One of my favorite parts of the latest The Important Thing podcast is where Rands explains that, in his RSS reader, he just marks-all-as-read at will.

For the kinds of RSS readers that track read/unread status, this is the right approach. If something’s truly important, it will come to you another way. And there are so many other ways that important things will reach you than in, say, 2005.

I write an RSS reader and I do this myself. (I often read just what’s new today, and then mark everything older as read.)

It’s totally a-okay. Your RSS reader is not your task master.

Prince William interviews Sir David Attenborough at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Kashmir Hill, a reporter at Gizmodo, spent weeks trying to avoid and block Amazon -- and every service that is owned by Amazon or uses Amazon's web services (AWS). She went to great lengths such as getting her own custom-built VPN. Turns out, it is impossible to keep Amazon off your life. An excerpt from the report: Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office's website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three "headquarters," chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Democrats have urged to delay his annual State of the Union until the ongoing partial government shutdown ends.

Union members are expected to vote on the deal on Tuesday, meaning teachers are likely to be back to work on Wednesday.

Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law. From a report: The European Union's Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from Alphabet, Facebook and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users. The law was supposed to be finalized this week but was delayed by disagreement among member states. Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, said Jennifer Bernal, Google's public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said. "The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position" on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple today pushed software updates for a range of its computing platforms. They are all minor releases that simply offer a few bug fixes and security updates, with no new features -- and there are no new features in any of the beta releases for these versions of the operating systems, either. From a report: iOS 12.1.3 fixes a scrolling bug in Messages, an iPad Pro-specific audio bug, and a graphical error in some photos, and it addresses some CarPlay disconnects experienced by owners of the three new iPhone models released in late 2018. It also fixes two minor bugs related to the company's HomePod smart speaker.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China demands that the US withdraw the arrest warrant against Meng Wanzhou, the top executive of tech giant Huawei.

The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have led to a dramatic drop in popularity for Russian president.

MasterCard was fined 570.6 million euros ($648 million) by the European Union for imposing rules that regulators said may have artificially raised the costs of card payments in the region. From a report: The European Commission said MasterCard unfairly prevented retailers from seeking cheaper rates from banks outside the EU country where they are based. MasterCard's curbs on cross-border acquiring ended when the EU introduced credit card legislation in 2015. The EU's probe started in 2013 and escalated with a statement of objections two years later. MasterCard last month set aside $650 million to cover the fine, less than a potential 1 billion euros it flagged as a possibility in 2017. The company got a 10 percent fine reduction for cooperating with the EU, regulators said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Human rights commission says more people died in last week’s protests than during August’s post-election violence.

A Taliban attack killed dozens of security personnel while members of the armed group held talks with the US in Qatar.

At least one killed, dozens injured in car bomb explosion in government stronghold of Latakia, Syrian state media says.