goombah99 writes: Netflix is sending emails to subscribers announcing the end of user-authored reviews on Netflix. Past reviews are being archived. The stated reason is declining usage. This follows on the previous years' decision to remove range voting for user ratings (0 to 5 stars) and substitute a thumbs up/down approval voting system. One suspects that the former is an unintended consequence of the latter, since the purpose of people who write a review is to try to explain the nuances of their decision. An inexpressive rating system defeats that. It can be argued that approval voting has technical advantages in aggregating ratings for a recommendation engine as it doesn't need to normalize the biases in a rating system between different users and mostly heads off gaming the system with exaggerated degrees of rating. But evidently that was also a necessary component of the review process itself regardless of its utility for recommendation engines. The email that Netflix is sending users is short and to the point: "You contributed a review on Netflix within the last year. We wanted to let you know that this feature will be retired on July 30th due to declining usage. We appreciate you taking time to write a review. All of your reviews will be available at netflix.com/reviews through July 30th."

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President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he offered to reduce US-bound migration in exchange for US assistance.

Belgium hit late winner to overcome two-goal deficit and move into the quarter-finals of World Cup 2018.

Legislation will deduct money the Palestinians allocate to prisoners and others killed by Israeli forces from taxes.

US President accuses OPEC of manipulating oil prices and urges allies to produce more while he reimposes Iran sanctions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook disclosed a new "bug" on Monday that temporarily let some users who'd been blocked on the service send messages to the people who had blocked them. The bug also let some previously-blocked users view posts that were shared "to a wider audience," such as publicly or with friends of friends, Facebook said. Facebook's privacy boss Erin Egan apologized for the error, writing in a blog that the company is reaching out to "over 800,000" users about the screw-up. The "blocking bug" was active between May 29 and June 5, for eight days, though the company now says Messenger should be acting normally. According to Egan's post: "[the bug] did not reinstate any friend connections that had been severed; 83% of people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked; and Someone who was unblocked might have been able to contact people on Messenger who had blocked them."

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The decision was unanimously backed by a unit charged with vetting the accounts of the different political groupings.

Xfinity Mobile customers will soon see a change to their video streams. From a report: In the coming weeks, videos streamed using cellular data will be limited to 480p resolution, a move that other carriers including T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint have implemented for certain plans in the past. Videos streamed over WiFi won't be affected by the change and Comcast says that it will offer the option to stream 720p video over cellular data for an added fee later this year. Until that plan becomes available, customers who would like to continue streaming video at 720p will be able to do so for no charge, they'll just have to call the carrier in order to set that up. Additionally, users with an unlimited plan will see their hotspot speeds capped at 600 Kbps.

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At least eleven people have been wounded in two days of clashes between demonstrators and police across the southeast of Iran.

Russians have been partying all night to celebrate their team's completely unexpected run to the World Cup quarterfinals.

An anonymous reader writes: In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Echo held 80% of the global smart assistant market, according to marketing research firm Canalys. Chinese companies were so far behind that they registered zero. But just a year later, Amazon has collapsed to a 28% market share, behind Google Home's 36% and ahead of China's Alibaba and Xiaomi with a combined 19%. Amazon had a strong head start with its Echo lineup, which launched in 2014. But now it's losing ground both in the U.S. and China, the leading markets for the devices.

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Poll: What do you think of Art Show?

US State Department says Washington's goal is to get as many countries as possible down to zero Iranian oil imports.

Egypt faces abuses to a degree unseen in the Mubarak years since 2013 coup, analysts say.

Coffee is far from a vice. There's now lots of evidence pointing to its health benefits, including a possible longevity boost for those of us with a daily coffee habit. From a report: The latest findings come from a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine that included about a half-million people in England, Scotland and Wales. "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers" during the decade-long study, says Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute. Participants ranged in age from 38 to 73. The association held up among drinkers of decaffeinated coffee, too. In the U.S., there are similar findings linking higher consumption of coffee to a lower risk of early death in African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and white adults, both men and women. A daily coffee habit is also linked to a decreased risk of stroke and Type 2 diabetes.

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