An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Jon Brodkin: Nearly two years have passed since the Federal Communications Commission reported on whether broadband customers are getting the Internet speeds they pay for. In 2011, the Obama-era FCC began measuring broadband speeds in nearly 7,000 consumer homes as part of the then-new Measuring Broadband America program. Each year from 2011 to 2016, the FCC released an annual report comparing the actual speeds customers received to the advertised speeds customers were promised by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, AT&T, and other large ISPs. But the FCC hasn't released any new Measuring Broadband America reports since Republican Ajit Pai became the commission chairman in January 2017. Pai's first year as chair was the first time the FCC failed to issue a new Measuring Broadband America report since the program started -- though the FCC could release a new report before his second year as chair is complete. For more than three months, Ars has been trying to find out whether the FCC is still analyzing Measuring Broadband America data and whether the FCC plans to release any more measurement reports. SamKnows, the measurement company used by the FCC for this program, told Ars that Measuring Broadband America is still active and that a new report is forthcoming, hopefully next month. But whether the report is released is up to the FCC, and Chairman Pai's public relations office has ignored our questions about the program. Because of Pai's office's silence, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request on August 13 for internal emails about the Measuring Broadband America program and for broadband speed measurement data since January 2017. By law, the FCC and other federal agencies have 20 business days to respond to public records requests. The FCC has denied Ars' request for "expedited processing," which "was warranted because the broadband measuring data is out of data, depriving American consumers of crucial information when they purchase broadband access," writes Brodkin. The FCC said, "we are not persuaded that the records you request are so urgent that our normal process will not provide them in a timely manner."

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Google's top news executive has refused to rule out shutting down Google News in EU countries, as the search engine faces a battle with Brussels over plans to charge a "link tax" for using news stories. The Guardian reports: Richard Gingras, the search engine's vice-president of news, said while "it's not desirable to shut down services" the company was deeply concerned about the current proposals, which are designed to compensate struggling news publishers if snippets of their articles appear in search results. He told the Guardian that the future of Google News could depend on whether the EU was willing to alter the phrasing of the legislation. "We can't make a decision until we see the final language," he said. He pointed out the last time a government attempted to charge Google for links, in 2014 in Spain, the company responded by shutting down Google News in the country. Spain passed a law requiring aggregation sites to pay for news links, in a bid to prop up struggling print news outlets. Google responded by closing the service for Spanish consumers, which he said prompted a fall in traffic to Spanish news websites. "We would not like to see that happen in Europe," said Gingras. "Right now what we want to do is work with stakeholders."

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Is there an App Store for Saudi Arabia? I don’t personally have any apps on the App Store — but if I did I’d make them unavailable there.

It’s totally a-okay for businesses and individuals to impose our own sanctions. We should, in fact.

Riaz was one of Pakistan's best known progressive writers who authored over a dozen books.

Rainier is the app, and Ballard is the language. It’s named for the neighborhood where I live in Seattle. (Using Pacific Northwest names is what I do now.)

Ballard has a fresh GitHub repository. It’s a separate framework, since I want to use it in NetNewsWire, and because I want to make it so other people can use it in their apps if they want to.

Another goal: the code should be understandable and tinker-able. The idea is to create a language where the implementation is not mysterious, where it’s accessible to even new programmers who are willing to put in some effort.

So I’m writing in Swift, at the highest level I can, and I’m writing blog posts which explain things.

Four Pieces

The language implementation will have four main parts:

• Tokenizer: takes a string of code and breaks it into tokens. A token is a small structure that specifies things like: this is an identifier, and its name is whatever. Or this is an if keyword. Or this is a + sign. Etc.
• Parser: turns the tokens into a tree of nodes that can be evaluated.
• Evaluator: runs the script — that is, it evaluates the tree of nodes created by the parser.
• Standard library: the set of commands — we call them verbs — that are built in to the language. These are for things like operating on strings, files, dates, and so on. This also includes some constants for things like the maximum value of an integer.

Makes sense, no?

Where I’m At

On the weekend I got far enough with the tokenizer — named Tokenizer — that I could start writing tests for it.

The tokenizer is probably the least interesting part of all of this, and I don’t think I need to write much to explain it.

The gist of it is that it goes through the string by calling popNextToken() to create an array of tokens until it reaches the end of the string. It will throw an error if it encounters something it can’t handle.

Which should be super-rare, because the tokenizer does not do much in the way of syntax checking. The tokenizer should be able to handle stuff that is entirely incorrect code.

Checking syntax is the job of the parser. The tokenizer just performs that initial pass that gives the parser something besides raw text to work with.

So, next step: write more tests for the tokenizer, fix any bugs, and then move on to the parser.

The parser will be more challenging, for sure. The evaluator, too — especially since it needs to be able to handle debugging, which means being able to pause, view the variables in the stack, resume, etc.

But one thing at a time: the tokenizer comes first.

French rights group says Prince Mohammed bin Zayed is complicit in torture and inhumane treatment.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's been messing around with indoor maps for years; you can check the layout of many department stores and other large indoor spaces in Google Maps. Find My Device can show on those maps where your device is located. Here's the changelog for the latest version: "Support for indoor maps to help you find your device in airports, malls, or other large buildings. And, Support for work profiles."

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Reversal of an earlier policy by the ruling party could significantly ease a standoff with the EU.

US president says he will not sanction Saudi Crown Prince over Jamal Khashoggi's murder.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts pushes back against Trump, saying there are no 'Obama judges or Trump judges'.

Jittery over a 'grand alliance' bid to form government, the BJP-backed governor dissolves the state assembly.

The way newscasters speak is unmistakeable, with their exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses. And now, Amazon has taught Alexa, its voice assistant, to approximate the authoritative intonation. From a report: You can listen to samples of the speaking style here, and the results, well, they speak for themselves. The voice can't be mistaken for a human, but it does incorporates stresses into sentences in the same way you'd expect from a TV or radio newscaster. According to Amazon's own surveys, users prefer it to Alexa's regular speaking style when listening to articles (though getting news from smart speakers still has lots of other problems). Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company's development of "neural text-to-speech" technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that's been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.

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Gap plans to "quickly" close hundreds of Gap-brand stores that are "dragging down the brand," the company told analysts on Tuesday. From a report: The retailer said Tuesday evening that it still has 775 Gap-branded stores globally, in addition to those under the Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta banners. Gap Inc. has more than 3,000 stores around the world. The namesake brand, however, has been the weakest unit of the company of late. In the fiscal third quarter, sales at Gap stores open for at least 12 months fell 7 percent, while those at Old Navy and Banana Republic were positive. "There are hundreds of other stores that likely don't fit our vision for the future of Gap brand specialty store, whether in terms of profitability, customer experience, traffic trends," CEO Art Peck said Tuesday evening during a call with analysts. "The range from the very best to the very worst stores is extremely broad." Peck said that should the company "address" the bottom half of its fleet of Gap stores, it could contribute more than $100 million to earnings. He added the company is looking to make decisions about shutting stores "with urgency," including looking at closing some of Gap's "amazing flagships." "There likely will be a cash cost to exit many of these stores, which we will attempt to minimize," Peck told analysts. "But I plan to exit those that do not fit the future vision quickly. I'm going to move thoughtfully but aggressively."

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The deputy chairman of the ruling AK Party has accused the US of turning a blind eye to murder.

Over 60 percent of the CAR's population is already in need of aid and protection, with violence affecting millions.