Summary of this week:

• FCC approves the UHD television system standard
• Uber buying 24,000 self-driving cars from Volvo (driver problems go away)
• Apple buys a small VR AR company
• Your iPhone X was built by unpaid, illegal student workers

Monday November 20, 2017

Our FCC approves a new television system standard ATSC 3.0, a.k.a., UHD. Fears of loss of privacy abound. Five years to buy a new televisor.

Government in Detroit has flopped. Citizens are building their own Internet access.

The Jeff Bezos Post, a.k.a., Washington Post, is now a software company selling media software to other news outlets.

The Internet cannot stop buzzing about the next iMac having an extra processor to power an always-on Siri assistant. "Computer, what time is it?"

Uber and other private-hire rides has become a haven for sex attacks in London. What went wrong with the idea of sharing a ride and saving traffic and fuel?

The Agrihood: Buy a big lot, grow some fruit trees, have a Starbucks around the corner. Only the rich need apply as the rest of us can't afford the new agriculture neighborhoods.

Change the definition of illness, declare half of America sick, sell lots more medicine. The health care revolving door keeps revolving.

Tuesday November 21, 2017

Sexual harassment and lying. If you lie enough, people think of you as a liar. Some in the news media are learning this lesson (finally).

Uber having trouble with drivers? Simple. Buy self-driving cars and rid yourself of those pesky people.

Amazon keeps pace with Microsoft and opens a cloud region for SECRET information.

Detecting art forgeries with a neural network (and a really good scanner).

Finally, Microsoft may copy Apple and others in making its computer disk search actually usable.

"We keep finding ways to rationalize various versions of yelling upstairs instead of doing the difficult work of engaging instead."—Seth Godin

Computing and finding a person's emotional state. Of course we can do this and take advantage in many ways. I wrote a story about this a few years ago.

The TED talks group has been a haven for sexual harassers for years. Everyone is waiting for this one to fall and fall really big.

400 websites track every single one of our keystrokes.

Linus Torvalds calls security problems bugs. Of course he is right. And throw in failures of systems engineering, too.

Wednesday November 22, 2017

It appears that Google's Android has been collecting location data on users even when users turned off that feature.

Mark Zuckerburg ends his first I'm-not-running-for-President Presidential campaign trip.

Google announces that it will be using Apple's Swift programming language.

Leica has a new camera for a few thousand dollars.

How illegal, unpaid student workers built our iPhone X. The stories get out in today's world and, well...

TripAdvisor is in trouble for censoring tales of rape and sexual assault.

Apple buys Vrvanna for a mere $30million. This is aimed at boosting VR and AR and maybe even real reality in products.

Intel audits its own product and finds severe errors in its Management Engine. And yes, this affects many of us.

Don't like your Internet Service Provider? Build your own. It is possible.

More information on how Uber hid their poor security and ultimately cheated 57million customers.

Thursday November 23, 2017

Here's the deal with net neutrality and our FCC. Some people believe non-elected government agencies should regulate private industry. Some people don't. Recall, the latter were elected in 2016. This isn't that complicated.

Our President has not nominated a bunch of science advisors. Yet the sun still manages to rise and set everyday. Hmmm, maybe those positions weren't necessary. Just a thought.

YouTube is trying to reduce the horrible videos that frighten children. Here's a solution: hire people to view videos before they are posted. I think that was the original idea, but it "cost too much money," i.e., it reduced profits.

AWS improves its Rekognition service to read text in images and recognize faces in real time.

Want to buy a portable computer tomorrow? Here are the pickings.

NASA declared water was flowing on Mars. Turns out it was sand. Fear not, NASA knows the temperature of the earth 10,000 years ago to a tenth of a degree.

Tesla delivers world's largest battery array in Australia in less than 100 days as promised. That shows the technology was  mature. How will they dispose of the thing in 20 years?

News Flash (not): Apple puts its retail stores in areas where rich people live. A bunch of US states only have one store.

Friday November 24, 2017

Today, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, is an unofficial national holiday. There is little US news to view.

Workers in Amazon's warehouses in Europe are striking today for better pay and conditions.

Seth Godin has good thoughts on the death of Black Friday—an American tradition for the last half century.

Strong rumors that Samsung will release its next big phone in January—earlier than usual.

The government of China creates a new way for its subjects to inform on one another.

Twitter is developing a bookmark feature where we can save tweets to read later.

Thanksgiving shopping is booming in the US. It does appear that folks were shopping on the phones while eating dinner.

All economic indicators are up. I guess the worst president in the history of history is doing something right.

What kind of robot do we want to change the world? One that cleans the kitchen.

Saturday November 25, 2017

Trying to have neural networks explain their answers. I guess this is important to someone.

Online shopping on Thanksgiving Day jumped up 18% to $2.87Billion.

Imgur finally confirms a 2014 hack where 1.7Million emails and passwords were stolen.

Must-see video. In Louisiana, this outdoor storage building was filled with a massive yellow jacket nest. I have done things like this, not on this scale, but like this.

Must be nice to be Jeff Bezos: Net worth is now over $100Billion with a B.

Adventures in retail on Black Friday. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Amazon.com grabs about half of all online shopping so far this year.

Now we have fake grass-level comments. Nothing new, it has happened many times before.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org

Sunday November 26, 2017

Meg Whitman announces that she is resigning as CEO of HPE in February.

The plutocrats poured a couple hundred million $$$ into AltSchool. The experiment flopped. The kids? Who knows.

Holiday shopping number$ are booming this year. Perhaps we can give a little credit to our president (the worst in history) for a good economy.

In praise of Mozilla's latest release of the once dead Firefox browser.

It is quite simple: the current administration disagrees wit the prior administration regarding the definition of net neutrality. The prior administration took the easy route, and that is easy to reverse.

How to write around your family. Forget it; they are your life; embrace them and soak in the content.

Some ideas on how to keep an interview an interview and not a free consulting session where they learn how to solve their problems without hiring you.

This post has ideas on generating new ideas. I find them to be pretty good ideas.

How one person's illness pushed to them write...NOW and not later because there might not be a later.

Continue writing and working through the holidays. You do have to pay the bills. Few are able to take a month off.