Google and the country's biggest brick-and-mortar retailers have one main problem in common: Amazon. Now both sides are acting like they are serious about working together to do something about it. From a report: On Thursday, Target and Google announced that they are expanding what was a years-old delivery partnership from a small experiment in a handful of cities to the entire continental U.S. The expansion will allow Target to become a retail partner in Google's voice-shopping initiative, which lets owners of the Google Home "smart" speaker order items through voice commands like owners of the Echo can do from Amazon. The announcement comes seven weeks after Walmart inked a similar deal with Google to offer hundreds of thousands of products through the service. Other big-box retailers like Home Depot are also on board. Voice commerce was the core of these recent announcements, and it may someday become popular for types of shopping like reordering household staples. But that's not what is most interesting here to me. Instead, it's the promise that Target is also beginning to work with Google "to create innovative digital experiences using ... other cutting-edge technologies to elevate Target's strength in style areas such as home, apparel and beauty."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. politicians have been warning for years that America couldn't let China win the clean energy race. That's exactly what has happened, with the trends most stark in electric cars, solar and nuclear energy. Why it matters: Building for the last decade, these trends have accelerated in the last couple of years. Politicians and business leaders said America's dominance in this space would bring jobs to the U.S. and security to our clean-energy resources, and now both of those goals are at risk. Why China is doing this: It needs to literally energize its 1.4 billion people, both how they travel and how they power their homes. Its leadership feels compelled to do it in a cleaner way than the U.S. did. Air pollution is at dangerously high levels across many of China's cities. People are seeing and feeling health repercussions of China's dependence on fossil fuel-fired cars and power plants in an acute way. Traditional air pollution, not climate change, is a big driver.

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The ‘Seabin’ can collect the equivalent of around 83,000 plastic bags a year.

Iranian leader calls 2015 nuclear deal not renegotiable, says Trump's decision to 'decertify' it would isolate the US.

A round-up of international reaction following the US president's decision not to certify the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

In 2003, almost by accident, the company that I founded but had left, surprised me by directing requests to a popular domain to one of my colocated servers. I tried to keep it running but there was too much traffic. I couldn't do the work required to stabilize the service, i had a new job and my health was still iffy after heart surgery, and I would have had to buy a bunch more servers, and there was no revenue to support it. So I had to turn the service off. Really the only choice was to risk my health, and spend a lot of money.

A few of the users went on a campaign aimed at punishing me personally. Many of them had empty sites on the service, they had never published anything, so they didn't have anything at stake. I completely disclosed what happened. None of the bloggers referred to my post or the podcast I did explaining. They kept right on attacking. I appealed to blogging friends but they wouldn't say anything in my defense.

Eventually the story was covered by mainstream journalists, and guess what -- they listened, and told my side of the story too. The ranters wanted something else, certainly not the truth. Most of the users just wanted their sites back. Quietly I worked with them, and got every one who wanted one a backup of their sites, personally, on my own time.

I waited it out, they got tired I guess, but never forgot how awful they were. That's why I empathize with Twitter.

A Twitter thread I wrote without benefit of Electric Pork. Freestyle. I think it's pretty good. It starts out like this: "Twitter users who think you are a customer. You are not a customer. You are the product."

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A federal jury in Minneapolis, Minnesota found a local man guilty of intentionally damaging his former employer's network before leaving the company. The man's name is Christopher Victor Grupe, 46, and from September 2013 until December 2015 he worked as an IT professional for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), a transcontinental railroad based in Alberta, Canada. Things went sideways in December 2015 when CPR suspended Grupe for 12 days for yelling and using inadequate language with his boss. When the man returned to work following his suspension on December 15, management told Grupe they were going to fire him for insubordination. According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, Grupe asked management to resign, effective immediately. He promised to come back the following days and return company property such as his laptop, remote access device, and access badges. He did return the items, as promised, but not before taking the laptop for a last spin inside CPR's network. Court documents show Grupe accessed the company's switches and removed admin accounts, changed passwords for other admin accounts, and deleted log files. When done, Grupe wiped his laptop and returned it to CPR's Minnesota office on December 17, two days after he resigned.

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Test2 Harness designed for the Test2 event system

supply autoconf style installation directories

perl applications development environment

A utility for managing systems with minimal installs