Videos and pictures of children being subjected to sexual abuse are being openly shared on Facebook's WhatsApp on a vast scale, with the encrypted messaging service failing to curb the problem despite banning thousands of accounts every day. From a report: Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp's automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include "Adult" sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active. TechCrunch's investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp's moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like "child porn only no adv" and "child porn xvideos" found on the group discovery app "Group Links For Whats" by Lisa Studio don't even attempt to hide their nature. Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That's proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community. It's a similar problem that WhatsApp, used by more than a billion users, is facing in developing markets where its service is being used to spread false information.

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Use the Image Capture app.

1. Plug your iPhone into the Mac using the USB cable.
2. Unlock the phone if necessary.
3. The photos and videos should appear in a window.
4. Select the ones you want.
5. Click the Import button.
6. Open the Pictures folder.
7. The videos are in the folder.
8. Move them where ever you like.

Do not use the Photos app. They store the videos you download in a database. You can find them if you persist but they're in a database and you can't just copy them out. This is pointless if you want to share them with other people or publish them via YouTube or whatever.

The NYT is fucked up. Don't delete Facebook. They are as wrong as they were when they made an issue of Hillary's emails. That got us President Fucking Trump. Thank you very much NY Times. Instead let's slowly figure out ways to do stuff on the open web that doesn't depend on huge tech companies. Facebook is far from our only problem. Change won't happen overnight and deleting Facebook is not the answer any more than we can solve climate change by not deleting our cars. And btw, the NYT's mortal enemy is Facebook. At some point they should disclaim that, their readers should be made aware that they are scared shitless of what Facebook is doing to the journalism industry. That's a fear you and I, their reader, might not share with them.

President Donald Trump announces the total withdrawal of US troops from Syria and a victory over ISIL in the country.

merbs writes: Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too. There's a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others. In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels' and casinos' widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city's most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got.

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UN envoy De Mistura says he regrets the outcome, admitting his efforts to establish committee while in office failed.

The Python Software Foundation has settled on a new governance model for the programming language Python. The decision to come up with a new model was made after Python creator and chief Guido van Rossum stepped down as the "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL). SDTimes: The new governance model will rely on a five-person steering council to establish standard practices for introducing new features to the Python programming language. Based on tested methods, the proposal was designed to be "boring," comprehensive, flexible and lightweight, the steering council model document explained. "We're not experts in governance, and we don't think Python is a good place to experiment with new and untried governance models," software developers Nathaniel Smith and Donald Stufft explained in the Python documentation. "So this proposal sticks to mature, well-known, previously tested processes as much as possible. The high-level approach of a mostly-hands-off council is arguably the most common across large successful F/OSS projects, and low-level details are derived directly from Django's governance." The steering council will serve as the "court of final appeal" for changes to the language and will have broad authority over the decision-making process, including the ability to accept or reject PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposals) (such as the one used to introduce this governance model), enforce and update the project's code of conduct, create subcommittees and manage project assets. But the intended goal of the council is to take a more hands-off and occasional approach to flexing its powers, Smith and Stufft explained.

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Rights groups slam planned changes, saying move is illegal and violates the rights of refugees.

Here's a question for you. Suppose you want to start a private Facebook group, but you don't want to use Facebook. What to do?

Despite assurances from Trump that ISIL is defeated, US raids against group in eastern Syria have intensified recently.

Earlier this year, business communication service Slack began to block users in Syria, Iran, and select other embargoed countries to comply with U.S. regulations. This week, the company has broadened the scope of the ban by blocking some users if they have moved from or visited any of the sanctioned nations in recent years. From a report: The company began to face a backlash early today after several users complained that their Slack accounts had been deactivated and that they never received a formal warning from the company. Part of the problem, as Sarah Shugars, a PhD candidate at Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, pointed out, is that some users have been blocked even if they have been living in the United States for a number of years.

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Nearly 600 homeless people in the two regions died last year - a 24 percent rise, according to official estimates.

U.S. authorities on Thursday unveiled indictments against two Chinese nationals linked to China's government who took part in a cyber spying campaign that hacked a range of American government agencies and corporations and violated a 2015 pact, escalating tensions between the two nations. From a report: The U.S. Justice Department charged Zhu Hua and Zhang Jianguo in computer hacking attacks on the U.S. Navy, the space agency NASA and businesses in numerous sectors. The defendants hacked computers to steal intellectual property and confidential business and technological data, according to the indictment. U.S. and British authorities on Thursday also condemned China for violating 2015 agreements to curb cyber espionage for business purposes, slamming Chinese efforts to steal other countries' trade secrets and technologies and to compromise government computers.

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We meet aspiring African footballers as they try to make it in Thailand's big league. But competition is fierce.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Latest registration figures released by Verisign, an internet network company that oversees some domain name endings, seem to indicate that after a rocky few years, new gTLDs may finally be finding their niche in the marketplace. 2019 could be the year of the obscure domain name. Registrations for new gTLDs rose by nearly 11 per cent in the last year, compared to an average 3.5 per cent increase across the entire domain landscape, according to Verisign. One in five domain name registrations in the last year were on new gTLDs. "The numbers are picking up as well as the usage," says Thomas Keller of 1&1 IONOS, a German web hosting company. In part that's down to saturation in more traditional domain name endings like dot-com, and country code TLDs (such as .uk, .tk and .cn). It's difficult to get good, precise and short dot-com domain names now, but hyper-specific and new gTLDs still have plenty of choice. Around ten per cent of new URLs registered through 1&1 IONOS were for new gTLds, Keller says.

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