By BeauHD from
Slashdot's empire-building department:
Combined, Disney and Lucasfilm's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars: The Force Awakens have surpassed $4.06 billion in ticket sales at the worldwide box office. That's more than what Disney paid to buy George Lucas' Star Wars franchise. From the Hollywood Reporter: While an interesting benchmark, it doesn't, of course, account for the hundreds of millions spent to produce and market the trio of films, or the fact that Disney splits box-office grosses with theater owners. Conversely, Disney has minted additional money from lucrative ancillary revenue streams, merchandising sales and theme park attractions. Opening in North America on Dec. 15, The Last Jedi zoomed past the $900 million mark on Thursday, finishing the day with $934.2 million globally, including $464.6 million domestically and $469.6 internationally (it doesn't land in China until Jan. 5). The sequel to The Force Awakens was directed by Rian Johnson, and has dominated the Christmas corridor. The Last Jedi will jump the $1 billion mark over New Year's weekend on its way to becoming the top-grossing 2017 release, eclipsing the $1.264 billion earned by fellow Disney title Beauty and the Beast. In December 2015, filmmaker J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens shattered numerous records on its way to grossing $2.068 billion globally, including an all-time best $936.7 million in North America, not accounting for inflation.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's up-and-at-em department:
ProPublica has found inconsistent rulings on hate speech after analyzing more than 900 Facebook posts submitted to them as part of a crowd-sourced investigation into how the world's largest social network implements its hate-speech rules. "Based on this small fraction of Facebook posts, its content reviewers often make different calls on items with similar content, and don't always abide by the company's complex guidelines," reports ProPublica. "Even when they do follow the rules, racist or sexist language may survive scrutiny because it is not sufficiently derogatory or violent to meet Facebook's definition of hate speech." From the report: We asked Facebook to explain its decisions on a sample of 49 items, sent in by people who maintained that content reviewers had erred, mostly by leaving hate speech up, or in a few instances by deleting legitimate expression. In 22 cases, Facebook said its reviewers had made a mistake. In 19, it defended the rulings. In six cases, Facebook said the content did violate its rules but its reviewers had not actually judged it one way or the other because users had not flagged it correctly, or the author had deleted it. In the other two cases, it said it didn't have enough information to respond. "We're sorry for the mistakes we have made -- they do not reflect the community we want to help build," Facebook Vice President Justin Osofsky said in a statement. "We must do better." He said Facebook will double the size of its safety and security team, which includes content reviewers and other employees, to 20,000 people in 2018, in an effort to enforce its rules better. He added that Facebook deletes about 66,000 posts reported as hate speech each week, but that not everything offensive qualifies as hate speech. "Our policies allow content that may be controversial and at times even distasteful, but it does not cross the line into hate speech," he said. "This may include criticism of public figures, religions, professions, and political ideologies."
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's here-we-go-again department:
Dangerous_Minds shares a report from ThreatPost: Ancestry.com said it closed portions of its community-driven genealogy site RootsWeb as it investigated a leaky server that exposed 300,000 passwords, email addresses and usernames to the public internet. In a statement issued over the weekend, Chief Information Security Officer of Ancestry.com Tony Blackham said a file containing the user data was publicly exposed on a RootsWeb server. On Wednesday, Ancestry.com told Threatpost it believed the data was exposed on November 2015. The data resided on RootsWeb's infrastructure, and is not linked to Ancestry.com's site and services. Ancestry.com said RootsWeb has "millions" of members who use the site to share family trees, post user-contributed databases and host thousands of messaging boards. The company said RootsWeb doesn't host sensitive information such as credit card data or social security numbers. It added, there are no indications data exposed to the public internet has been accessed by a malicious third party. The company declined to specify how and why the data was stored insecurely on the server. "Approximately 55,000 of these were used both on RootsWeb and one of the Ancestry sites, and the vast majority of those were from free trial or currently unused accounts. Additionally, we found that about 7,000 of those password and email address combinations matched credentials for active Ancestry customers," Blackham wrote.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's blast-from-the-past department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twenty years ago this week, on December 29, 1997, Bill Gates bought Microsoft a $450 million late Christmas present: a Sunnyvale-based outfit called Hotmail. With the buy -- the largest all-cash Internet startup purchase of its day -- Microsoft plunged into the nascent world of Web-based email. Originally launched in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia as "HoTMaiL" (referencing HTML, the language of the World Wide Web), Hotmail was initially folded into Microsoft's MSN online service. Mistakes were made. Many dollars were spent. Branding was changed. Spam became legion. Many, many horrendous email signatures were spawned. But over the years that followed, Hotmail would set the course for all the Web-based email offerings that followed, launching the era of mass-consumer free email services. Along the way, Hotmail drove changes in Windows itself (particularly in what would become Windows Server) that would lay the groundwork for the operating system to make its push into the data center. And the email service would be Microsoft's first step toward what is now the Azure cloud.
Former Microsoft executive Marco DeMello, now CEO of mobile security firm PSafe Technology, was handed the job of managing the integration of Hotmail as the lead program manager for MSN -- Microsoft's own answer to America Online. In an interview with Ars, DeMello -- who would go on to be director of Windows security and product manager for Exchange before leaving Microsoft in 2006 -- recounted how, right after he was hired in October of 1996 to manage MSN, he was summoned to Redmond for a meeting with Bill Gates. "He gave me and my team the mission of basically finding or creating a system for free Web-based email for the whole world that Microsoft would offer," DeMello said.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's from-under-our-noses department:
If you searched for the words "climate change" into Google, until earlier this week, you could have gotten an unexpected result: ads that call global warming a hoax. "Scientists blast climate alarm," said one that appeared at the top of the search results page during a recent search, pointing to a website, DefyCCC, that asserted: "Nothing has been studied better and found more harmless than anthropogenic CO2 release." Another ad proclaimed: "The Global Warming Hoax -- Why the Science Isn't Settled," linking to a video containing unsupported assertions, including that there is no correlation between rising levels of greenhouse gases and higher global temperatures. These references were first reported by The New York Times (the link may be paywalled). From a report: America's technology giants have come under fire for their role in the spread of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign, prompting promises from Google and others to crack down on sites that spread disinformation. Less scrutinized has been the way tech companies continue to provide a mass platform for the most extreme sites among those that use false or misleading science to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Google's search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it. Not everyone who uses Google will see climate denial ads in their search results. Google's algorithms use search history and other data to tailor ads to the individual, something that is helping to create a highly partisan internet. A recent search for "climate change" or "global warming" from a Google account linked to a New York Times climate reporter did not return any denial ads. The top results were ads from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. But when the same reporter searched for those terms using private browsing mode, which helps mask identity information from Google's algorithms, the ad for DefyCCC popped up. [...] The climate denialist ads are an example of how contrarian groups can use the internet's largest automated advertising systems to their advantage, gaming the system to find a mass platform for false or misleading claims.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's hindsight-is-20/20 department:
Yesterday, Apple officially apologized for slowing down older phones in order to compensate for degrading batteries. In a letter to customers, Apple said, "We apologize," offering anyone with an iPhone 6 or later a battery replacement for $29 starting in late January through December 2018 -- a discount of $50 from the unusual replacement cost. They're also promising to add features to iOS that provide more information about the battery health in early 2018.
Apple's response has left many wondering whether or not it is enough. Even though they are discounting the cost of a battery replacement, for example, they are still profiting from each battery replacement. At the end of the day, "Apple only came clean after independent investigation, giving the whole situation an air of underhanded secrecy," writes Macworld. Should Apple have responded differently to the battery controversy? In the first place, should Apple even issue a software update to older devices to purposefully throttle the CPU and prevent the phones from randomly shutting down when experiencing rapid power draw?
Quinn Nelson via Snazzy Labs explains the controversy and how it is largely exaggerated.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's double-speak department:
Prior to Christmas, AT&T and DirecTV gave layoff notices to a large number of landline, legacy service, and home installers spanning the country. "It is not clear if the firings relate to the pending AT&T and Time Warner acquisition, or how it specifically relates to the announcement that the company was giving $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 employees in commemoration of the tax overhaul signed just before Christmas," reports Apple Insider. Slashdot reader deadwill69 writes: Just more doublespeak after they announced their bonus program to justify the tax cuts. Seems they really didn't mean it after all. "Technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies, and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we're adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business," AT&T said in a statement to the Chicago Tribune. "Many of the affected employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they'll be offered another job with the company, and we'll work to find other jobs for as many of them as possible." Let's hope they keep that promise. On a bright note: their service really couldn't get much worse?
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's thanks-Obama department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: If you're a fan of Easter eggs hidden in source code, this is a pretty good one. Apparently, as Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham observed on Twitter, some Trump administration and GOP websites have a portion of code with a joke that throws shade at Obama's golf habits, the irony nowhere to be found. We checked the source code and sure enough the line "Oops! Something went wrong. Unlike Obama, we are working to fix the problem and not on the golf course" appears on action.donaldjtrump.com sites, like the one hosting this surely statistically sound, Obama-obsessed "Inaugural Year Approval Poll," but not on donaldjtrump.com pages. As Ingraham pointed out, it's also present on some official GOP sites, including the GOP.com homepage. In both instances, the Obama dig is paired with a 404 error message that states "What do Hillary Clinton and this link have in common? They're both dead broke." To top it off, the code itself is apparently itself broken, swapping a single equal sign where there should be two. An honest mistake? Or perhaps the world was never meant to be gifted with these very good jokes at all?
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By msmash from
Slashdot's creepy-much department:
Rick Zeman writes: The New York Times (may be paywalled) has an article describing how some apps track TV and movie viewing even when the loaded app isn't currently active. These seemingly innocuous games, geared towards both adults and children work by "using a smartphone's microphone. For instance, Alphonso's software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely...." While these apps, mostly available on Google play, with some available on the Apple Store, do offer an opt opt, it's not clear when consumers see "permission for microphone access for ads," it may not be clear to a user that, "Oh, this means it's going to be listening to what I do all the time to see if I'm watching 'Monday Night Football."'One advertising executive summarizes thusly: "It's not what's legal. It is what's not creepy."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's oops-they-did-it-again department:
An anonymous reader shares a report: The South Carolina lottery game is called Holiday Cash Add-A-Play, and the rules are pretty simple: Get three Christmas tree symbols in any vertical, horizontal or diagonal line, and you win a prize. Monday was Christmas, and some folks in the Palmetto State were feeling jolly. "I don't play the lottery that much," Nicole Coggins of Liberty, S.C., told local NBC affiliate WYFF. "Every once in a while, I'll buy a Powerball ticket, but something told me to buy a lottery ticket." She paid an extra dollar to add a play. The ticket was a winner, and she was excited. The station says that as word got out about the sudden proliferation of winning tickets, a frenzy ensued. One store manager told WYFF that "it was crazy" as people hurried to buy the tickets. But the Christmas miracle was too good to be true. The South Carolina Education Lottery says a programming error in its computer system vendor is to blame for so many winning tickets. "From 5:51 p.m. to 7:53 p.m., the same play symbol was repeated in all nine available play areas on tickets which would result in a top prize of $500," the lottery said in a statement Wednesday. "No more than five identical play symbols should appear for a single play. As soon as the issue was identified, the Add-A-Play game was suspended immediately to conduct a thorough investigation."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's tussle-continues department:
An anonymous reader shares a report: Breaking DRM or ripping Blu-Rays discs is a crime In the United States. While there are fair use exemptions, these don't apply to the public at large. Interestingly, filmmakers themselves are now urging the Copyright Office to lift some of the current restrictions, so that they can make the films they want. [...] Technically speaking it's not hard to rip a DVD or Blu-Ray disc nowadays, and the same is true for ripping content from Netflix or YouTube. However, people who do this are breaking the law. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions specifically forbid it. There are some exemptions, for educational use for example, and to allow for other types of fair use, but the line between legal and illegal is not always clear. Interestingly, filmmakers are not happy with the current law either. They often want to use small pieces of other videos in their films, but under the current exemptions, this is only permitted for documentaries. The International Documentary Association, Kartemquin Films, Independent Filmmaker Project, University of Film and Video Association and several other organizations hope this will change. In a comment to the Copyright Office, which is currently considering updates to the exemptions, they argue that all filmmakers should be allowed by break DRM and rip Blu-Rays. According to the filmmakers, the documentary genre is vaguely defined. This leads to a lot of confusion whether or not the exemptions apply. They, therefore, suggest to apply it to all filmmakers, instead of criminalizing those who don't identify themselves as documentarians.
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