An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Massachusetts plans to protect net neutrality by naming and shaming internet service providers that don't adhere to open internet principles. Lawmakers in the state Senate have proposed a bill (S2160) that would create an "internet service provider registry" to track whether broadband and wireless providers adhere to policies that keep the internet open and neutral. Motherboard reports: In the wake of the FCC's repeal of net neutrality, more than half the states in the union are considering their own, state-level net neutrality rules. Some states are tackling the problem with legislation (California, Oregon, Washington), while others (like Montana) are signing executive orders banning state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively... when the FCC repealed net neutrality, it included a provision attempting to "pre-empt" (read: ban) states from protecting consumers. As a result, large ISPs have threatened to sue any states that stand up for consumer welfare, and at least one ISP (Charter Spectrum) has tried to use the repeal to wiggle out of state lawsuits for terrible broadband. Charter's efforts on that front have failed, and the the FCC's authority to tell states what to do has been highly contested. Still, Massachusetts thought it might be a better idea to try and publicly shame ISPs into behaving.

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The 40-year-old is the main challenger of President Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe's first post-Robert Mugabe elections.

"It's been a year since Equifax doxed the nation of America through carelessness, deception and greed, lying about it and stalling while the problem got worse and worse," writes Cory Doctorow. Equifax's new CSO says they've spent over $200 million on security upgrades, in work being overseen by auditor from eight different states. An anonymous reader quotes Doctorow's response: This all sounds very good and all, but it's still monumentally unfair. The penalty for Equifax's recklessness should have been the corporate death penalty: charter revoked, company shut down, assets sold to competitors... The fact that Equifax's investors and execs kept all the money they made by risking all America with shoddy security, and that no one went to jail for a monumental act of corporate recklessness, is a moral hazard, virtually guaranteeing that Equifax's competitors will not take the care they owe to the people on whom they have amassed nonconsensual, potentially life-destroying dossiers. Equifax's CEO and several top officials did leave the company, notes Government Technology -- but that's about it. Thus far, no financial punishment has been imposed on Equifax itself. Despite contentious hearings, no Congressional action has been taken. A few months later, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tabled action against the company. And while the Federal Trade Commission said it opened an investigation into the Equifax breach in September, the agency has since named as chief of its consumer protection division a lawyer who has represented Equifax. This past week, Equifax asked a federal judge to reject the claims from 46 banks and credit unions for payment of damages because of the massive data breach. The companies claimed that Equifax owes them for all the costs they incurred protecting data after the breach was revealed, costs that could easily run into many millions of dollars.... Equifax had revenue of $876.9 million during the second quarter of 2018, up 2 percent from the same quarter of last year, officials said.

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Former cricketing superstar is poised to become Pakistan's next prime minister, despite allegations of election fraud.

SDF's Riad Darar speaks with Al Jazeera about prospects of creating a 'decentralised' state alongside Syrian government.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wants to spend $3 billion to pump back the water that's flowing through Hoover Dam -- so it can flow through again later, during periods of peak energy demand. This generates a net profit for the dam's operators -- the pumping stations are powered by cheap solar and wind energy, while the dams are currently operating at just 20% of their capacity. An anonymous reader quotes Clean Technica: The problem is that California has so much renewable energy available now, thanks in large measure to aggressive state mandated policies, that much of it is "constrained." That's utility industry speak for having to give it away or simply let it go to waste. In some cases, utilities in California actually pay other utility companies to take the excess electricity off their hands. Why not store it all in some of Elon Musk's grid scale batteries? Simply put, pumped hydroelectric storage is cheaper than battery storage, at least for now. Lazard, the financial advisory and asset management firm, estimates utility scale lithium-ion batteries cost 26 cents per kilowatt-hour compared with 15 cents for pumped hydro storage. "Hoover Dam is ideal for this," Kelly Sanders, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California tells the New York Times. "It's a gigantic plant. We don't have anything on the horizon as far as batteries of that magnitude."

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Trade unions have warned that many Russians will not live long enough to claim a state pension.

The president and main opposition leader promise a better future as they conclude campaigning with rallies in Harare.

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Opera, an underdog in a browser market dominated by Google's Chrome, raised $115 million in an initial public offering Friday. The company sold 9.6 million American depositary shares at $12 each, the high end of the $10-to-$12 range it expected for the IPO. When the stock started trading more broadly at about 7:30 a.m. PT, it rose as high as 28 percent above that before settling in at a 10 percent rise, to $13.24, during midday trading.... In fact, Opera raised a big notch more, because at the same time as the IPO, it also secured a $60 million private funding round from Tospring Technology, also known as Bitmain, which makes Bitcoin mining computers, IDG Capital Fund and IDG Capital Investors. And the financial firms underwriting the IPO had an option to release another 15 percent of shares -- 1.44 million. "It gets us roughly up to $190 million," Chief Financial Officer Frode Jacobsen said.... In the first three months of 2018, Opera reported net income of $6.6 million on revenue of $39.4 million. The company makes money through partnerships with search engines, including Google and Yandex, that pay for search traffic it sends their way and through advertising deals like promoting websites on the browser's bookmarking, or speed dial, page. Opera has 264 million monthly active users on smartphones and 57 million on personal computers, Opera said in regulatory filings. Starting in 2017, it built an AI-powered news service into its browser and now offers it as a standalone app called Opera News. That has 90 million monthly users. The news app and service has been responsible for the turnaround in Opera's recent financial fortunes, Jacobsen said.

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Theodore McCarrick, who faces allegations he abused a boy in the 1970s, had already been suspended from ministry duties.

pacopico writes: First World View hung Google SVP Alan Eustace at the end of a balloon and then dropped him 135,908 feet back to Earth. Then, it sent a KFC chicken sandwich to the edge of space. Now, World View has figured out how to get high-altitude balloons to sail winds in the stratosphere and travel for thousands of miles. They're being used to take detailed pictures of the Earth, send communications to far off places and learn more about the weather. This strange company was founded by two people who lived in Biosphere 2, and they say they're doing all this balloon work to get people to think differently about the planet. In a few years, they plan to send people up to the edge of space in a capsule and let them hang out for a couple hours, while they sip cocktails and reflect on life or something like that. The flights would cost $75,000 per person -- the money from KFC is already being used to build new software (along with sensors, and of course, durable balloons). Bloomberg Businessweek reports: Since the Zinger, it's conducted more than 50 flights, primarily for the U.S. government, and kept its balloons up in the air for many days at a time. "People want us to do things like sit over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean and look for pirates," says Taber MacCallum, co-founder and chief technology officer. The company plans to start flying for commercial clients early next year. "Basically, our mission is to take over the stratosphere," he says. Interestingly, Elon Musk also asked MacCallum's first company to design a greenhouse for Mars.

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This map shows how voters are distributed in the United States.

Humberto Ortega has urged his brother to disband the pro-Sandinista paramilitary forces and end violence

Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein writes: YouTube very quietly made a very cool and rather major improvement in their video players today... YouTube is now adjusting the YT player size to match videos' native aspect ratios. This is a big deal, and very much welcome. YouTube provided some before-and-after screenshots Friday, and acknowledged that "We launched this update on mobile awhile back (both Android and iOS) so this change also aligns the desktop and mobile viewing experiences." Gizmodo writes: Until now YouTube forced all videos into a 16:9 ratio by windowboxing them, meaning surround them with black vertical or horizontal bars like the old days of watching widescreen movies on VHS. In that sense, this isn't a huge change -- white space instead of black -- although the location of player controls moves to fit the video's size... The aspect adjustments are apparently automatic, retroactive to all uploaded video, and if there's a way to turn the feature off in Creator Studio it's non-obvious... Update 7/27/18 7:48pm: A YouTube spokesperson has since clarified to Gizmodo that currently there is no way to disable this feature.

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Video: I figured something out about outliners a few days ago, and I have it working, and am ready to explain it is. 1. You only need two levels of hoisting if you have... 2. A crumb trail, like directory websites have. It belongs in outliners (none of mine ever had them). 3. You don't even need a dehoist command as long as you have the crumb trail. Watch the video to see how it works. It's remarkably simple.