An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, Apple's App Store, the place where people download apps for games and social networking services on their iPhones, has generated far more revenue worldwide than its Android competitors. This year, things are changing: The App Store will fall second to the amount of revenue generated by Android app distributors, predicts analytics firm App Annie. In 2017, the App Store will generate $40 billion in revenue, while Android app stores run by Google and other parties will generate $41 billion, App Annie said. That gap is expected to widen in 2021, with Android app stores generating $78 billion in revenue and Apple's App Store at $60 billion in revenue, according to App Annie's report released on Wednesday. The surge in revenue for Android comes from a growing number of consumers in China who are buying Android phones and are willing to pay for apps. In 2021, App Annie expects there to be eight Android smartphone users to every single iPhone user in China.

Pissing in Comcast's pool

davewiner

So the ISPs are going to be able to sell our browsing history, so maybe we ought to do something to scramble that for them to remove much of the excess value.

Let's say you and I both agree to pool resources, and we set it up so that when you want to visit a site, it looks to my ISP like I'm visiting it, and vice versa. And then we get a bunch more people to do it and completely randomize it. That's fun, then we can make it work in waves, where all the porn requests go through Comcast on Tuesdays, and all the Breitbart requests go through Verizon on Sundays. On Mondays all the wingnuts turn into eleet libruls and start reading Mother Jones.

I think if we wanted to, if we derived pleasure in thwarting their primacy over us poor slobs, we could make the data they mine pretty worthless.

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Pissing in Comcast's pool

davewiner

So the ISPs are going to be able to sell our browsing history, so maybe we ought to do something to scramble that for them to remove much of the excess value.

Let's say you and I both agree to pool resources, and we set it up so that when you want to visit a site, it looks to my ISP like I'm visiting it, and vice versa. And then we get a bunch more people to do it and completely randomize it. That's fun, then we can make it work in waves, where all the porn requests go through Comcast on Tuesdays, and all the Breitbart requests go through Verizon on Sundays. On Mondays all the wingnuts turn into eleet libruls and start reading Mother Jones.

I think if we wanted to, if we derived pleasure in thwarting their primacy over us poor slobs, we could make the data they mine pretty worthless.

Many people say they are beginning to lose faith in Aung San Suu Kyi's leadership.

Touring oil-rich north region, Russian leader calls for the protection of his country's economic and security interests.

Two readers share a report: While workers have traditionally looked to unions to address their grievances, a new generation is trusting in the power of petitions to force changes. At the Wall Street Journal, 160 reporters and editors, delivered a letter to their managers protesting the lack of women and minorities running the organization, Business Insider reported yesterday. "Nearly all the people at high levels at the paper deciding what we cover and how are white men," the letter read. IBM employees are circulating an online petition objecting to the tone of CEO Ginni Rometty's letter to US president Donald Trump, and calling on her affirm what they call the company's progressive values. [...] Other employee petitions call for Oracle to oppose US president Donald Trump's second travel ban, and to let men who work at US regional supermarket Publix grow beards. Employee petitions are now so popular there's a website, coworker.org, devoted to hosting them. In some cases, the campaigns work: Starbuck's relaxed its rules about visible tattoos and unnatural hair color for baristas after thousands signed petitions asking for a change. Sometimes, they fail disastrously. Interns at one (unnamed) company described in a blog about being fired en masse after signing a petition asking for a more relaxed dress code.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government has threatened 'direct rule' if a government is not formed in Northern Ireland.

16-year-old Gambian says he's the only survivor after boat packed with 147 Africans goes down in the Mediterranean.

Stories about the first human head transplant operation, supposedly coming in December 2017, are circulating again. From a report on the Outline: But despite what you might have read or seen, humanity is not much closer to transplanting a human head to a new body than we were last year. Sorry to disappoint anyone looking to get their head transplanted. The story is based on the work of one man: Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. Canavero started making headlines in 2013 with ambitious claims about the process he designed for a transplant of a human head -- as in, moving a healthy human head from a subject with an unhealthy body to an otherwise-healthy, brain-dead donor body. Canavero's claims have been alternately regarded as sensationalist, spurious, and ethically murky. Since then, the doctor has periodically resurfaced in the news. Once, when he found a willing patient in Valery Spiridonov, a Russian man with spinal muscular atrophy in the form of Werdnig-Hoffmann disease; other times when he published papers, including two proof-of-principle studies last year as well as articles reviewing preliminary work on animals relating to his proposed procedure. Though published in the internet-only journal Surgical Neurology International, an important distinction here is that none of these actually involve a successful full transplant of any kind despite his claim to have successfully transplanted a monkey's head. The papers addressing work with animals are, broadly speaking, about treating spinal cord injuries and issues.