Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success. From a report: Three practitioners including erstwhile blockchain enthusiast John Burg, a Fellow at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), looked at instances of the distributed crypto ledger being used in a wide range of situations by NGOs, contractors and agencies. But they drew a complete blank. "We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development." Blockchain vendors were keen to puff the merits of the technology, but when the three asked for proof of success in the field, it all went very quiet. "We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL [monitoring, evaluation, research and learning] processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque." Burg was an enthusiastic advocate for blockchain until recently -- as he explained in this Medium post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tumblr, the underground social media site known for its pornographic content and tight-knit community, will be instituting a major change to its guidelines in a couple of weeks. The company said in a blog post today that it will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th. The company flatly stated that "adult content will no longer be allowed here." The Verge reports: Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay -- so long as sex acts aren't depicted -- and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos. After December 17th, any explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community. "Blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as 'explicit' per our old policy and before December 17, 2018 will still be overlaid with a content filter when viewing these blogs directly," the blog post reads. "While some of the content on these blogs may now be in violation of our policies and will be actioned accordingly, the blog owners may choose to post content that is within our policies in the future, so we'd like to provide that option..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Majority of public sector doctors join strike, according to officials, as the country's economy struggles.

As some of the key players in Yemen's war meet in Sweden, will peace finally be achieved?

SpaceX notched its 19th launch of the year Monday, lofting 64 small spacecraft from 34 organizations into low Earth orbit. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's central coast at about 10:34 a.m. local time. The customer was Spaceflight Industries, a Seattle-based company that organized the launch on behalf of several clients. From a report: The Spaceflight SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission includes 15 microsats and 49 cubesats from commercial and government entities, including universities, startups and a middle school, according to the SpaceX press kit. The payloads -- which vary from technology demonstrations and imaging satellites to educational-research endeavors -- are from 17 countries, including the U.S., Brazil, India and South Korea. SpaceX said a series of six deployments would occur about 13 to 43 minutes after takeoff, then Spaceflight would command its own deployment sequences over a period of six hours. The Falcon 9's first stage has flown twice before: in May 2018 and again in August. SpaceX recovered it Monday on "Just Read the Instructions," a droneship in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX also attempted to recover the rocket's fairing, which encloses the payload, with Mr. Steven, a boat designed to capture it in a massive net.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m on the latest Micro Monday podcast with Jean MacDonald! It was so much fun to do.

We talk about podcasting and about the similar ideas behind The Omni Show and Micro Monday. And The Record.

We also talk about NetNewsWire and about Micro.blog.

Entirely coincidentally — Micro.blog has been open to the public for a year now. Congratulations to Manton and Jean on this big milestone!

Opposition Labour Party heads push against British PM Theresa May over publication of Brexit legal advice.

Skype is getting real-time captions and subtitles, and PowerPoint will have these features, too, next year. From a report: Ostensibly an accessibility feature (and launched on United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities), the new option means that Skype will be able to use voice recognition to show you the text of what is being said in a voice or video call. Microsoft will also bring the same feature to PowerPoint next year. Microsoft promises that live captions and subtitles are "optimized to be fast, continuous, and contextually updated as people speak", and in the current incarnation they will automatically scroll during a call. In a future update, however, it will be possible to manually scroll through subtitles and take advantage of additional viewing options.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qatar is set to quit the 15-nation bloc after more than 50 years, saying it will instead focus on natural gas.

Even as a furious debate broke out in China over gene-edited babies, some scientists in the US are also hoping to improve tomorrow's children. From a report: [...] Amid the condemnation, though, it was easy to lose track of what the key experts were saying. Technology to alter heredity is for real. It is improving very quickly, it has features that will make it safe, and much wider exploratory use to create children could be justified soon. That was the message delivered at a gene-editing summit in Hong Kong on Wednesday, by Harvard Medical School dean George Daley, just ahead of He's own dramatic appearance on the stage (see video starting at 1:15:30). Astounding some listeners, the Harvard doctor and stem-cell researcher didn't condemn He but instead characterized the Chinese actions as a wrong turn on the right path (see video). "The fact that it is possible that the first instance of human germ-line editing came forward as a misstep should in no way lead us to stick our heads in the sand," Daley said. "It's time to ... start outlining what an actual pathway for clinical translation would be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Head of European football says he would not back Spain and Portugal if they were to bid alongside Morocco in 2030.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "We've launched our last satellite," John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, said in a meeting with analysts on Nov. 29. The AT&T executive effectively declared the end of the satellite-TV era with that statement. AT&T owns DirecTV, the US's largest satellite company -- and second largest TV provider overall, behind Comcast. DirecTV will continue offering satellite-TV service -- it had nearly 20 million satellite video subscribers as of September, per company filings. But the company will focus on growing its online video business instead, Donovan said. It has a new set-top box, where people can get the same TV service they'd get with satellite, through an internet-connected box they can install themselves. It expects that box to become a greater share of its new premium-TV service installations in the first half of 2019. It also sells cheaper, TV packages with fewer channels through its DirecTV Now and WatchTV streaming services, which work with many smart TVs and streaming media players like Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices. The practice of getting TV through satellite dishes propped up in backyards and perched on rooftops first took hold in the US in the last 1970s and early 1980s, after TV networks like HBO and Turner Broadcasting System started sending TV signals to cable providers via satellites. People in areas without cable or broadcast TV began putting up their own dishes to receive the TV signals, and that grew into a TV business of its own.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nasa's Osiris-Rex spacecraft moves alongside the 500m-wide rock from which it hopes to grab a sample.

'Sudan Forgotten Films' follows the journey of two men as they attempt to rescue the African nation's film archive.

Prosecutors rejected Italy's appeal to name policemen suspected of PhD student's murder, citing lack of evidence.