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Amazon Blames Social Media for Struggle With Fake Reviews (theguardian.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the blame-game dept.
Amazon has blamed social media companies for its failure to remove fake reviews from its website, arguing that "bad actors" turn to social networks to buy and sell fake product reviews outside the reach of its own technology. From a report: The company says it removed more than 200m suspected fake reviews before they were seen by customers in 2020 alone, but nonetheless has faced continued criticism for the enormous scale of fake and misleading reviews that make it on to its store. This year a Which? investigation found companies claiming to be able to guarantee "Amazon's Choice" status on products -- an algorithmically assigned badge of quality that can push products to the top of search results -- within two weeks, and others claiming to have armies of reviewers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Amazon says the blame for those organisations should lie with social media companies, who it says are slow to act when warned that fake reviews are being solicited on their platforms.
Medicine

Apple Struggles in Push To Make Healthcare Its Greatest Legacy (wsj.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has said the company's greatest contribution to mankind will be in health. So far, some Apple initiatives aimed at broadly disrupting the healthcare sector have struggled to gain traction, according to people familiar with them and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: Apple has envisioned an audacious plan for healthcare, offering its own primary-care medical service with Apple-employed doctors at its own clinics, according to people familiar with the plan and documents. To test that and other bold healthcare ideas, it took over clinics that catered to its employees and built a team with scores of clinicians, engineers, product designers and others. Today those ambitions, which aren't widely known, have largely stalled as Apple has shifted the focus of its health unit to something it knows well: Selling devices, specifically the Apple Watch, according to people familiar with its strategy.

The new primary-care service hasn't gotten off the ground, people familiar with it say. A digital health app launched quietly this year has struggled to keep users engaged, say people familiar with the app and the documents seen by the Journal. Some employees have raised questions internally about the integrity of health data coming from the company's clinics that has been used to support product development, according to people familiar with their concerns and the documents.
Microsoft

Microsoft's Smith Says Secret Subpoenas Hurt US Tech Companies (bloomberg.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."
Firefox

Firefox 3.6 Support Ends April 2012 187

Posted by timothy from the slow-motion-shutdown dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla for some time after switching to the rapid release process talked about releasing Extended Support Releases that would give companies and organizations some breathing space in the race to test and deploy new browser versions. With the first ESR release (which will be Firefox 10), comes the Firefox 3.6 end of life announcement. Firefox 3.6 users will receive update notifications in April to update the browser to the latest stable version by then."
Movies

The Home-Built Dark Knight Batmobile 87

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-the-little-jokers-to-school dept.
ElectricSteve writes "RM Auctions recently declared James Bond's Aston Martin DB5 to be 'the world's most famous car,' but there's no doubt that there is another contender for that title — the Batmobile. One thing that muddies the waters a bit is the fact that the term 'Batmobile' actually describes at least three different vehicles: the modified Lincoln Futura concept car from the '60s TV series, the vaguely Corvette-shaped 1989-and-beyond movie cars, and now the car from the most recent two movies, the military-spec Tumbler. Michigan-based movie props artist Bob Dullam really likes the Tumbler, so he did what any of us would do in his position — he built one of his own from scratch."

Comment Re:And nothing of value is lost (Score 1) 454

by el_$corpio (#32360272) Attached to: UK Newspaper Websites To Become Nearly Invisible

You're assuming that the initial subscription will have a cost. Offering a free subscription (for a month, year, whatever) may bring in enough people. It then becomes a issue of retention when it comes to charging. He may even initially charge a small amount (less than the price of a paper edition) and scale it up slowly.

Who says it has to be profitable immediately?
Businesses

Facebook, Zynga Sign Long-Term Virtual Currency Deal 124

Posted by Soulskill from the money-builds-great-friendships dept.
Despite recent rumors that Facebook and FarmVille developer Zynga were gearing up for a legal battle, the two announced yesterday that they have signed a five-year agreement over how virtual currency will be used. Quoting: "The source of the conflict ... comes down to Facebook's decision to introduce Facebook Credits, an over-arching currency system to be used in all games on its platform. This allows users to purchase just one type of currency for use in Facebook games, rather than buying directly from individual developers — a lack of direct control over its monetization that became a major point of contention for Zynga. Also likely an issue is Facebook's decision to take 30 percent of revenues gathered from credits, with 70 percent allocated to the developers."
The Courts

Writer Peter Watts Sentenced; No Jail Time 299

Posted by timothy from the new-spirit-of-openness dept.
shadowbearer writes "SF writer Peter Watts, a Canadian citizen, whose story we have read about before in these pages, was sentenced three days ago in a Port Huron, MI court. There's not a lot of detail in the story, and although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples) he was not ordered to do any time in jail, was freed, and has returned home to his family. The judge in the case was, I believe, as sympathetic as the legal system would allow him to be."
Privacy

Why Tor Users Should Be Cautious About P2P Privacy 122

Posted by timothy from the but-this-computer's-in-a-safe-location dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I went across your post a few days ago saying that a machine connected to the Internet was all one needed to spy on most BitTorrent users of the Internet. I followed the link to find out that those researchers from INRIA claimed their attacks also worked for BitTorrent users on Tor. I didn't believe it at first, but then today I found this link on the Tor Project. It seems their attacks don't only link your real IP to your BitTorrent files on Tor but also to the web pages that you're browsing! Tell me it's a joke." No joke, but according to Jacob Appelbaum (a Tor developer), the security flaw is more nuanced — and the fault of software outside of Tor. Read on for his explanation of how the privacy benefits of Tor can be easily lost.
Software

Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps For Linux 121

Posted by timothy from the everything-is-amazing-no-one-is-happy dept.
tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."
Image

Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106

Posted by samzenpus from the get-your-face-out-there dept.
Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"

Comment Re:Britney Spears School of Publicity (Score 3, Informative) 116

by el_$corpio (#27041121) Attached to: Psion Accuses Intel of Cybersquatting

I also have a Psion Netbook and have been using mine every day for years. What it lacks in connectivity it makes up for in speed, battery life and applications that do what they should and carry no bloat. The Agenda is still the best calendar app I've used. For example, you can create an entry and then add a (Psion) Word document containing information about the entry, including images, etc.

It turns on instantly. That alone puts it above any of the subnotebooks that are currently calling themselves netbooks. You can pop the CF cards in and out without causing the OS any confusion. You can even get a Windows like front end.

Wireless network cards can be got from eBay without too much difficulty (I've got a couple). You normally get an RS232 cable with the Netbook but it's easier to copy all of the files on the C: drive to a CF card and then copy the CF card to a PC.

Oh, and infrared works fine here - can use it to connect to the internet through my mobile phone and send and receive files.

And the Psion 5 (or 5MX) is completely compatible with these, so you can carry all of this around in your pocket if you don't want to lug around the Netbook.

Stunning machine at the time, still brilliant now (if you accept it's limitations) and a name well worth defending IMHO.

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