feed on feeds - 2016/11/17 - items 0 to 15

According to a report from Bloomberg, AOL is firing as many as 500 employees as part of a restructuring plan to focus on mobile, video and data. The move comes a year after Verizon acquired the company for $4.4 billion. Bloomberg reports: The layoffs are occurring in all of AOL's business units, said the person, who asked not to be identified disclosing the scope of the cuts. AOL employs about 6,400 people worldwide, the person said. In addition to the job cuts, the company will split into two parts, according to the memo. One will be dedicated to media properties, which include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and the other will focus on platforms, like AOL's advertising technology. "Mobile, video, and data are the key growth drivers of that strategy and the company will be putting resources into each of these areas," [Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.] With the wireless industry maturing, AOL parent Verizon has been buying up media and advertising-technology companies and working to refine go90, its free video-streaming service aimed at phone-toting teens.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a report from Bloomberg, AOL is firing as many as 500 employees as part of a restructuring plan to focus on mobile, video and data. The move comes a year after Verizon acquired the company for $4.4 billion. Bloomberg reports: The layoffs are occurring in all of AOL's business units, said the person, who asked not to be identified disclosing the scope of the cuts. AOL employs about 6,400 people worldwide, the person said. In addition to the job cuts, the company will split into two parts, according to the memo. One will be dedicated to media properties, which include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and the other will focus on platforms, like AOL's advertising technology. "Mobile, video, and data are the key growth drivers of that strategy and the company will be putting resources into each of these areas," [Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong wrote in a memo to employees Thursday.] With the wireless industry maturing, AOL parent Verizon has been buying up media and advertising-technology companies and working to refine go90, its free video-streaming service aimed at phone-toting teens.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It would be relatively simple to produce a web-based feed, outside of Twitter or Facebook, that includes only stories from vetted news orgs. That doesn't mean that their stories are true, just that they are making their best efforts to produce real news.

There's no time to get into a deep philosophical discussion about this. I have been a harsh critic of news orgs, for many years. It's all there on my blog, going back to 1994. I have had their biases and eliteness destroy years of my work, because it's easier for them to please the people who run the big tech companies than report on what is actually happening in tech. Like you, I saw them cover this election incredibly unfairly, against the interests of their readers.

I know all about the flaws of the press. But there's a world of difference between them and some of the pubs people are relying on for news. Sort of like the difference between the flaws of the two candidates we all just voted for that were covered so inadequately by the press. (Ironic isn't it.)

I'm calling on the news industry to work together solve this problem. The technology is there now. We have to help readers find reasonably reliable sources of news. The technical problem is already solved. All that's needed is the will to create the system. It is not hard to do what Facebook does in aggregating news.

Relying on the tech industry to distribute news has had terrible results. The news industry must do its own distribution if the resulting product is going to be worth anything.

Each news org has been a silo. We need a platform that combines the flows of all the silos. Not full text. Just abstracts and images. The tech and knowhow are here now. It's long past time to act. We all feel the urgency. Work together. Now.

You must be feeling by now what Ben Franklin said in revolutionary days. "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Act!

It would be relatively simple to produce a web-based feed, outside of Twitter or Facebook, that includes only stories from vetted news orgs. That doesn't mean that their stories are true, just that they are making their best efforts to produce real news.

There's no time to get into a deep philosophical discussion about this. I have been a harsh critic of news orgs, for many years. It's all there on my blog, going back to 1994. I have had their biases and eliteness destroy years of my work, because it's easier for them to please the people who run the big tech companies than report on what is actually happening in tech. Like you, I saw them cover this election incredibly unfairly, against the interests of their readers.

I know all about the flaws of the press. But there's a world of difference between them and some of the pubs people are relying on for news. Sort of like the difference between the flaws of the two candidates we all just voted for that were covered so inadequately by the press. (Ironic isn't it.)

I'm calling on the news industry to work together solve this problem. The technology is there now. We have to help readers find reasonably reliable sources of news. The technical problem is already solved. All that's needed is the will to create the system. It is not hard to do what Facebook does in aggregating news.

Relying on the tech industry to distribute news has had terrible results. The news industry must do its own distribution if the resulting product is going to be worth anything.

Each news org has been a silo. We need a platform that combines the flows of all the silos. Not full text. Just abstracts and images. The tech and knowhow are here now. It's long past time to act. We all feel the urgency. Work together. Now.

You must be feeling by now what Ben Franklin said in revolutionary days. "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Act!

Nasa astronaut Peggy Whitson, 56, breaks more records as she heads to the ISS for the third time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Shareholders for SolarCity and Tesla voted Thursday to approve merging the two companies. "Tesla's shareholders have overwhelmingly approved our acquisition of SolarCity," said a statement from Tesla sent to CNBC. "Excluding the votes of Elon and other affiliated shareholders, more than 85% of shares voted were cast in favor of the acquisition. With SolarCity's shareholders also having approved the acquisition, the transaction will be completed in the coming days." The deal has divided investor and analyst opinion. Some Tesla shareholders have filed lawsuits against the deal, and critics have called it a bailout for SolarCity. Chairman Elon Musk, who holds about 22 percent of SolarCity stock and 22 percent of Tesla's, has recused himself from both votes, as have other insiders such as director Antonio Gracias and J.B. Straubel. Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners, sits on both companies' boards, and Straubel was part of Tesla's founding team and serves as its chief technical officer, according to company filings. The merger comes as the solar energy business is showing signs of a slowdown.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delegates from more than 190 countries meeting in Marrakech issue a united call for action on climate change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany's Justice Minister says he believes Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech. Under a program that runs until March, German authorities are monitoring how many racist posts reported by Facebook users are deleted within 24 hours. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has pledged to take legislative measures if the results are still unsatisfactory by then. Maas has said the European Union needs to decide whether platform companies should be treated like radio or television stations, which can be held accountable for the content they publish. Under current EU guidelines Facebook and other social media networks are not liable for any criminal content or hate posts hosted on their platform. Instead, in May Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter signed the EU hate speech code, vowing to fight racism and xenophobia by reviewing the majority of hate speech notifications within 24 hours. But the code is voluntary not legally binding. The state justice ministers meeting in Berlin called on the government to take swift action against hate speech on the Internet. The ministers called for more transparency and said social media companies should be obliged to regularly publish figures on how many hate posts have been deleted. They also wanted more public information on how notifications are processed and the criteria behind the decision making. Facebook says it is a technology company, not a media company, that builds the tools to supply users with news and information but does not produce content.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of the US National Security Agency has said that a "nation-state" consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election. From an AOL article:Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the NSA and US Cyber Command, made the comments in response to a question about Wikileaks' release of nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails during a conference presented by The Wall Street Journal. "There shouldn't be any doubt in anybody's minds," Rogers said. "This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." Rogers did not specify the nation-state or the specific effect, though US intelligence officials suspect Russia provided the emails to Wikileaks, after hackers stole them from inside DNC servers and the personal email account of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta. At least two different hacker groups associated with the Russian government were found inside the networks of the DNC over the past year, reading emails, chats, and downloading private documents. Many of those files were later released by Wikileaks.Further reading: Quartz and MotherJones.

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AnyEvent module for interacting with Mattermost APIs

Efficiently compute time from local and GMT time

AnyEvent module for interacting with Mattermost APIs