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Submission + - Google Doodles the Diversity Talk, Struggles to Walk the Diversity Walk

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Monday, Google commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a Google Doodle from guest artist Cannaday Chapman. Back in 2014, Google finally disclosed racial diversity data for the first time, revealing that its tech workforce was only 1% Black. "Put simply," wrote Google HR Chief Laszlo Bock, "Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity." So, how have things changed over the years? According to Google's 2014-2017 'Our Workforce Composition' Charts, not much.

Submission + - New Study Claims That The "Black Death" Was Spread By Humans, Not Rats (bbc.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe. But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice". The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351. "We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News. "So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there]." He and his colleagues then simulated disease outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was spread by: 1) rats 2) airborne transmission 3) fleas and lice that live on humans and their clothes. In seven out of the nine cities studied, the "human parasite model" was a much better match for the pattern of the outbreak. It mirrored how quickly it spread and how many people it affected. "The conclusion was very clear," said Prof Stenseth. "The lice model fits best.It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats. It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person." Plague is still endemic in some countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas, where it persists in "reservoirs" of infected rodents. According to the World Health Organization, from 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths. And, in 2001, a study that decoded the plague genome used a bacterium that had come from a vet in the US who had died in 1992 after a plague-infested cat sneezed on him as he had been trying to rescue it from underneath a house.

Comment Re:Mixed feelings (Score 1) 315

by RobotRunAmok (#55928121) Attached to: Chelsea Manning Files to Run for U.S. Senate in Maryland
She is not running against a Conservative or even a Republican -- yet. She has to first primary against the current Dem in office. Which means the whole "If you don't vote for me you are some kind of bad phobic person" only serves to fracture the Left. She has also tweeted out EXTREMELY anti-cop screeds, which would make her the darling of the BLM crowd, if the BLM crowd weren't traditionally homo/trans phobic (American politics is funny that way). So the only group that really benefits from Manning running is the GOP, who will face an already bloodied Dem candidate, whether it be Manning or the incumbent.

Comment Re:As someone who is trying to wipe out DRM (Score 2) 54

by RobotRunAmok (#55916327) Attached to: Studios Sue Dragon Box in Latest Crackdown on Streaming Devices

>>Please learn to pirate, so that your video habits will stop being used to legitimize the ridiculous idea that software shouldn't be end-user maintainable.

So a studio who paid $100M to create a movie should gift it to you in order that you are able to... do what with it exactly? Copy it onto a second device? A third? Your boyfriend's? Your D&D Club's server? The internet? Help me out with this one... Seems as though if every movie was distributed for free, the creators would lack motivation to give us nice things. What am I missing, I'm not getting the "ridiculous idea" part at all...

Submission + - Project Veritas Exposes Twitter "Shadow Banning", Blocking Opposing Views (zerohedge.com) 6

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the latest of a series of undercover operations targeting the mainstream media and now Social Media, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas has just dropped a new undercover video which reveals Twitter "shadow banning" and creating algorithms that censor certain ideas. The first clip features a former Twitter software engineer who explains how/why Twitter "shadow bans" certain users:

Abhinav Vadrevu: "One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don't know they've been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content." "So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don't know if Twitter does this anymore."

Submission + - Twitter really does suppress accounts of Republicans (projectveritas.com)

Submitted by mi
mi writes: Mr. O'Keefe of Project Veritas has talked to former Twitter employees and posted a new video. Some of the bits are:
  • shadow banning: “they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it”
  • "if it was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump I banned his whole account it’s at your discretion"
  • "A lot of unwritten rules It was never written it was more said"
  • "you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck the majority of it are for Republicans"

We usually think, Twitter has a right to do this. But, if the practice negatively affects its investors, then maybe not — and the accusations should make the company a target of a criminal investigation.

Submission + - SPAM: Uber's Secret Tool for Keeping the Cops in the Dark

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In May 2015 about 10 investigators for the Quebec tax authority burst into Uber Technologies Inc.’s office in Montreal. The authorities believed Uber had violated tax laws and had a warrant to collect evidence. Managers on-site knew what to do, say people with knowledge of the event.

Like managers at Uber’s hundreds of offices abroad, they’d been trained to page a number that alerted specially trained staff at company headquarters in San Francisco. When the call came in, staffers quickly remotely logged off every computer in the Montreal office, making it practically impossible for the authorities to retrieve the company records they’d obtained a warrant to collect. The investigators left without any evidence.

Most tech companies don’t expect police to regularly raid their offices, but Uber isn’t most companies. The ride-hailing startup’s reputation for flouting local labor laws and taxi rules has made it a favorite target for law enforcement agencies around the world. That’s where this remote system, called Ripley, comes in. From spring 2015 until late 2016, Uber routinely used Ripley to thwart police raids in foreign countries, say three people with knowledge of the system. Allusions to its nature can be found in a smattering of court filings, but its details, scope, and origin haven’t been previously reported.

The Uber HQ team overseeing Ripley could remotely change passwords and otherwise lock up data on company-owned smartphones, laptops, and desktops as well as shut down the devices. This routine was initially called the unexpected visitor protocol. Employees aware of its existence eventually took to calling it Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s flamethrower-wielding hero in the Alien movies. The nickname was inspired by a Ripley line in Aliens, after the acid-blooded extraterrestrials easily best a squad of ground troops. “Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
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It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire

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