Mohamed Ali Alhakim's statement over use of toxic agents in Mosul comes week after after several were hospitalised.

Mohamed Ali Alhakim's statement over use of toxic agents in Mosul comes week after after several were hospitalised.

The SEC has decided to deny an application for the first exchange-traded product that tracks the price of bitcoin, according to an order posted on the regulator's website. From a report: In an order today, the commission found that the proposed fund was too susceptible to fraud, due to the unregulated nature of Bitcoin. The result is a major setback for the fund, and a frustrating false start for the crypto-currency at large. The ETF is essentially a common stock fund pegged to the price of Bitcoin, allowing investors to purchase Bitcoin without the work of establishing a personal wallet. (In concrete terms, the ETFs investors will be buying shares whose price will always be the same as the price of a single bitcoin, similar to an equivalent investment in gold or cattle.) Without a wallet, investors still won't be able to spend Bitcoin, but they can buy and sell it at market price, adding more liquidity to the Bitcoin system overall.

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eionmac shares a report that details a legal battle in which a food blogger won thousands of dollars in libel damages "after a row over two tweets." BBC reports: Food blogger Jack Monroe has won 24,000 British pounds damages, plus legal costs, in a libel action against columnist Katie Hopkins after a row over two tweets. Ms Monroe sued the writer over two war memorial tweets she said caused "serious harm" to her reputation. Ms Hopkins posted tweets in May 2015 asking her if she had "scrawled on any memorials recently." Ms Monroe said that meant she had either vandalized a war memorial or "condoned or approved" of it. Mr Justice Warby also ordered Ms Hopkins -- a columnist for the Mail Online -- to pay an initial 107,000 British pounds towards the campaigner's legal costs within 28 days. He ruled that the tweets had caused "Ms Monroe real and substantial distress" and she was entitled to "fair and reasonable compensation."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The feud between Oculus and ZeniMax Media is opening up once again, this time with the CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, suing his former employer for earnings that he claims are still owed to him. The suit is largely unrelated to the $6 billion trade secrets suit which ended last month with a $500 million judgment against Oculus. Instead, Carmack is suing ZeniMax Media for $22.5 million that he says has not been paid to him for the 2009 sale of his game studio, id Software, known for such pioneering video game classics as Doom and Quake. The lawsuit reveals that ZeniMax Media paid $150 million for the game studio. The document details that Carmack was set to earn $45 million from the id acquisition. In 2011, Carmack converted half of that note into a half-million shares of ZeniMax common stock, but has yet to receive the other half of his earnings in cash or common stock from the company, despite formal requests being made. The lawsuit was reported first by Dallas News.

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Questioning Russia's spin

davewiner

My heart sank when I saw that WikiLeaks was going after the CIA.

So predictable, I wrote on Twitter. We must be getting close to the smoking gun in the connection between Trump and Russia. They know it, so now Putin is dumping his oppo research file on the CIA and using his mouthpiece Julian Assange to rep it.

Last summer when the DNC emails were coming out I pleaded with friends in academic journalism, let's run seminars for reporters on the technology of email, to build confidence so their reports will be more accurate, but it went nowhere and the result was devastating. 

Now here we are again. 

Then I read this morning a column in the NYT by Zeynep Tufekci, saying that the press was naively accepting Assange's interpretation of what the CIA leaks mean, and no surprise to me, he's lying about their significance. Too late, the press is reporting otherwise. Then on a walk this afternoon I listened to the excellent Daily podcast, also from the NYT, that as Tufekci predicted they would, accepted Assange's premise.

Look at how the press waits until the CBO scores the Republican health bill before passing judgement. Clearly we need something like the CBO to evaluate Wikileaks type claims. People who have reps to lose, have deep technical backgrounds and know how to ask the questions, if they don't have expertise on a specific subject. So reporters aren't out there on their own, trusting someone so wholly untrustworthy as Assange. Something like Snopes or ProPublica, to take the time to evaluate the claim, and while they're deliberating the press will know to withhold judgement. 

Wayne Williams, writing for BetaNews: Microsoft pushed out a mysterious driver to Windows users on Wednesday that caused big problems for some. The driver, listed as "Microsoft -- WPD -- 2/22/2016 12:00:00 AM -- 5.2.5326.4762," wasn't accompanied by any details, although we knew from the name that it related to Windows Portable Devices and affected users who had phones and tablets connected to the OS. Microsoft today admitted the problem with the driver, saying on the Answers Forum: "An incorrect device driver was released for Windows 10, on March 8, 2017, that affected a small group of users with connected phones or portable devices. After installation, these devices are not detected properly by Windows 10, but are affected in no other way. We removed the driver from Windows Update the same day, but if the driver had already installed, you may still be having this issue." As Williams adds, even though it was an optional update for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users, it was pushed to those on Windows 10.

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JobCenter JSON-RPC 2.0 Api client using Mojo.

A grep-like program for searching source code