Vice chairperson of anti-discrimination committee says members of ethnic community treated as 'enemies of the state'.

Amnesty calls footage credible evidence to support allegations that Cameroon's armed forces committed 'grave crimes'.

Students from Fast.ai, a small organization that runs free machine-learning courses online, just created an AI algorithm that outperforms code from Google's researchers, per an important benchmark. From a report: Fast.ai's success is important because it sometimes seems as if only those with huge resources can do advanced AI research. Fast.ai consists of part-time students keen to try their hand at machine learning -- and perhaps transition into a career in data science. It rents access to computers in Amazon's cloud. But Fast.ai's team built an algorithm that beats Google's code, as measured using a benchmark called DAWNBench, from researchers at Stanford. This benchmark uses a common image classification task to track the speed of a deep-learning algorithm per dollar of compute power. Google's researchers topped the previous rankings, in a category for training on several machines, using a custom-built collection its own chips designed specifically for machine learning. The Fast.ai team was able to produce something even faster, on roughly equivalent hardware.

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Security meltdowns on your smartphone are often self-inflicted: You clicked the wrong link, or installed the wrong app. But for millions of Android devices, the vulnerabilities have been baked in ahead of time, deep in the firmware, just waiting to be exploited. Who put them there? Some combination of the manufacturer that made it, and the carrier that sold it to you. From a report: That's the key finding of new analysis from mobile security firm Kryptowire, which details troubling bugs preloaded into 10 devices sold across the major US carriers. Kryptowire CEO Angelos Stavrou and director of research Ryan Johnson will present their research, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, at the Black Hat security conference Friday. The potential outcomes of the vulnerabilities range in severity, from being able to lock someone out of their device to gaining surreptitious access to its microphone and other functions. They all share one common trait, though: They didn't have to be there. [...] "The problem is not going to go away, because a lot of the people in the supply chain want to be able to add their own applications, customize, add their own code. That increases the attack surface, and increases the probability of software error," Stavrou says. "They're exposing the end user to exploits that the end user is not able to respond to." Security researchers found 38 different vulnerabilities that can allow for spying and factory resets loaded onto 25 Android phones. That includes devices from Asus, ZTE, LG and the Essential Phone, which are distributed by carriers like Verizon or AT&T.

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Sometime about 15 years ago, a group of hackers and activists launched The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrent search engine. TorrentFreak: While the exact launch date is a bit of a mystery, even to the site's founders, August 10 was previously chosen as its anniversary. What we do know is that the site was brought online in 2003 by now-disbanded pro-culture organization Piratbyran, which is Swedish for Bureau of Piracy. The group was formed by political activists and hackers in the same year, many of whom had already launched other web projects challenging political, moral, and power structures. One of the group's unwritten goals was to offer a counterweight to the propaganda being spread by local anti-piracy outfit Antpiratbyran. With BitTorrent as the up-and-coming file-sharing technology, they saw fit to start their own file-sharing site to promote sharing of information. The Pirate Bay first came online in Mexico where Gottfrid Svartholm, aka Anakata, hosted the site on a server owned by the company he was working for at the time. After a few months, the site moved to Sweden where it was hosted on a Pentium III 1GHz laptop with 256MB RAM.

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The inauguration of Mnangagwa is delayed after the opposition coalition files a legal challenge to election results.

Suspect in custody after shooting in eastern Canada leaves two civilians and two police officers dead.

Saudi-UAE coalition air strikes killed dozens of people, many of them children, in northern Yemen on Thursday.

"The damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic." From a report: In July, Nintendo sued two popular ROM sites, LoveROMS and LoveRetro.co, for what it called "brazen and mass-scale infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property rights." Both sites have since shut down. On Wednesday, another big, 18-year-old ROM site, EmuParadise, said it would no longer be able to allow people to download old games due to "potentially disastrous consequences." Nintendo owns the intellectual property for its games, and when people pirate them instead of buying a Nintendo Super NES Classic Edition or a downloading a copy from one of its digital storefronts, it can argue it's losing money. According to Nintendo's official site, ROMs and video game emulation also represent "the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers," and "have the potential to significantly damage" tens of thousands of jobs. Even when a Nintendo game isn't for sale, it's still the company's intellectual property, and it can enforce its copyright if it wants. But the damage that removing ROMs from the internet could do to video games as a whole is catastrophic. Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs. Entire chapters of video game history would be lost if ROMs and emulation didn't preserve games where publishers failed to. And perhaps most importantly, denying people access to ROMs makes the process of educating them in game development much more difficult, potentially hobbling future generations of video game makers.

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Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have faced growing internal unrest from employees who raise ethical concerns about how the companies deploy their high-tech services and products. That chorus of dissent is now growing louder as outside engineers voice their concerns to recruiters working for those tech companies. An anonymous reader shares a report: The protests of tech workers have proven persuasive because Silicon Valley firms compete fiercely to recruit and retain relatively scarce engineering talent. For example, Google's leadership sought to reassure employees by declaring it would not renew its Pentagon contract and by issuing a set of ethical principles for future uses of Google-developed technologies. By the same logic, engineers who are approached by tech recruiters also have leverage. "I might be a one-off example, but it could be different if Amazon gets a lot of people emailing them saying, 'Hey I won't work for you because of this,'" Geiduschek, a software engineer at Dropbox, who declined a job offer from Amazon, says. Jackie Luo, a software engineer at Square, took a similar stance with a tech recruiter who sought to interest her in a career with Google. The recruiter happened to contact Luo when she was reading about Google's plans to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored version of the company's Internet search engine. [...] Individual engineers such as Luo and Geiduschek seem to be responding to tech recruiters through their own initiative rather than as part of any larger movement. Meanwhile, some tech employees have joined organized efforts, such as the #TechWontBuildIt movement spearheaded by the labor advocacy group Tech Workers Coalition.

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Local Bangladeshis in host communities near Rohingya camps complain of rise in cost of living but others see benefits.

Data by Brazilian think-tank shows that many of the murders were concentrated in the poorer northeastern states.

The social network's initiatives to connect people to the internet, including Internet.org and new data analytics tools, are now part of Facebook Connectivity. From a report: A half decade after launching Internet.org, seen by many as the coming-out party for Facebook's connectivity programs, the company said it's shaking up its efforts to bring internet access to the 4 billion people who still don't have it. On Friday, Facebook rounded up all its disparate broadband and infrastructure projects and housed them under a new umbrella organization called Facebook Connectivity. "There's no silver bullet for connecting the world," Yael Maguire, vice president of engineering for Facebook Connectivity, said in an interview Thursday. "There isn't going to be a magic technology or business plan or single regulatory policy change that's going to change this. We really believe that it is a wide and diverse set of efforts that's required to do this." The Connectivity group houses projects including Terragraph, which aims to connect high-density urban areas; OpenCellular, an open-source platform working on rural connectivity; and the Telecom Infra Project, a joint initiative with the wireless industry for creating faster networks. Facebook said the umbrella will also include Internet.org, which drew controversy with its Free Basics product that offered a pared-down version of the internet in emerging markets. While Internet.org has been synonymous with Facebook's connectivity efforts for the past five years, the new Connectivity brand may signal the company trying to distance itself from the backlashes surrounding Internet.org.

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The death toll from a magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Indonesia's Lombok island rises to at least 321.

Ethiopia's government has regressed to an old habit: shutting down the internet. From a report: Reports show the internet has been blocked in the eastern cities of Jijiga, Dire Dawa, and Harar following violence and simmering political tensions. Over the past weekend, federal troops were deployed to the eastern Somali regional state, leading to a standoff with local police, lootings, and death. The region's leader Abdi Mohamoud Omar, better known as Abdi Iley, was forced to resign and replaced by his finance minister Ahmed Abdi Mohammed. Following the unrest, officials cut off internet access to the region, with no explanation from either the ministry of communications or the sole mobile operator and internet provider Ethio Telecom. The move is indicative of an old Ethiopian government trick, blocking the internet or access to specific social media sites like Facebook and Twitter during anti-government protests or unease.

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