An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Netflix's first interactive movie, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch makes no bones about its Choose Your Own Adventure inspiration, and that's reportedly caught the eye of the series' original publisher. Chooseco, a publishing company specializing in children's books, is suing Netflix for infringing on the company's "Choose Your Own Adventure" trademark. According to the official complaint, Netflix has been in negotiations with Chooseco over a license for the series since 2016, but Chooseco says Netflix never actually gained permission to use it. After the release of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch late last month, Chooseco has filed a complaint against Netflix for $25 million in damages, as the company says that Netflix's new movie benefits from association with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, without the company ever receiving the trademark. Chooseco says it sent a cease-and-desist request to Netflix at least once over the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark in the past. Netflix has declined to comment on the complaint.

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Shutdown expected to stretch into 22nd day, which would make it the longest of its kind in US history.

Leader of the opposition-controlled parliament says he's ready to assume presidency until new elections are held.

Listened to the Daily podcast interview a sheriff from an Arizona border county. The border wall story was used to stoke hatred of non-white, non-Christian Americans during the campaign. That's what it means. The "humanitarian crisis" the president calls for is a fig leaf for people like the sheriff. It's a loud obvious dog whistle. Can't budge an inch or we're supporting hate.

Apple is planning to release three new iPhone models this year, including a device to succeed the newly-created XR model, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. From a report: Apple will unveil direct successors to last year's iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. The iPhone XR, which is believed to have been the least popular of the three, will be updated with a model that comes with the same LCD display and similar design, according to the report. Apple is also considering adding a triple-lens camera system to one of the 2019 models in a bid to compete with Samsung and others that are readying similar camera systems, the Journal's sources said.

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Juan David Ortiz, a 10-year employee of US border patrol, is accused of killing four sex workers in Texas.

A Huawei executive has been arrested in Poland on charges of spying for China, Poland's counterintelligence service said Friday. NPR reports: A government spokesman identified the suspect as Weijing W.; media reports in Poland and China say he also is known as Stanislaw Wang, Huawei's sales director in Poland. In a coordinated arrest Tuesday, authorities also detained and charged a Polish citizen named Piotr D. who works for the telecom company Orange Polska. He is a former Internal Security Agency official, according to Poland's TVP Info, which first reported the story. Police searched both of the suspects' homes Tuesday. In addition, TVP Info says, Internal Security Agency officers searched Huawei's headquarters in Poland and an Orange office where Piotr D. worked. The government has evidence that the two suspects "cooperated with the Chinese services" as they conducted espionage against Poland, according to Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for the special services branch, in a tweet about the case.

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Bird, an electric scooter rental company, sent a "Notice of Claimed Infringement" to news blog Boing Boing for reporting about people doing legal things that Bird does not like. EFF reports: Electric scooters have swamped a number of cities across the US, many of the scooters carelessly discarded in public spaces. Bird, though, has pioneered a new way to pollute the commons by sending a meritless takedown letter to a journalist covering the issue. The company cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and implies that even writing about the issue could be illegal. It's not. Bird sent a "Notice of Claimed Infringement" over this article on Boing Boing, one of the Internet's leading sources of news and commentary. The article reports on the fact that large numbers of Bird scooters are winding up in impound lots, and that it's possible to lawfully purchase these scooters when cities auction them off, and then to lawfully modify those scooters so they work without the Bird app. The letter is necessarily vague about exactly how the post infringed any of Bird's rights, and with good reason: the post does no such thing, as we explain in a letter on behalf of Happy Mutants LLC, which owns and operates Boing Boing. The post reports on lawful activity, nothing more. In fact, the First Amendment would have protected it even if reported on illegal conduct or advocated for people to break the law. (For instance, a person might lawfully advocate that an electric scooter startup should violate local parking ordinances. Hypothetically.) So, in a sense, it doesn't matter whether Bird is right or wrong when it claims that it's illegal to convert a Bird scooter to a personal scooter. Either way, Boing Boing was free to report on it.

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More on the dual-major journalism and computer science degree. Yesterday I wrote how that could be great for journalism, now I want to talk about the flip side, how it's great for the software journalists use, i.e. publishing software. In my experience the best software is that which is designed by people who use the product. They bump against the limits as users do, think of shortcuts and simplifications (called factoring in software). If you don't use the software your ideas about how it should work are theoretical. The closer you are to the user experience, the better you understand the tradeoffs from the user's perspective. And that ultimately is the most important one. So applied to this dual-major concept when the students learn their comp sci, it can be in the context of how journalists use computer systems. And with better understanding of users on the part of the students, after all they are users, the better the publishing software can be.

First, I am not a Democrat. I'm an independent but these days I vote straight Democrat because what the Republicans have become is so abhorrent to me. We're at the very baseline of governance in the US. Do you or do you not stand for the Constitution? Today only the Dems do. The Repubs do not.

Anyway, if Pelosi and Schumer give the president "the wall" which I put in quotes because we have no clue what it means, we are giving into the idea that a majority of the American electorate have no say in how the country is run.

We've been pushed to the limit by the Repubs. They wouldn't confirm Merrick Garland. They have installed a majority on the court even though they don't represent a majority in the country. The latest appointee slandered the court during his confirmation hearings. It's going to get worse. They gerrymandered Congressional districts so that in order to control the House the Dems have to win a landslide, which they did, in 2018, and even so, according to the Repubs, have no say in governance.

Enough. We have a system of government. Respect it. Trump's "wall" is an imaginary thing. It's an example of the emperor with no clothes. If we can't stand against this and say no, and have it stick, then we have given up any hope of ever having self-government in the US.

Country will be renamed the Republic of Northern Macedonia, finalising its part of the deal with Greece.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2018, several high-profile controversies involving AI served as a wake-up call for technologists, policymakers, and the public. The technology may have brought us welcome advances in many fields, but it can also fail catastrophically when built shoddily or applied carelessly. It's hardly a surprise, then, that Americans have mixed support for the continued development of AI and overwhelmingly agree that it should be regulated, according to a new study from the Center for the Governance of AI and Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. These are important lessons for policymakers and technologists to consider in the discussion on how best to advance and regulate AI, says Allan Dafoe, director of the center and coauthor of the report. "There isn't currently a consensus in favor of developing advanced AI, or that it's going to be good for humanity," he says. "That kind of perception could lead to the development of AI being perceived as illegitimate or cause political backlashes against the development of AI."

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I requested to download all the info Flickr has about me on Tuesday, got the data on Wednesday, and yesterday I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what I got.

• There were 14 zip files, each containing one folder, total of 6.59GB, 12,729 files.
• 13 of the folders contain JPG images.
• One folder, named 72157704082859561_da410b4a23fb_part1, all JSON files, 36.8MB, 6366 files. The vast majority of the JSON files have names like photo_6594805.json. I've uploaded one of the files to the Scripting News repo, so you can see what kind of data you get about each image.
• Each of the 13 folders contains files with names like dsc02455jpg_76330356_o.jpg. The dates on the files unfortunately are all the same, they don't say when the photos were taken. This would be helpful in piecing things together. It appears the first part of the name, before the underscore, is derived from the name of the file. Then following the first underscore and before the second is a number, which appears to be the identifier of the picture. This I believe is the connection between the image and the JSON file, above.

I loaded the JSON files into a section of a Frontier object database, and the names of the JPG files into another section. I wrote a script that looped over all the data from the JSON files, got the ID and then checked if there were images to go with that ID. 5816 image files existed and 533 didn't. Not bad, but not perfect. 533/5816 == about 91 percent. Here's a list of IDs for which there were no images.

I haven't tried to generate a static site using this info, but you could. It would be missing some images, about 9 percent. Even so, it would have been really nice if Flickr delivered it in that format. It's nice to have the JSON files, but most users won't be able to use them unless some software is written, and they find it.

HBO has been playing all the Sopranos episodes back to back for a few days. Yesterday by luck I hit on the very last episode. Earlier in the day I read a debate written when the series ended on whether Tony died at the end. I am of the school that yeah of course he died, but then the person who took the opposite position was convincing. We don't know what happened at the end so leave it there. But I got to see all the scenes that were discussed, the same day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: IMDb is known as the place to go to look up details for any film under the sun, and now it's entering the streaming video arena. The company has launched Freedive, a free streaming platform that's supported by periodic ad breaks. The service's films and TV shows are available to registered IMDb or Amazon users and Amazon Fire TV owners. (The list of compatible devices is the same as the list for Prime Video.) Fire owners can navigate the service by way of a new icon in the "Your Apps & Channels" section or by telling their Amazon smart device, "Alexa, go to Freedive." The site says it will continually add new offerings to the site. The site will also indicate on a film's page if it's available on Freedive.

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