Amazon is looking to get into game streaming, joining its tech titan contemporaries Microsoft and Google, according to a report from The Information. From a report: Amazon is reportedly developing its own game streaming service, and it is talking to publishers about distributing games on its platform. Citing "two people briefed on the plans," The Information reports that the service likely won't launch until next year at the earliest.

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Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to charges last year, is set to testify to the US House of Representatives next month.

The Council on American Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit claiming that Maryland's anti-BDS law violates free speech.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A weather app that comes preinstalled on Alcatel smartphones contained malware that surreptitiously subscribed device owners to premium phone numbers behind their backs. The app, named "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar," was developed by TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company that among other things owns the Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm brands. The app is one of the default apps that TCL installs on Alcatel smartphones, but it was also made available on the Play Store for all Android users --where it had been downloaded and installed more than ten million times. But at one point last year, both the app included on some Alcatel devices and the one that was available on the Play Store were compromised with malware. How the malware was added to the app is unclear. TCL has not responded to phone calls requesting comment made by ZDNet this week. The app reportedly harvested users' data and sent it to China. It collected geographic locations, email addresses, and IMEI codes, which it sent back to TCL. Upstream, a UK-based mobile security firm, also found that "the malicious code hidden inside the app would also attempt to subscribe users to premium phone numbers that incurred large charges on users' phone bills," reports ZDNet. "All in all, the company says it detected and blocked over 27 million transaction attempts across seven markets, which would have created losses of around $1.5 million to phone owners if they hadn't been blocked." Upstream notes that most of the behavior they've seen originated only from two types of smartphones: Pixi 4 and A3 Max models.

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Only five percent of land has not been modified by humans, according to new report.

By selling more products of its own, Amazon is becoming a competitor to the outside manufacturers it hosts on its platform -- and that's worrying regulators around the world. From a report: Governments have rarely tried to rein in Amazon's ambitions, allowing it to avoid most of the recent scrutiny directed at other large tech platforms. But the increased focus on Amazon's house-brand offerings suggests it may now be Amazon's turn. Driving the news: Amazon built a robust business as a participant in its own marketplace when it saw growth stall in stateside e-commerce, which is why holiday shoppers might have seen Amazon-owned brands like Happy Belly for food or Solimo for household goods when they browsed the site last year. It created more "private label" products, from its AmazonBasics line to brands for fashion and furniture, that are in-house versions of things others sell on the site. It struck deals with outside manufacturers to sell their products exclusively. Critics say Amazon uses its sales data to find fruitful areas where it can produce generic versions of already-popular products.

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Scientists say the warming of the world's oceans is accelerating more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change given that almost all of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases ends up stored there. From a report: A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years. "2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth's oceans," said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. "As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year." As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer, slowing the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by human greenhouse gas emissions. But the escalating water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.

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Here's a scriptingNews format feed example. They can be hard to find. Hopefully now at least this one will show up in searches.

I just skimmed the Vice article about RSS. Up front they make it sound like something dramatic happened. That gravestone image was pretty bad. Someday it'll come back to them. ;-) Anyway there was, momentarily, some drama. The two groups wanted to do very different things. Netscape, as far as I'm concerned, wanted to bootstrap syndication of web content, and that was validated by the enormous popularity of RSS for that application. They had a vision that was right. And yes, they did one day just disappear. I wanted to preserve the progress we had made and build on it. I loved the idea since feeds provided exactly the level playing field I wanted for bloggers and pros. Look at all the good that came from that. Ask TechCrunch or Daring Fireball, Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo. And podcasting. These things all got their start because there was that level playing field. That vision was what was driving me. Ultimately the two forks went their separate ways, as they should have, because we were going different places. It's unfortunate both were called RSS, but if you study the history of tech standards these kinds of tales of woe are more the rule than the exception. It's a good story. I guess, for me it's the ancient past.

Observers say the visit is a chance to move past a difficult relationship between Berlin and Athens.

The announcement comes as the partial shutdown hits the 20th day with no resolution in sight.

Threat comes as president heads to southern border on 20th day of shutdown to make case for wall that Democrats oppose.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's new term has been widely condemned as illegitimate.

The partial government shutdown entered its 20th day on Thursday, as President Trump travelled to Texas.

According to the UN, 40,000 children's lives are at risk, as Lebanon faces harsh winter storms.