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Amazon.com, Inc. : Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 20% to $72.4 Billion   —  Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2018.  —  Operating cash flow increased 67% to $30.7 billion for the trailing twelve months … from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2G271xT

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : The Saudi startup behind anonymous commenting app Sarahah, banned by Apple and Google over bullying, launches Enoff, a workplace anonymous feedback app for iOS   —  Sarahah, the anonymous messaging app founded in Saudi Arabia that became an unexpected viral sensation with teens … from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2DLdkn8

More than a year after net neutrality was essentially abolished by a divided Federal Communications Commission, a major legal challenge supported by dozens of companies and advocates has its day in court tomorrow. Mozilla v. FCC argues that the agency’s decision was not just dead wrong, but achieved illegally. “We’re not just going into court to argue that the FCC made a policy mistake,” said Public Knowledge VP Chris Lewis in a statement. “It broke the law, too. The FCC simply failed in its responsibility to engage in reasoned decision-making.” Oral arguments before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals commence Friday, February 1, though the FCC attempted to have the date put off due to the shutdown — and the request was denied . The legal challenge is one of several tacks being taken against the FCC’s replacement of 2015’s net neutrality rules with a much weaker one last year. As with any rule or law, there are multiple avenues for dissent; a direct legal challenge is among the qui...

Lorelei Kelly Contributor Lorelei Kelly leads the Resilient Democracy Coalition , a group working to make sure Congress succeeds in the Information Age. More posts by this contributor Our ‘modern’ Congress doesn’t understand 21st century technology The banana republic of big data Like many modern digital innovations, “crowdsourcing” is a concept borrowed from the commercial tech industry. It is a method to solicit ideas from the Internet masses to complete a task or solve a challenge.  It seems a perfect fit for Congress, an entire branch of government stuck in the past, losing public legitimacy and increasingly ineffective in policymaking. Even though it is the world’s most powerful representative assembly, Congress is working at 45% less expert capacity than it had in the 1970s.  It has remained in this state of dereliction despite accumulating millions more constituents and demands for consideration. Plus,  its most important policy bridge to the pu...

Guidelines about what constitutes "obscene" pornography have been relaxed in England and Wales. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://bbc.in/2GbfmOU

Nintendo announces the Mario Kart Tour app will be delayed until summer 2019. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://bbc.in/2G1broD

Libby's father says he reported disturbing content to Instagram, but the company did nothing. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://bbc.in/2t2rtpz

Two students banned from the uni over a group chat are being allowed back to classes early. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://bbc.in/2Wxm3Rd

Hackers are trying to discredit the inquiry into alleged Russian interference in US politics, prosecutors say. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8290670 https://bbc.in/2Rujpbd

Facebook just announced its latest round of “ coordinated inauthentic behavior ,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 262 Pages, 356 accounts, three Facebook groups and 162 Instagram accounts that exhibited “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that identify it as potentially state-sponsored or otherwise deceptive and coordinated activity. As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher noted in a press call, Facebook coordinated closely with Twitter to discover these accounts, and by collaborating early and often the company “[was] able to use that to build up our own investigation.” Today, Twitter  published a postmortem on its efforts to combat misinformation during the US midterm election last year. Example of the content removed As the Newsroom post details, the activity affected a broad swath of areas around the globe: “There were multiple sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Al...

Joseph Cox / Motherboard : UK's Metro Bank confirms it has faced an SS7 attack intercepting 2FA codes; a telecom lobbying group previously told Congress such an attack is “theoretical”   —  Motherboard has identified a specific UK bank that has fallen victim to so-called SS7 attacks, and sources say the issue is wider than previously reported. from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2FYYCex

Facebook : Facebook says it removed 262 Pages, 356 accounts, three groups, and 162 Instagram accounts tied to Iran for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior   —  Today we removed multiple Pages, groups and accounts that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram. from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2DOaFct

UltraViolet , an older “cloud movie locker” service , is shutting down. The service, which allowed consumers to unlock a digital copy of their DVDs and Blu-Rays, was something of a transitional step between the age of physical media and today’s streaming video landscape. Over time, it’s become less necessary for consumers, as movie marketplaces and subscription services now offer extensive libraries of movies for streaming, rental and purchase – all in digital formats. The shutdown was first reported by Variety . Today, UltraViolet claims to have over 30 million users, who are able to stream more than 300 million movies and shows from their cloud libraries. But arguably, “UltraViolet” never became a household name. The service was not well-received at launch. When the Hollywood and tech execs  first came up with the idea,  many people at the time thought it was just another  “form of DRM”  to keep people from sharing their movies – the way that was possible with ...

Tony Romm / Washington Post : Twitter says it removed thousands of malicious accounts that originated in Iran, Russia, and Venezuela for spreading disinformation about the 2018 midterms   —  Twitter revealed Thursday that it had removed thousands of malicious accounts thought to have originated in Iran … from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2Bbgkri

New research out of Stanford and New York University took a look at what happens when people step back from Facebook for a month. Through Facebook, the research team recruited 2,488 people who averaged an hour of Facebook use each day. After assessing their “willingness to accept” the idea of deactivating their account for a month, the study assigned eligible participants to an experimental category that would deactivate their accounts or a control group that would not. Over the course of the month-long experiment, researchers monitored compliance by checking participants’ profiles. The participants self-reported a rotating set of well being measures in real time, including happiness, what emotion a participant felt over the last 10 minutes and a measure of loneliness. As the researchers report, leaving Facebook correlated with improvements on well being measures. They found that the group tasked with quitting Facebook ended up spending less time on other social networks too, inst...

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Sources: on-demand storage service Clutter is raising between $200M and $250M in a round led by SoftBank   —  Marie Kondo's rise as a cultural icon shows there's big business to be had in sorting out a mess.  And startups are also hoping to get in on the action. from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2RwTkZ0

It seems inevitable that the high seas will eventually play host to a sort of proxy war as automated vessels clash over territory for the algae farms we’ll soon need to feed the growing population. But this rocket-launching robo-boat is a peacetime vessel concerned only with global weather patterns. The craft is what’s called an unmanned semi-submersible vehicle, or USSV, and it functions as a mobile science base — and now, a rocket launch platform. For meteorological sounding rockets, of course, nothing scary. Autonomous subs spend a year cruising under Antarctic ice It solves a problem we’ve seen addressed by other seagoing robots like the Saildrone: that the ocean is very big, and very dangerous — so monitoring it properly is equally big and dangerous. You can’t have a crew out in the middle of nowhere all the time, even if it would be critical to understanding the formation of a typhoon or the like. But you can have a fleet of robotic ships systematically moving around th...