finding readers through online searches. "It used to be that you could solve merchandising communication on the cover by adding a tagline, blurb or bulleted list," he said. But now, publishers "pack the keywords and search terms into the subtitle field because in theory that'll help the book surface more easily." He should know. Sourcebooks will publish Shafia Zaloom's "Sex, Teens, and Everything in Between: The New and Necessary Conversations Today's Teenagers Need to Have about Consent, Sexual Harassment, Healthy Relationships, Love, and More" in September.

Amazon allows up to 199 characters for a book's title and subtitle combined, making the word combination possibilities, if not endless, vast. Anne Bogel, host of the podcast "What Should I Read Next?," is not generally a fan of the trend. "I don't feel respected as a reader when I feel like the subtitle was created not to give me a feeling of what kind of reading experience I may get, but for search engines," she said. When Bogel asked author friends how they came up with their subtitles, several told her they can't even remember which words they ended up using. That being said, sometimes titular long-windedness works.

"Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors. "The Dashboard first launched seven years ago with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005 and saw its final update in 2011 with the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion." From the report: The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade. In particularly, Dashboard became well known for its desktop Sticky Note feature and its overall skeuomorphic approach best emphasized by the clock, stocks, and calculator widgets, a design philosophy that formed the foundation of the first version of iOS that launched a few years after OS X Tiger. It wasn't until iOS 7 in 2013 that Apple would abandon that aesthetic for a flatter, more modern one that eventual carried back over to its desktop approach.

Since 2011, Dashboard has been accessible in various forms, but it's had none of its widget design or UI updated, making it a bit of an anachronism existing behind the scenes on macOS. With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple disabled the application by default, but still allowed users to access it either as a hotkey overlay or its own separate space within Mission Control. Now, in macOS Catalina, it appears Dashboard is going away for good. Appleosophy tried to disable and enable the Dashboard via Terminal only for the system to show it as missing even after a forced reboot. The Launchpad overlay also shows the Dashboard app icon as a question mark, the same as with the broken up and effectively killed off iTunes.

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the group has approved funding for the hybrid Libre RISC-V CPU/VPU/GPU, which will "pay for full-time engineering work to be carried out over the next year, and to pay for bounty-style tasks."

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl explains why that's significant: High security software is irrelevant if the hardware is fundamentally compromised, for example with the Intel spying backdoor co-processor known as the Management Engine. The Libre RISCV SoC was begun as a way for users to regain trust and ownership of the hardware that they legitimately purchase.

This processor will be the first of its kind, as the first commercial SoC designed to give users the hardware and software source code of the 3D GPU, Video Decoder, main processor, boot process and the OS.

Shockingly, in the year 2019, whilst there are dozens of SoCs with full source code that are missing either a VPU or a GPU (such as the TI OMAP Series and Xilinx ZYNQ7000s), there does not exist a single commercial embedded SoC which has full source code for the bootloader, CPU, VPU and GPU. The iMX6 for example has etnaviv support for its GPU however the VPU is proprietary, and all of Rockchip and Allwinner's offerings use either MALI or PowerVR yet their VPUs have full source (reverse engineered in the case of Allwinner).

This processor, which will be quad core dual issue 800mhz RV64GC and capable of running full GNU/Linux SMP OSes, with 720p video playback and embedded level 25fps 3D performance in around 2.5 watts at 28nm, is designed to address that imbalance. Links and details on the Libre RISC-V SoC wiki.

The real question is: why is this project the only one of its kind, and why has no well funded existing Fabless Semiconductor Company tried something like this before? The benefits to businesses of having full source code are already well-known.

Suren Enfiajyan shared this story from Science magazine: Genes are a powerful driver of risk for autism, but some researchers suspect another factor is also at play: the set of bacteria that inhabits the gut. That idea has been controversial, but a new study offers support for this gut-brain link. It reveals that mice develop autismlike behaviors when they are colonized by microbes from the feces of people with autism. The result doesn't prove that gut bacteria can cause autism. But it suggests that, at least in mice, the makeup of the gut can contribute to some hallmark features of the disorder.

"It's quite an encouraging paper," says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland who was not involved in the research. The idea that metabolites -- the molecules produced by bacterial digestion -- can influence brain activity "is plausible, it makes sense, and it will help push the field forward..." Compared with mice colonized with bacteria from children without autism, the mice that inherited a microbiome from a child with autism were less social and showed more repetitive behavior, the authors report today in Cell. Mice with the autism-derived microbiome also had lower levels of several bacterial species that the researchers suspect could be beneficial...

"There's still a lot of missing links," says Jun Huh, an immunologist at Harvard University who studies the relationship between bacteria and brain function. "But I think the real importance of this study is to show -- for the first time -- that there's a causal relationship between the bacterial community and [autismlike] behavior."
UPDATE (6/21/2019): Some online criticism of the study suggests that the data may have been misinterpreted.

From a report: Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn't that they had missed out on payments for a single song -- it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years. The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren't.

Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it's one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. "Every second that goes by and it's not fixed, I'm dripping pennies," said the musician. Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there's no need to verify the accuracy of a song's metadata before it gets released, and there's no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. As a result, the problem is way bigger than a name being misspelled when you click a song's credits on Spotify. Missing, bad, or inconsistent song metadata is a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table that never gets paid to the artists who earned that money.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Dot: A consumer advocacy group has found that not all Facebook users have been given the ability to opt out of the company's facial recognition. According to Consumer Reports, despite Facebook rolling out a new privacy setting last year allowing users to choose whether the company can use such technology to detect them in photos, some users say they have never been granted the option. After analyzing the accounts of 31 users throughout the U.S., Consumer Reports discovered that 8 accounts, or roughly 25 percent, did not have the face recognition setting. Consumer Reports set up its own test accounts to determine whether the privacy setting would be available but found that around half a dozen did not have the ability to disable face recognition.