• Huawei's Matebook 13 is a conventional laptop with a 3:2 screen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Apart from the 3:2 2160x1440 screen, it has a quad core i7-8565U, 8GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, and two USB type C ports for doing everything (charging, video out, USB stuff).
  
  CPU performance is excellent - it leaves the new Macbook Air absolutely in the dust.  I/O performance is fair, though the Macbook is much faster there, perhaps because of the MacOS filesystem.
  
  It also has a dedicated GPU - a low end MX150, but it's there - so it leaves laptops relying on the integrated Intel GPU in the dust as well.  Perhaps because of that, battery life is just 6 hours, which isn't awful but falls well short of all-day use.
  
  
• Game developer Ammobox file a valid DMCA complaint against Steam for their own game and everyone lived happily ever after.  (TechDirt)
  
  Almost everyone.
  
  
• Samsung, not to be outdone by rival Toshiba, has announced a 1TB eUFS storage chip for smartphones and...  Other smartphones.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Though larger than Toshiba's 512GB device it is slower at "only" 1GB per second.
  
  
• Podcasts to program by.
  
  

• Facebook has been paying teenagers so it could spy on them.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Over 18, that's one thing. If an adult says "You pay me, I let you see my data", that's a valid transaction.  Under 18, go directly to jail.  Do not pass Go.
  
  Tech Crunch has all the details - they've done some great work on this story - and it looks like Facebook seriously fucked up here.

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

• Humble Bundle has cookbooks.
  
  Whether you want to make anteater stew, turtle soup, whatever the heck that thing is pie...  Okay, yeah, they're O'Reilly.  Programming cookbooks for Python, SQL, JavaScript, Raspberry Pi and Arduino, Docker, R, Scala and more.
  
  
• HP's 10th generation ProLiant MicroServer gets a look-at.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I have an old one of these - third generation or something like that, using an AMD Bobcat family CPU.  The starting price is actually very cheap.  I'd like to see a 2.5" version though.
  
  
• Apple's FaceTime had a tiny little bug that lets anyone spy on anyone else.  (Bleeping Computer)  [Updated]
  
  Basically you could trick the other end into thinking the user had answered the call.  Nice work, guys.  We figured this out in the 19th century, but nooo.
  
  The hack worked via a new group call service; Apple have switched that service off until the bug has been fixed and the service has been tested seventeen hundred different ways.
  
  
• Which online storage is right for you?  (ZDNet)
  
  I have both Dropbox and Google Drive - the latter mostly because I ran out of space for my email.  The problem with Dropbox is you can only get more than 1TB by upgrading to their business plans, which require a minimum of three users.
  
  
• Apple death watch, India edition: iPhone sales in India plummeted almost 50% from 2017 to 2018.  (ZDnet)
  
  Apple sold 1.7 million units in India in 2018 - out of 150 million total smartphone purchases.  The OnePlus 6 sold 1 million units there in 22 days.
  
  
• Star Control: Origins returns to GOG.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I picked it up at half price from the Stardock store during the DMCA takedown, but haven't had a chance to play it yet.  Probably in March or April.  2023.
  
  The article also shows a list of the claims behind the DMCA takedown notice, which include obviously uncopyrightable items such as hyperspace, radar, and autopilot.  
  
  
• The headline reads "Uber partner Bell unveils flying taxi".  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Bell?  Wait, that Bell?  Yes, you guessed it, the "flying taxi" is a helicopter.
  
  Okay, it's a four seat autonomous electric quadcopter, so it is something new.  And the fact that Bell is building it suggests that it might actually be real, given that they've been building helicopters since the 1940s.
  
  
• Nvidia issued guidance that they weren't going to meet their revised revenue forecasts and their stock price went splut.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They went all-in on AI and ray tracing with the RTX range, and bumped up prices because those new features make the chips large and expensive to manufacture.
  
  Only problem is, pretty much nothing exists to use those features yet, and they probably won't see truly mainstream support for another two or three years.  
  
  Plus Nvidia had a lot of old cards left in the channel after the crypto mining  bubble burst.  AMD managed that event better in that respect, but on the other hand, during the bubble AMD cards were simply unobtainable.
  
  I think what Nvidia is doing will pay off big in the long run, particularly looking at the specs of TSMC's 5nm node.  It's just going to take a while.
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia, here's their Titan RTX in case you just discovered a bunch of early Apple stock certificates in your grandparents' attic.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• And speaking of TSMC, a chemical contamination at one of their plants may have ruined as many as 10,000 wafers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is in a plant that produces 16nm an 12nm chips, not the latest 7nm, but it could affect Xbox and PlayStation shipments, mid-range phones, and...  Nvidia graphics cards.  It's not a huge shortfall but there's a long lead time in wafer production so it's bound to cause scheduling problems.

• While I snark at Tech Crunch, they are snarking at Instagram.
  
  Both the app and the website went down, refusing all requests, for nearly an hour.
  
  Then they got fixed.
  
  Yeah, that's the whole story.  Next!
  
  
• Pushback on the California privacy legislation from...  Basically, everyone.  (TechDirt)
  
  We're not saying "train wreck", but choo choo CRASH.
  
  
• Many VPNs turn out to be worse than no VPN.  (TechDirt)
  
  If you're not paying for it, they're stealing your data.  If you are paying for it, they might still be stealing your data.
  
  
• Discussions of false DMCA takedown notices have been targeted by false DMCA takedown notices.  (TechDirt)
  
  Fortunately, Google got wise to this and aren't playing along.
  
  
• Facebook is now blocking tools that track Facebook's user trackers. (ProPublica)
  
  The obvious next step is a tool to block Facebook's blocking tool that blocks tools that track Facebook's user trackers.
  
  Of course, this being ProPublica, the shocking ad they use as an illustration is an NRA membership drive.
  
  
• Is Twitter banning users for posting #LearnToCode at smug idiots journalists?  (Reason)
  
  Yes.

• Julia turns 1.1!
  
  Wait, when did it turn 1.0?  And do they have an option for static compilation yet?  (I know that means specialisation doesn't work, but still...)
  
  Update: There is a static compiler!
  
  
• Huawei has launched the View 20, which I mentioned previously...  Sometime.  (AnandTech)
  
  This has a 48MP main camera, and the latest Kirin 980 with Cortex A76.  A 6.4" 1080x2340 display, a big 4000mAh battery, 6/128GB or 8/256GB, a 25MP front camera (why?) and a headphone jack.
  
  That might be a suitable replacement for my old Xperia Z Ultra if I had any money to spare.  (My Z Ultra still works, but it overheated at some point and the battery swelled by half a millimetre or so and the back popped off.  So I'm a wee bit cautious about continuing to use it.)
  
  
• Raspberry Pi's CM3+ is a Raspberry Pi 3B+, minus all the I/O ports, on a DDR2 SO-DIMM module.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nothing to do with memory, it's just a cheap, standard connector that's the right size and has the right number of pins, so you can build a board with all the I/O and then pop the CPU and its attached RAM and flash straight into it.
  
  
• How to outperform anything with anything else.
  
  The answer is: Cheat.  The example shows Python outrunning carefully optimised C++ code, but it does that by cheating.
  
  90% of programming is knowing how to cheat.
  
  
• SK Hynix says DDR5 will be here next year and DDR6 is already in development.  (Guru3D)
  
  Their initial DDR5 chips run at 5.2GHz, with plans to hit 6.4GHz by 2022.
  
  
• Steam aren't the only company randomly censoring games.  Sony are at it too.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
  
  
  Thanks Sony!  Where would we be without you to save us from the terrifying outline of already-censored cartoon boobs?
  
  
• Samsung is ditching plastic packaging.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Prepare for more day one dings and scratches on your future appliance purchases.

• The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
  
  Or in this case, Cameroon.  (TechDirt)
  
  The Cameroonian military is jailing journalists for publishing fake news.  Much as I'd like to see the mainstream media dropped into a supermassive black hole, I don't want to see them in jail.
  
  
• More GDPR bad news may be on the way for Google.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Hmm.

Speaking of anime, Re:Slime is pretty good, but the ops and eds are not.  They needed Megumi Hayashibara.

Other Linus has been trying to build a six-user video editing workstation for months, not because it is in any way remotely practical or cost-effective, but because videos of computers failing in interesting ways get a lot of hits.  Also, he has a habit of dropping fragile $7000 components, so these things can turn without warning into the IT crowd equivalent of a slasher film.

Does he succeed this time?  It's worth a look, because this rig resembles Doc Brown's workshop more than it does the usual neat RGB-lit builds that feature on YouTube tech channels.

• Google's Pixel Slate is a premium Chromebook convertible for the three people who want that. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has the same 12.3" 3000x2000 screen as my HP Spectres, and that screen is amazing. Not quite as bright, and not quite the colour gamut of something like the iPad Pro, but still very good.
  
  But the Slate model reviewed here has half the memory of my Spectres, one eighth the storage, a slower CPU, and a less capable operating system (unless you unlock the Slate and dive into Linux) - and costs more.
  
  On the third hand, HP ran out of Spectres at that price in last November, so you're too late anyway.
  
  The Pixel Slate isn't a bad device by any means; I just don't think there's a market for it.
  
  
• Tencent's share price rose 4% after the Chinese government approved a new batch of mobile games.  (WCCFtech)
  
  Thirty years ago China took a look at the 1984 hellscape they had built, and did a hard turn towards an eclectic mashup of Brave New World and Neuromancer.  Which is an improvement - really it is - but ugh.
  
  
• Intel may have a 35W 8 core CPU up their sleeves.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An engineering sample of a Core i9 9900T has been spotted, and that's a 35W designation, or has been so far.  What makes it believable is that the base clock was listed as 1.7GHz, which is pretty damn slow.
  
  
• 15 US senators are demanding an FCC and FTC investigation into mobile carriers selling user location data.  (CNet)
  
  The list seems to be mostly Democrats for whom I have very little regard, but on this one, they are correct.
  
  
• What Fyre Fest docs reveal about the Bay Area Mafia being perpetually hopped up on goofballs.  (Rolling Stone)
  
  Slightly paraphrased the headline there.  Their subhed is good though.  Other than that, assume everything in the story is wrong.
  
  
• An Atari 2600 emulator in Minecraft.
  
  The latest version of Minecraft has new features that let developers of these things cheat a little - not everything has to be built out of blocks.  This allows the emulator to play Donkey Kong at 1 fps.
  
  
• 7zip's encryption isn't.
  
  Basically.

• We need a word for that feeling you get when you're reading an article that is really getting stuck in to Facebook for their shady activities and and are just about to post a link to it when you realise the author is a hard left conspiracy nut.
  
  
• New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo was apparently sick the day they covered the Bill of Rights in Clown College. (TechDirt)
  

  Let’s make assaulting the press a felony in New York State. Last year saw heinous and deadly attacks against members of the press, journalists must be protected from the threat of physical harm for just for doing their jobs.

  — Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 16, 2019

Let's dig up a few OVA classics today, shall we?

[Goes to upload a picture.  Where is my Images folder?  WHERE IS MY IMAGES FOLDER? Oh, it's right there.  WHY CAN'T I UPLOAD TO IT?  Don't look at me, you wrote this thing.  Oh, huh.  If you reduce your site's main page from 10 posts to 5 because of the number of YouTube videos you've added, it has the side-effect of reducing the number of folders shown per page as well.  Which is fine except when it comes to that dropdown list.

I can fix that in the template with a hard-coded limit of 1000 or something.]

• Intel's single functional (mostly) 10nm CPU gets reviewed.  (AnandTech)
  
  And when I say reviewed I mean it - 14 pages, and some of the individual pages would make Tolstoy blush.
  
  Quick summary though: Eh.
  
  
• Samsung has a 15.6" 4k OLED laptop display on the way.  (AnandTech)
  
  100% DCI-P3, 600 nits, HDR10, and a 120,000:1 contrast range are the key points, all areas where OLED has a huge advantage over LCD.  I have three high resolution laptops (one Dell 4k and the two 3000x2000 HP models I picked up at fire sale prices last year) and they're great, but the Dell is neither particularly bright nor possessed of an especially impressive colour gamut.  
  
  How well Samsung has dealt with the problems specific to OLED we have yet to see.  These should start appearing in laptops around the middle of the year, but it might be wise to hold off for a bit if you're spending your own money.
  
  
• Intel's volumes are down but average selling price is up, suggesting that this is not part of an economic downturn, but rather AMD nibbling away at their low end products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This holds true across the board - notebooks, desktops, and servers.
  
  
• Samsung is forging ahead with its full-custom Arm chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The new Exynos 9820 will feature two of Samsung's M3 cores, as well as two A75 cores (which were the high-end standard core until recently) and four A55 low-power cores.
  
  The previous 9810 had some design issues that prevented it from living up to its potential, so it will be interesting to see how Samsung fares this time around.  Neither Arm themselves nor companies like Qualcomm seem to be interested in chasing Apple in the high-performance wide-issue full-custom space, leaving Samsung alone, apart from companies like Fujitsu who are putting Arm into supercomputers and would set your pocket on fire if they got anywhere near the smartphone market.
  
  
• Asus' VivoMini VC65-C1 is a small - bigger than a NUC, but still small - PC that can play 4K Blu Ray disks. (AnandTech)
  
  Up to 6 cores and 32GB RAM (maybe 64GB or even 128GB depending on stuff), one M.2 slot and two 2.5" drive bays. 8" square and 2" tall. Oh, and no external power brick - it has direct AC in.
  
  
  
  
• Websocketd lets you turn absolutely anything into a websocket server.
  
  Awk?  Snobol?  Fortran IV?  No problem!
  
  Mind you so does Caddy so it's probably best just to use that.  The author of Caddy mentioned that he got the idea for that feature from Websocketd.
  
  Websocketd GitHub.
  
  
• Badger is an LSM database library with built-in versioning.  Versioning is used in transaction management, with stale versions normally getting eliminated once a new transaction is committed, but Badger allows you to keep them around and query them.
  
  Want to see the last five versions of that post you just accidentally overwrote? [This never happens - Ed.] Badger can dig those out for you.
  
  Badger GitHub.
  
  
• The Microsoft 365 online service has been renamed to Microsoft 363.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Oops.
  
  
• The full specs for Motorola's upcoming G7 range have been leaked.  By Motorola.  (CNet)  [Warning - autoplay video with sound]
  
  Oops.

• Court documents show that it wasn't just a couple of individuals in customer support denying refunds to under-age purchasers of in-game items, it was Facebook corporate policy.  (Reveal)
  
  They even had a term for it: Friendly fraud.
  
  This is not going to go well for Facebook.
  
  
• Need to get your blep and blop fix in one convenient place?  Pro tip: You can combined subreddits with a + to create instant custom multireddits.
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Blep+blop/

• JMAP is a modern email protocol that doesn't suck.
  
  It works over HTTPS (okay) and uses JSON (yay!)  It's stateless where IMAP and POP are stateful, but that's probably a win on balance.
  
  There are a couple of Python libraries already, though not yet in the robust state of libraries for protocols that were laid down in 1986.
  
  JSON lacks support for some data types (dates and times) but it is simple, fast, and robust, where formats like XML or YAML are none of those things.
  
  
• A DNA voltmeter for organelles.
  
  Just the thing I need.
  
  
• Apple has laid off 200 employees from their automotive division.  (Mashable)
  
  The whole project never made any sense anyway. 
  
  
• There's a steganographic JavaScript advertising attack in the wild and targeting Mac users.
  
  It downloads an image that looks like a plain white rectangle and a snippet of JavaScript that decodes the hidden content.  Once decoded, it tries to convince you to download a fake update to Adobe Flash which contains the real payload - the Shlayer trojan.
  
  All the rigmarole is to hide from real-time virus scanners, and it worked, for a while.
  
  
• Chrome has added new protection against downloads not specifically requested by the user.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The existing protections are already a significant nuisance when trying to get your purchases from Humble Bundle, but given the story immediately above I guess we'll just have to deal with it.
  
  
• A look at modern big iron: The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's basically a whole lot of PCs on a very fast backplane.  A single-width compute sled can contain 56 cores and 3TB of RAM, and a double-width sled twice as much.  Eight (or four) such sleds fit in a 7U rack module, which can weigh up to 400 pounds fully populated.
  
  
• NumPy has a remote execution bug.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  NumPy is a very widely used Python library for scientific computation.  Turns out it uses Python's Pickle library by default when saving data, which has been known to be unsafe for about a trillion years.  The problem is even documented by NumPy...  Just not actually fixed.
  
  
• Fucking magnets, how do they work?  (Quanta)
  
  Turns out that is actually a good question.
  
  
• NekoMiko gets a pervert patch to bypass the shutoff valve that was blocking steamy content.  (One Angry Gamer)  [Potentially NSFW]
  
  Steam has gotten censorious again - nobody seems to know why they keep changing their minds, and Valve aren't talking - and blocked a whole bunch of games (the above site calls this waifu holocaust 2.0).  So the developers are publishing a tame version and then making a patch file publicly available.
  
  Also, that site was loading while I was typing this in another Chrome window, and it popped up an alert, stole the input focus while I was typing, and disappeared the alert before I had a chance to see what it said.
  
  What the actual fuck was that, Google?  Never, ever, ever do that.
  
  
• Google has appealed to the Supreme Court to smack down the idiots in the appeals court who overturned the original (and correct) ruling in the original trial of Fuckheads Who Want to Copyright API Definitions v. The Rest of the Universe.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
• Some researchers working to make the BGP protocol more robust managed instead to crash a number of routers at major internet providers.  (ZDNet)
  
  Then two weeks later they did it again.
  
  I mean, point made, but could you maybe not experiment on a live patient?

• The Huffington Post just laid off their entire opinion section.  (CNN)
  
  All together now: Isn't that everything they do?
  
  
• BuzzFeed meanwhile is laying off 15% of its employees.  (CNN)
  
  The truly shocking thing here is that BuzzFeed has 1450 staff.  Doing what?  Posting "10 reasons why your cat may be an alien" and "Donald Trump takes orders from Mars and we have the documents to prove it (in Martian)"?
  
  
• Why is all this happening?  Newspapers have been in decline for forty years and their responses to this decline have been to make themselves more and more isolated, irresponsible, and unreliable, and to blame everyone else for their own failings.  The thread is a fascinating mix of historical fact and wilful ignorance.  But it can be summed up in one picture.
  
  
  
  Not that newspapers were ever trustworthy, on the whole.  The ghost of William Randolph Hearst is laughing heartily.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Some people look at old anime that has been remastered in 1080p and ask why.

Fair enough.

 

I was planning to do Magic Knight Rayearth, but the HD clips of the season one opening have been stomped.

Well, okay.

One more, unrelated.

• Looks like AMD will offer a 12-core Ryzen 3000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which doesn't exactly come as a surprise since their CEO all but announced it at CES, but anyway, someone was testing an engineering sample and it landed in a benchmark database.
  
  
  
  
• Why are eyeglasses so expensive?  (LA Times)
  
  Lack of transparency, my dear Watson.
  
  
• Intel's Pentium Silver J5005...  Wait, I recognise that numbering scheme.  That's an Atom.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's one of the good Atoms, though, and is actually a little faster than the Excavator-based Opteron X3421.  But both get squashed like bugs by any real CPU.
  
  
• Do those double-height, double-capacity DDR4 DRAMs do their duty?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yeah, basically.  If you have a system with only two memory slots (like many Dell Inspiron desktops) these might be the perfect solution to upgrade it to 128GB of RAM.  If and when the BIOS supports that.
  
  

• The Supreme Court has denied cert to an appeal of a failed lawsuit against Yelp.  (TechDirt)
  
  This means California Supreme Court decision stands - which is good because they got it right, upholding the protection of social network operators against lawsuits for user-generated content.
  
  
• Facebook will ban you if, among a whole list of other activities, you post in support of someone else they banned.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But they have a nice new user interface to tell you so, so there's that.
  
  
• Millennials say they plan to contact companies for customer service using social media.  (ZDNet)
  
  Hi, Delta Airlines?  This is @SluttyKitty94, and I wanted to complain about...  DON'T LOOK AT MY TUMBLR!
  
  Yeah, no.

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about the sea cucumber.

Wait - 13:05 - that's clearly an Old One.

The terrifying alien being silhouetted by the Aurora Australis above the Antarctic Peninsula.

The animation got a lot more fluid as the series progressed.  

 

• Samsung has announced the 970 EVO Plus as their new top-of-the-line NVMe SSD for consumers. (AnandTech)
  
  Sizes up to 1TB available now, 2TB in April.
  
  It's up to 30% faster than the original 970 in some benchmarks, particularly sequential writes, and is priced the same as the 970.  So much like the Western Digital Black SN750, not a huge upgrade, but a welcome one.
  
  
• There's a security bug in the wifi chips used in some little known products like Microsoft's Surface and Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have one of those, expect it to reboot soon as it downloads a security update from the mothership.
  
  
• Sapphire has launched a crypto mining version of the Radeon 570 with 16GB RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And an HDMI port, so you can actually use it as a video card.
  
  It's a bit of an odd duck since the mining boom has largely busted, but there are some cryptocurrencies which are designed to need a large amount of memory to mine so they can't be swamped by the first person to get a bunch of ASICs back from the foundry.
  
  
• GitLab 11.7 is out with multi-level child epics, Kubernetes API integration, and cross-project pipeline browsing.
  
  No, I don't know either, and I use it every day.
  
  
• A planned update to the Chromium extension API may break ad-blockers including the widely-used uBlock Origin and uMatrix.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is pure coincidence, I'm sure.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• The PHP extension repository is still offline while that security breach is investigated.  (ZDNet)
  
  A clean and verified copy of the installer source code has been pushed to GitHub, but GitHub itself never got the hacked version.  So if you downloaded the installer from source, or if you relied on the version that came with your operating system, which would have been packaged from the GitHub source, you should be safe.  It's only if you grabbed the compromised version directly from the repository that you might have a problem.
  
  
• Intel has consigned their Quark microcontrollers to the well, that didn't work shelf next to the IAPX 432, the i860, and their entire discrete GPU product lineup so far.  (AnandTech)
  
  What discrete GPUs, you ask?  Well, precisely.
  
  
• Toshiba is sampling UFS 3.0 flash drives.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are teeny-tiny devices - the size and thickness of a fingernail - and can store up to 512GB and transfer up to 2.9GB per second.  Obviously the first market is high-end phones, but any small mobile device that needs a lot of fast built-in storage can take advantage of this technology, such as, for example, um, phones.

Social Media News

• Russia is suing Facebook and Twitter for not storing Russian users' data in Russian datacenters where Russia can conveniently steal it all.  (ZDNet)
  
  Facebook and Twitter responded to the lawsuit with, and I quote, "Say 'Moose and squirrel' again!" and then fell out of their chairs laughing hysterically.
  
  
• Reddit and Twitter have both redesigned their websites.
  
  Just click the opt out / return to legacy site option.  I can see what they're going for, but I don't have to like it.

Anime Op/Ed of the Day

Nyawm.

• Why don't people use formal methods?
  
  Because 95% of the time there isn't even a proper requirements doc.
  
  
• The Orange Pi 3 is a competitor to you-know-what.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Made by Shenzhen Xunlong Software (who?) so of course you'd want to integrate it into your next security-critical IOT prototype.
  
  
• Sun's new EPYC-based Ultra 24 workstation.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Okay, there may have been a few aftermarket upgrades.  Like, everything except the case.
  
  
• Some Amazon shareholders have called for the company to stop providing face Rekognition services to the US government.  (Computer Weekly)
  
  Partly because it might be used for border security and immigration enforcement, which shows that these people are dingbats.  There are many valid concerns, with this technology, but those ain't it.

• CNIL (who?) has fined Google 50 million Euros for GDPR violations.
  
  If you visit CNIL's website, you are greeted with this.
  
  
  
  I would bet, oh, 50 million Euros, that they are not GDPR compliant.
  
  
• Facebook's WhatsApp has limited users to forwarding a message five times.  (Reuters)
  
  A limitation that will be bypassed in approximately 0.23 seconds.  Frankly, the people calling for this restriction worry me far more than WhatsApp or its users.

Speaking of aftermarket upgrades...

Bonus Video of the Day

All good, you get to ride the ant.

On second thought, hold the corned beef.  Art by Richard Parry.

Bonus Picture of the Day

Hoag's Object, an atypical galaxy about 600 million light years away in the constellation Serpens.  Why is it structured like that?  Nobody's entirely sure.

Disclaimer: This post may contain traces of cereals containing gluten, soy, egg, fish, crustacea, peanuts, tree nuts, milk, more egg, ants, those little green things, what are they called, capers, butter, cheese, bread, fish again, a different kind of fish, shrimp, no, wait, those are included under crustacea, so molluscs, aglets, look it up, maple and/or maple-flavoured syrup, other sugars including but not limited to sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose, galactose, and maltose, very small rocks, and a duck, unless he's got out again.