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Businesses

Google's New Currents App Is Its Enterprise Replacement For Google+ (theverge.com) 30

Posted by BeauHD from the enterprise-focused dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Now that Google+ is history, today, Google unveiled what will be offered to G Suite users in its place: Currents. The new app "enables people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees." The company says Currents has a new look and feel compared to Google+ -- it seems somewhat similar to my eyes -- and it's been streamlined to make it faster to post content and tag it. Posts from a company's top executives can be given priority in the Currents stream to make sure employees see it. Currents is launching in beta, and Google says G Suite companies can request access to the program starting now. Google+ posts will automatically be transferred over to Currents. (I'm just talking about G Suite posts; personal Google+ posts are a goner at this point.) If the Currents name sounds familiar, it's because it "was previously a magazine app that was the precursor to Google Play Newsstand, which itself was later replaced by Google News," the report notes.
The Almighty Buck

Silicon Valley's Saudi Arabia Problem (nytimes.com) 297

Posted by msmash from the moral-dilemma dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Somewhere in the United States, someone is getting into an Uber en route to a WeWork co-working space. Their dog is with a walker whom they hired through the app Wag. They will eat a lunch delivered by DoorDash, while participating in several chat conversations on Slack. And, for all of it, they have an unlikely benefactor to thank: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Long before the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi vanished, the kingdom has sought influence in the West -- perhaps intended, in part, to make us forget what it is. A medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword, doubling as a modern nation with malls (including a planned mall offering indoor skiing), Saudi Arabia has been called "an ISIS that made it." Remarkably, the country has avoided pariah status in the United States thanks to our thirst for oil, Riyadh's carefully cultivated ties with Washington, its big arms purchases, and the two countries' shared interest in counterterrorism. But lately the Saudis have been growing their circle of American enablers, pouring billions into Silicon Valley technology companies.

While an earlier generation of Saudi leaders, like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, invested billions of dollars in blue-chip companies in the United States, the kingdom's new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has shifted Saudi Arabia's investment attention from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest swinging checkbooks, working mostly through a $100 billion fund raised by SoftBank (a Japanese company), which has swashbuckled its way through the technology industry, often taking multibillion-dollar stakes in promising companies. The Public Investment Fund put $45 billion into SoftBank's first Vision Fund, and Bloomberg recently reported that the Saudi fund would invest another $45 billion into SoftBank's second Vision Fund. SoftBank, with the help of that Saudi money, is now said to be the largest shareholder in Uber. It has also put significant money into a long list of start-ups that includes Wag, DoorDash, WeWork, Plenty, Cruise, Katerra, Nvidia and Slack. As the world fills up car tanks with gas and climate change worsens, Saudi Arabia reaps enormous profits -- and some of that money shows up in the bank accounts of fast-growing companies that love to talk about "making the world a better place."
Android

Google Invests $22 Million In Feature Phone Operating System KaiOS (techcrunch.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the money-talks dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year.

KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozilla's failed Firefox OS experiment, as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better. KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax and Alcatel, and it works with carriers including Sprint and AT&T -- it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with India's Reliance Jio, the challenger telco that disrupted the Indian market with affordable 4G data packages. "This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that still cannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets," said KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville in a statement.
Communications

New York Times CEO: Print Journalism Has Maybe Another 10 Years (cnbc.com) 208

Posted by BeauHD from the sign-of-the-times dept.
New York Times CEO Mark Thompson believes that the newspaper printing presses may have another decade of life in them, but not much more. "I believe at least 10 years is what we can see in the U.S. for our print products," Thompson said on "Power Lunch." He said he'd like to have the print edition "survive and thrive as long as it can," but admitted it might face an expiration date. "We'll decide that simply on economics," he said. "There may come a point when the economics of [the print paper] no longer make sense for us. The key thing for us is that we're pivoting. Our plan is to go on serving our loyal print subscribers as long as we can. But meanwhile to build up the digital business, so that we have a successful growing company and a successful news operation long after print is gone." CNBC reports: Digital subscriptions, in fact, may be what's keeping the New York Times afloat for a new generation of readers. While Thompson said the number of print subscribers is relatively constant, "with a little bit of a decline every time," the company said last week that it added 157,000 digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2017. The majority were new subscribers, but that number also included cooking and crossword subscriptions. Revenue from digital subscriptions increased more than 51 percent in the quarter compared with a year earlier. Overall subscription revenue increased 19.2 percent. Meanwhile, the company's fourth-quarter earnings and revenue beat analysts expectations, "even though the print side of the business is still somewhat challenged," Thompson said. Total revenue rose 10 percent from a year earlier to $484.1 million. New York Times' shares have risen more than 20 percent this year. "Without question we make more money on a print subscriber," Thompson added. "But the point about digital is that we believe we can grow many, many more of them. We've already got more digital than print subscribers. Digital is growing very rapidly. Ultimately, there will be many times the number of digital subscribers compared to print."
Earth

Trump Administration Wants To Fire 248 Forecasters At the National Weather Service (fortune.com) 524

Posted by BeauHD from the drain-the-swamp dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: After a year that saw over $300 million in damages from hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters, the Trump administration is proposing significant cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and hopes to eliminate the jobs of 248 weather forecasters. The idea, which is part of the 2019 fiscal budget proposal and caught the agency by surprise, is being derided by the NWS's labor union, which says the cuts will impact the reliability of future weather forecasts and warnings. All totaled, the Weather Service faces cuts of $75 million in the initial proposal. Some or all of those cuts could be jettisoned before the bill is voted upon. "We can't take any more cuts and still do the job that the American public needs us to do -- there simply will not be the staff available on duty to issue the forecasts and warnings upon which the country depends," said Dan Sobien, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

Further reading: The Washington Post
Medicine

Researchers Find More Evidence For the Strange Link Between Sugar and Alzheimer's (sciencealert.com) 99

Posted by BeauHD from the cognitive-decline dept.
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: People with high blood sugar stand to experience worse long-term cognitive decline than their healthy peers, even if they're not technically type 2 diabetic, new research suggests. The findings are not the first linking diabetes with impaired cognitive functions, but they're some of the clearest yet showing blood sugar isn't just a marker of our dietary health -- it's also a telling predictor of how our brains may cope as we get older. "Our findings suggest that interventions that delay diabetes onset, as well as management strategies for blood sugar control, might help alleviate the progression of subsequent cognitive decline over the long-term," explain the researchers, led by epidemiologist Wuxiang Xie from Imperial College London. The researchers sourced their data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, an ongoing assessment of the health of a representative sample of the English population aged 50 and older, which began in in 2002. For its analysis, the team tracked 5,189 participants -- 55 percent women, with an average age of 66 years -- assessing their level of cognitive function between 2004-2005 to 2014-2015, spanning several waves of the ELSA study. The findings are reported in the journal Diabetologia.
XBox (Games)

Kinect Is Really Dead Now, Basically (gamespot.com) 110

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-an-era dept.
Microsoft has confirmed that it is no longer producing the Kinect adapter that is needed to connect the Kinect to an Xbox One S, Xbox One X, or other Windows device. This comes after Microsoft announced in October 2017 that it was killing off the Xbox One's Kinect camera. GameSpot reports: "After careful consideration, we decided to stop manufacturing the Xbox Kinect Adapter to focus attention on launching new, higher fan-requested gaming accessories across Xbox One and Windows 10," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Polygon. The representative declined to say if Microsoft would ever bring Kinect back. However, the company confirmed that the adapter "will no longer be available" to purchase.

Comment Re:It makes sense. (Score 1) 232

by avm (#55110371) Attached to: The IRS Decides Who To Audit By Data Mining Social Media

A boat's estimated value in many cases has little or nothing to do with the income (declared or otherwise) of its owner. Snap judgements based on external appearances are very often completely wrong, in many different areas of life.

I have known a great number of boaters who worked in assorted building trades, who had boats that were the envy of the folks who could actually afford the waterfront property. One gentleman I knew, who was a framing carpenter, built himself an absolutely beautiful vintage Chris-Craft replica, completely from scratch and powered it with an engine from his retired work pickup truck. The guy was lucky to break $50K/year, but he had a boat that looked like it cost better than twice his income.

Comment It was bound to happen... (Score 1) 594

by avm (#53838945) Attached to: Tesla Employee Calls For Unionization, Musk Says That's 'Morally Outrageous'

...sooner or later. Let's face it, Tesla is doing much better than you might think, given the short amount of time they've been in existence. They're very high profile, and Musk has a lot of money. That alone is enough to attract the inevitable parasites.

As to the claims that this worker is a UAW shill, he may be, or he may not. UAW certainly is not going to own it, nor will he, if this is true. He could simply be a disgruntled worker upset over X condition, and failing to make headway with local management, he is proceeding along his legally available options (rather than doing the easier thing and voting with his feet). HOWEVER, that's giving him and the UAW both a great deal of benefit of the doubt. It is entirely within the scope of union practises to use shills and other underhanded dealings (political donations, anyone?) to get what their leadership wants. It is completely plausible that he is, in fact, on the UAW's payroll. This has been the case longer than most of you posters have been alive.

Unions may have had their time and place once, but it sure as hell has passed them by. Nowadays, they exist to enrich their leadership, and keep their mediocre to piss-poor members employed, at the expense and on the backs of their members who actually give a shit about their job and perform well. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and thanks to crooked leadership raiding the pension fund for personal gain, that's all I'll get for time served.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, anyway. Popcorn anyone?

Comment Ironic (Score 1) 28

by avm (#53475813) Attached to: First Version of Sandboxed Tor Browser Available

Firstly, that the Tor browser has not, according to this article, been sandboxed from the outset. Given the nature of the beast, you'd think this would have been a design consideration from the get-go.

Secondly, that we have an explanation of a sandbox in the summary of the article, as well as the linked article. Wherefore art thou, /.? Thy news is more fit for PHB than BOFH.

Comment Re:Block everyone or the driver? (Score 1) 291

by avm (#53347193) Attached to: US Regulators Seek To Reduce Road Deaths With Smartphone 'Driving Mode'

My viewpoint is that if you can't operate you vehicle safely while making limited use of your smartphone, you can't operate it safely while not using your smartphone.

This. So very much this. Mind you I'm a huge proponent of hands-free, but the overwhelming point is that if you are unable to drive safely without both hands on the wheel, you are unable to drive safely at all. Cars and other motorized vehicles do have more control inputs than just the steering, accelerator and brakes.

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