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Submission + - Yahoo kills Pipes, Maps, and some TV and Music services in prioritization drive (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Yahoo today announced that it is fine-tuning its focus moving forward, and this means that some products and services are being dropped. In its Q2 2015 progress report, the company explains that it looking to dedicate its energy and resources to "search, communications and digital content."

One of the most surprising casualties is Yahoo Maps — the site will close at the end of June. Despite the closure, maps will still be supported by other Yahoo products such as Flickr, but it illustrates Google's dominance in this arena. Other victims of the cull include Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Mail on old versions of iOS, as well as Yahoo Music and Yahoo TV in some regions.

Comment Re:Waiting on the Raspi (Score 1) 133

by countSudoku() (#49841581) Attached to: Microsoft To Release Low-Cost Windows 10 With Bing Branding

Make that a RPi 2, not the 1 series, which I have two of the little beasties. They're so much fun to futz with! Anyway, I'm not sure why they are porting Win to RPi, since it already comes with a very nice OS that is highly customizable and extendable, and generally several other flavors to boot from, if Raspbian is not what you need for your project. Using the bulk of the horsepower of this little guy for propping up a giant monolithic kernel's GUI such as Win10 might be a lot of wasted cycles to just make the Aero function. Or whatever they call it now. Now, if you could run it headless and get some DOS action down below, then I could see the value for the Windows-savvy folks doing their thing on the software side of this little project system to interface with the GPIOs and other sweet interfaces on RPi. Still, good for them to port it anyway, if just to say mee too. More RPis sold means more support, and that's good for the RPi community at large.

Submission + - Yahoo killing Maps, Pipes & more (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: In case you were wondering what it is exactly that Yahoo does these days, the company says its focus is on "search, communications and digital content." The rest must go, and as such, Yahoo today has announced some things it is getting rid of. For starters, the company is doing away with maps.yahoo.com (a.k.a. Yahoo Maps) at the end of June. Though maps will live on within Yahoo search and Flickr in some fashion. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago."

Comment Re:Sure, sure, sure.... (Score 1) 830

We love you 'merica! With your American Football, and your Imperial measurements, and your overweight people riding scooters at Dizknee Whirled pretending they are disabled and shit! You go, grrrl!

Seriously though, this is one of those 3rd tier issues that you don't bring up until AFTER you forcefully take over the government and dismantle K-Street and all the rats who inhabit it. THEN, we'll know you're not a crackpot, wacko, hoodlum, nogoodnik with the Evil Bit set

Submission + - WikiLeaks releases secret TISA docs

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: The new agreement that would hamstring governments and citizens even further.

the EU would be forbidden from requiring that US companies like Google or Facebook keep the personal data of European citizens within the EU—one of the ideas currently being floated in Germany. Article 9.1 imposes a more general ban on requiring companies to locate some of their computing facilities in a territory: "No Party may require a service supplier, as a condition for supplying a service or investing in its territory, to: (a) use computing facilities located in the Party’s territory."

Article 6 of the leaked text seems to ban any country from using free software mandates: "No Party may require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition of providing services related to such software in its territory." The text goes on to specify that this only applies to "mass-market software," and does not apply to software used for critical infrastructure. It would still prevent a European government from specifying that its civil servants should use only open-source code for word processing—a sensible requirement given what we know about the deployment of backdoors in commercial software by the NSA and GCHQ.

Any agreement whose text has not been publicly released cannot possibly be a good agreement.

Submission + - U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the Net Neutrality FUD Wagon (uschamber.com)

Submitted by Jawnn
Jawnn writes: Blogger Sean Hackbarth writes that Net Neutrality Will Be Unhealthy for Telemedicine. In the article he trots out the same tired arguments we've been hearing for years now — if "innovators" can't buy the network performance they need, everyone suffers (or in this case "Grandma might die"). The fact that network performance (choose your metric) is now, and has always been, available for purchase seems to have conveniently escaped yet another net neutrality opponent.

Submission + - Spider Silk Finally Ready for Commercialization (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We've been hearing about little bits of progress for decades, but spider silk fibers are finally ready to be delivered at commercial scale, thanks to three scientist-founders and large investments ($40M) from SF and SV venture capitalists. Who'll be the first to build a web slinger?

Submission + - PayPal responds to fury over robocalls, will now allow users to opt-out (bgr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, PayPal was lambasted for its new user agreement which allowed the online payments company to robocall and autotext customers at will. What was particularly jarring about the user agreement — set to go into effect on July 1 — is that PayPal reserved the right to contact customers not just for account problems, but also for surveys and promotions. Even worse, PayPal brazenly advised users who weren’t on board with the new agreement that they should simply close their account and move it along.

Naturally, news of PayPal’s new TOS caused something of an uproar online. Thankfully, PayPal has since realized that forcing users to accept automated texts and phone calls wasn’t the wisest of business decisions.

Submission + - Fracking Safe, Says EPA

Submitted by sycodon
sycodon writes: A long-awaited EPA report on hydraulic fracturing concludes that the extraction process has “not led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

Comment Priorities (Score 1) 94

by countSudoku() (#49840101) Attached to: Baidu Forced To Withdraw Last Month's ImageNet Test Results

China is a fast-moving, up-and-comer nation in the modern sense, but they lead the way in air pollution. Some mock our nation's EPA, but you can thank them, and other local entities like them, who put air and water quality above corporate profits, despite the many complaints from the largest abusers and other overly friendly corporate shills and lackeys. Allowing businesses to run amok in the name of a few low-paying jobs and letting them skip out on paying a fair share in taxes is how these things happen. Also, the cheating thing. but that is not new and not unique. Just very very funny when just the other week they crowed long and hard about beating a Google at a search or whatever. Priceless! Next up; China solves the problem with nuclear fission reactors by building them out of thousands of live people who are yelled at to contain the plasma or be fired from their sweet 40 cents a day job.

Submission + - Supreme Court may decide the fate of API's, Klingonese, Dothraki... (slate.com)

Submitted by nerdpocalypse
nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla V Mothra, Google V Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire Nerd World. What is at stake is how a language can be patented. This affects not just programming languages, API's, and everything that runs..well...everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki

Submission + - You thought NSA bulk data collection was dead?

Submitted by fustakrakich
fustakrakich writes: Guess again!
US officials confirmed to the Guardian that in the coming days they will ask a secret surveillance court to revive the program – deemed illegal by a federal appeals court – all in the name of “transitioning” the domestic surveillance effort to the telephone companies that generate the so-called “call detail records” the government seeks to access. The unconventional and unexpected legal circumstance depends on a section of the USA Freedom Act, which Obama signed into law on Tuesday, that provides a six-month grace period to prepare the surveillance and legal bureaucracies for a world in which the National Security Agency is no longer the repository of bulk US phone metadata. During that time, the act’s ban on bulk collection will not yet take effect.

Submission + - Why American Loathe Cable Companies 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Vikas Bajaj writes in the NYT that the results are in and the American Customer Satisfaction Index shows that customer satisfaction with cable TV, Internet and phone service providers have declined to a seven-year low. Of the 43 industries on which the survey solicits opinions, TV and Internet companies tied for last place in customer satisfaction. “Internet and TV have always been among the lowest scoring,” says David VanAmburg, director of the Index. “But this year they’re at the very bottom.” The study, which is based on more than 14,000 consumer surveys, gives companies a rating from 0 to 100. The ACSI reports huge drops in customer satisfaction for Comcast and Time Warner Cable, following their failed merger. Already one of the lowest-scoring companies in the ACSI, Comcast sheds 10 percent to a customer satisfaction score of 54. Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable earns the distinction as least-satisfying company in the Index after falling 9 percent to 51. Joining Time Warner Cable in the basement is ACSI newcomer Mediacom Communications (51), which serves smaller markets in the Midwest and South. “Customer service in these industries has long been bad,” says VanAmburg of Internet and TV providers. “They don’t have a good business model for handling inquiries with efficiency and respect. It goes back a decade plus.”

Even though those complaints are longstanding, customer frustration has risen along with the ever-rising prices. “You compound all that with the prices customers are paying, and that’s the final straw,” says VanAmburg. “They’re opening bills each month and saying ‘I’m paying how much?'” In an age of over-the-top viewing options like Hulu and Netflix, customer dissatisfaction may increasingly translate to companies’ bottom lines. “There was a time when pay TV could get away with discontented users without being penalized by revenue losses from defecting customers,” says Claes Fornell, chairman and founder of the Index. “But those days are over.”

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