The Insider News

Engadget[^]:

Europe is introducing new rules for Google, Apple, Amazon and other large platforms forcing them to handle customer complaints better and be more transparent about rankings.

Bleeping Computer[^]:

A new in-development ransomware was discovered that has an interesting characteristic. Instead of the distributed executable performing the ransomware functionality, the executables compiles an embedded encrypted C# program at runtime and launches it directly into memory.

ZDNet[^]:

A patch for Meltdown created an even bigger flaw for 64-bit Win7 and Server 2008 R2. Now, it's freely available.

Infoworld[^]:

After January 2019, businesses will need a commercial license to receive updates for Oracle Java SE products

Psypost[^]:

Drinking coffee before a discussion can help people stay focused and feel better about the people in the conversation, suggests a new study that appears in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

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An examination by The New York Times found 205 accounts impersonating Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram. At least 51 of the impostor accounts, including 43 on Instagram, were scams.

Science Daily[^]:

The technology could be used by soldiers on the battlefield to print temporary sensors on their bodies to detect chemical or biological agents or solar cells to charge essential electronics.

TechXplore[^]:

Computer scientists at Rice University have created a deep-learning, software-coding application that can help human programmers navigate the growing multitude of often-undocumented application programming interfaces, or APIs.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft reveals modular mobile system for multi-player games, analytics, air-traffic control, and trading-desks.

The Next Web[^]:

Many scholars believe that the grammar of Sanskrit, which is rule-bound, formula-bound and logical, is the most appropriate to write algorithms, or to be used in machine learning and even artificial intelligence.

Jaxenter[^]:

Pluralsight, the enterprise technology learning platform, announced the launch of the Pluralsight Technology Index that ranks the demand for skills in certain technologies.

Engadget[^]:

According to The Washington Post, Lundgren was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison over restore disks for Windows computers.

Visual C++ blog[^]:

We are thrilled to announce the availability of vcpkg on Linux and MacOS. This gives you immediate access to the vcpkg catalog of C++ libraries on two new platforms, with the same simple steps you are familiar with on Windows and UWP today.

Ars Technica[^]:

The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014 and subsequently became the first mission to ever orbit around a comet.

ZDNet[^]:

25 years ago, the first release of Mosaic web browser appeared and the web, as we know it, began.

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That all takes us to the nub of the problem. It’s natural to trust one’s own senses, to believe what one sees—a hardwired tendency that the coming age of manipulated video will exploit. Consider recent flash points in what the University of Michigan’s Aviv Ovadya calls the “infopocalypse”—and imagine just how much worse they would have been with manipulated video. Take Pizzagate, and then add concocted footage of John Podesta leering at a child, or worse. Falsehoods will suddenly acquire a whole new, explosive emotional intensity.

But the problem isn’t just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction. The president, reportedly, has already pioneered this tactic: Even though he initially conceded the authenticity of the Access Hollywood video, he now privately casts doubt on whether the voice on the tape is his own.

In other words, manipulated video will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of common reality. As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.”