EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Friday appealed a court ruling dismissing her order to iPhone maker Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in Irish back taxes, a landmark case in the European Commission's crackdown against sweetheart tax deals. From a report: The Luxembourg-based General Court in July scrapped the Commission's 2016 ruling, saying that EU competition enforcers had not met the requisite legal standard to show that Apple had enjoyed an unfair advantage. Vestager said the case was important, a sign that her drive to get multinationals pay their fair share of taxes would continue unabated. "The General Court judgment raises important legal issues that are of relevance to the Commission in its application of State aid rules to tax planning cases," she said in a statement.

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TL;DR: If your screenname is bullmancuso, this is your profile page.

Here's the deal with profile pages.

• You have one. I have one.
• Anyone who has signed on to BingeWorthy has one.
• They list all the shows you've rated, from best to worst.
• They exist primarily to provide Twitter and Facebook metadata for your ratings.
• Profile pages are designed to share. When someone asks for a list of good things to binge, instead of thinking of a few off the top of the head, share a link to your profile page.
• You can edit your name, the image URL, description so if you're not happy with the initial versions (which we got from your Twitter profile), you can change them in the Settings dialog in BingeWorthy. All this is echoed in your Facebook and Twitter metadata, so it'll show up when you paste a link into those services, and many others that read this form of metadata.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here.

I have a huge collection of MP3s and a new Android phone. What's the best way to load some of that music on the phone so I can listen on the go?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook announced on Thursday that it has taken down three "coordinated inauthentic behavior" networks promoting disinformation that included nearly 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts along with dozens of Facebook Pages and Groups. While the efforts were seemingly run independently, and focused primarily outside of the US, each has ties to Russian intelligence -- and they collectively provide a sobering echo of the social media assault that roiled the 2016 election. The networks Facebook tackled dated back at least three years, but most had few followers at the time they were caught. They primarily promoted non-Facebook websites in an apparent effort to get around the platform's detection mechanisms, focusing on news and current events, particularly geopolitics. They targeted users in a number of countries, including Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Japan, the UK, and Belarus, as well as the United States to a lesser extent. Facebook attributed one of the disinformation distribution networks to "actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in 'DC leaks' in 2016." In other words, the actors were likely tied to Fancy Bear, also known as APT 28, the group also responsible for hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Facebook attributes the second network to "individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency," the so-called troll farm that wreaked havoc on Facebook in 2016. The company noted that it is unclear whether the IRA is still an active entity or what form it takes at this point. The third network had "links to individuals in Russia, including those associated with Russian intelligence services." None of the networks focused solely on the US. Instead, they engaged with a broad array of topics connected to Russian interests, including the war in Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the election and protests in Belarus, Russia's relationship with NATO, and politics in Turkey.

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A giant Gundam in Japan's Port of Yokohama is now able to "pick up its legs to walk, bend its knees, turn its head, and contort its fingers to mime hand signals," reports Popular Mechanics. The 60-foot robot is the largest in the world. From the report: Inspired by the fictional Japanese robot of the same name -- which has appeared in over 50 TV series and movies since 1979, as well as many manga comics and video games -- this Gundam features a staggering 24 degrees of freedom. People in Japan have caught and shared a few glimpses of the engineering marvel. Considering the Gundam weighs about 25 tons, it's pretty insane to watch it raise both arms in the air and pick itself back up after kneeling. Those efficiencies are thanks to precise engineering and design work, as outlined in a series of YouTube videos from Gundam Factory Yokohama. In one installment, the engineers give a tour of where they designed, built, and assembled the Gundam. The videos are a great way to really contextualize the size of this monster; from the metal fingertip to where the wrist will connect, for example, the hand is about 6.5 feet wide.

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Rose Pastore reporting via Gizmodo: A new way of producing powerful X-ray beams -- the brightest on Earth -- is now making it possible to create 3D images of matter at astounding resolutions. This "Extremely Brilliant Source" officially opened last month at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, and scientists are already using it to study the coronavirus behind covid-19. These X-ray beams will image the interiors of fossils, brains, batteries, and countless other interesting items down to the atomic scale, revealing unprecedented information and supercharging scientific research. A typical medical X-ray, like you would get for a broken bone, can show doctors details about your particular fracture and the tissue around it. X-rays penetrate the body and are absorbed at different rates by different tissue; once they've passed through you, they hit a detector, creating the familiar black-and-white X-ray image. The Extremely Brilliant Source produces X-rays 10 trillion times more powerful than those used in hospitals. With such a beam, scientists could create a 3D image of your broken bone so detailed that they could see the individual atoms in the blood cells surrounding your fracture. Of course, you wouldn't want to be hit with this particular beam -- the dose of radiation would be fatal. The possibilities that the Extremely Brilliant Source opens up feel endless. One area that particularly excites Francesco Sette, director general of the ESRF, is research into the structure and functioning of brains, which could eventually enable brain-like electronics. "It would be a major revolution, not only for neuroscience, but also for all those applications that are coming up to use possibly the human brain architecture for a new generation of devices," he said.

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New technology has been unveiled which allows humans to ask robots questions and understand their actions.

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more." Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

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Saad Bhamla, an undergraduate in Mumbai, India, has invented a do-it-yourself hearing aid made from inexpensive, easy-to-find parts. "At bulk rates, Bhamla says, it would cost just under $1 to make," reports Science Magazine. "But anyone with the freely available blueprints and a soldering iron can make their own for not much more -- maybe $15 or $20, Bhamla says." From the report: Inspired by his grandparents and a hearing-impaired colleague -- who is the first author on the new paper -- Bhamla and his team set out to develop a cheap hearing aid built with off-the-shelf parts. They soldered a microphone onto a small circuit board to capture nearby sound and added an amplifier and a frequency filter to specifically increase the volume of high-pitch sounds above 1000 hertz. Then they added a volume control, an on/off switch, and an audio jack for plugging in standard earphones, as well as a battery holder. The device, dubbed LoCHAid, is the size of a matchbox and can be worn like a necklace. Next, Bhamla and his colleagues tested the device. They found that it boosted the volume of high-pitch sounds by 15 decibels while preserving volumes at lower pitches. It also filtered out interference and sudden, loud sounds like dog barks and car horns. Finally, tests with an artificial ear revealed that LoCHAid might improve speech recognition, by bringing conversations closer to the quality heard by healthy individuals. It complied with five out of six of the World Health Organization's preferred product recommendations for hearing aids, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE. There are some drawbacks. The device can't be fine-tuned for individual needs, and the researchers anticipate that LoCHAid's parts will wear out after about a year and a half. It's also bulky, though a smaller version is in development. Bhamla notes that it needs to be clinically tested before his device can be sold as a "hearing aid" in the United States.

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The supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy has a shadow crescent that moves, like a dancer in the dark. From a report: Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four continents, the collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope managed to peer 53 million light-years away and look at a supermassive black hole, which is 6.5 million times the mass of the sun and sits at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The fiery historic image showed off a bright crescent of ultra-hot gas and debris orbiting the black hole's event horizon, the pitch-black central point-of-no-return that traps anything that goes over, even light. The EHT team had just made one of the most impressive achievements in the history of astronomy, but this was only the beginning. On Wednesday, members of the EHT collaboration published new findings in the Astrophysical Journal about M87's supermassive black hole (known as M87*), revealing two new major insights. First, the shadow diameter of the event horizon doesn't change over time, which is exactly what Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts for a supermassive black hole of M87*'s size. However, the second insight is that the bright crescent adorning this shadow is far from stable: it wobbles. There's so much turbulent matter surrounding M87* that it makes sense the crescent would bug out and get fidgety. But the fact that we can watch it over time means we now have an established method for studying the physics of one of the most extreme kinds of environment in the entire universe.

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MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090, which just launched this morning, is the single most powerful graphics card money can buy currently (almost). It sits at the top of NVIDIA's product stack, and according to the company, it enables new experiences like smooth 8K gaming and seamless processing of massive content creation workloads, thanks in part to its 24GB of on-board GDDR6X memory. A graphics card like the GeForce RTX 3090 isn't for everyone, however. Though its asking price is about a $1,000 lower than its previous-gen, Turing-based Titan RTX counterpart, it is still out of reach for most gamers. That said, content creation and workstation rendering professionals can more easily justify its cost. In performance testing fresh off the NDA lift, versus the GeForce RTX 3080 that arrived last week, the more powerful RTX 3090's gains range from about 4% to 20%. Versus the more expensive previous generation Titan RTX though, the GeForce RTX 3090's advantages increase to approximately 6% to 40%. When you factor in complex creator workloads that can leverage the GeForce RTX 3090's additional resources and memory, however, it can be many times faster than either the RTX 3080 or Titan RTX. The GeForce RTX 3090 will be available in limited quantities today but the company pledges to make more available directly and through OEM board partners as soon as possible.

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I might subscribe to the New Yorker if they split the fee with a small publication they admire that they think everyone should read. I abhor the idea of just the big old stodgy names getting funded. I won't do it.

Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that claimed the company collected and stored facial templates for its users between June 7, 2011, and Aug. 19, 2020, when the settlement was approved. "Individuals could be eligible for cash payouts of $200 to $400," reports Patch. From the report: In 2015, lawsuits were filed against Facebook over its use of "face tagging" feature. Plaintiffs claimed that Facebook was collecting biometric information ("face prints") without getting proper consent required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Facebook disputed the allegations. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Donato gave preliminary approval to a $650 million settlement, out of which class members can claim money. Facebook has also agreed to change its practices. It's not known how much individual class members will receive, but Edelson PC predicts an individual will get $200 to $400. A household with four eligible people could receive as much as $800 to $1,600. To participate in the settlement, a person need only have been a Facebook user located in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored biometric information after June 7, 2011. Eligible participants must submit a claim form by Nov. 23, 2020. It takes under two minutes to fill out a claim form online or send it in. More information is forthcoming.

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Global warming is behind the scale and impact of recent wildfires in the western US, scientists say.