From a report: Recently, a musician signed to a major indie label told me they were owed up to $40,000 in song royalties they would never be able to collect. It wasn't that they had missed out on payments for a single song -- it was that they had missed out on payments for 70 songs, going back at least six years. The problem, they said, was metadata. In the music world, metadata most commonly refers to the song credits you see on services like Spotify or Apple Music, but it also includes all the underlying information tied to a released song or album, including titles, songwriter and producer names, the publisher(s), the record label, and more. That information needs to be synchronized across all kinds of industry databases to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid. And often, they aren't. Metadata sounds like one of the smallest, most boring things in music. But as it turns out, it's one of the most important, complex, and broken, leaving many musicians unable to get paid for their work. "Every second that goes by and it's not fixed, I'm dripping pennies," said the musician. Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there's no need to verify the accuracy of a song's metadata before it gets released, and there's no one place where music metadata is stored. Instead, fractions of that data is kept in hundreds of different places across the world. As a result, the problem is way bigger than a name being misspelled when you click a song's credits on Spotify. Missing, bad, or inconsistent song metadata is a crisis that has left, by some estimations, billions on the table that never gets paid to the artists who earned that money.

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Separately on Thursday, Trump says he will make 'dramatic' statement on the border this week.

The Galaxy Note 10 will reportedly be Samsung's first flagship to remove the headphone jack, taking one of the last wired audio options off the flagship market. From a report: The Note 10 will have no 3.5mm connector, or exterior buttons (power, volume, Bixby) will be replaced by capacitive or pressure-sensitive areas, likely highlighted by some kind of raised 'bump' and/or texture along the edge (i.e., a faux button). We don't know if it's Samsung's intent to carry over both of these changes to the Galaxy S11 in 2020. Both changes had been previously rumored, but we can now provide stronger confirmation. The Note line has always been fertile ground for Samsung's more forward-looking changes to its smartphones' industrial design and general philosophy, as it's a phone that's long been adored by some of Samsung's most ardent fans -- the sort of people who tend to be early adopters of new technology.

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Far-right MEPs want British representatives to join their ranks, but Brexiters have little interest or influence.

After years of criticism of a crackdown on dissident following a 2016 attempted coup, Erdogan announces reforms.

Google's new confidential mode is rolling out to G Suite users and will be turned on by default starting on June 25th. Personal account holders have been able to use this feature since Gmail's mid-2018 redesign, but Gmail users at work have not. "Confidential mode is a powerful tool that will come in handy at work if you send messages containing sensitive details," reports The Verge. "It lets you set an expiration date for your message, which cuts off access when that day arrives. While the message is available, recipients won't be able to forward your message to others, copy its contents, or download it, and the sender can revoke access at any point. To add another layer of security, you can set the message to only unlock after the recipient types in an SMS verification code that's sent to their phone number." Slashdot reader shanen reacts: Apparently the Google of supreme evil has decided they need to try to force this confidential-mode email down people's throats. I think that's actually a gigantic business opportunity for Outlook, assuming they actually want to offer a superior email system. The fundamental premise of confidential mode is "We want to communicate with you, but we don't trust you," and my fundamental response is GFY. The ONLY thing I want is an option to reject all confidential-mode email. (However, I'm sure Microsoft is too evil to offer that option because they don't trust their own employees and have to eat their own poison dog food.) (Well, actually there are several other improvements I want from email, such as a bounce for no-reply email.)

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Four years after 3D Touch debuted on the iPhone 6s, the pressure-sensitive feature appears to be on the chopping block. From a report: Last week, in a research note shared with MacRumors, a team of Barclays analysts "confirmed" that 3D Touch "will be eliminated" in all 2019 iPhones, as they predicted back in August 2018. The analysts gathered this information from Apple suppliers following a trip to Asia earlier this month. This isn't the first time we've heard this rumor. The Wall Street Journal said the same thing back in January. Apple already replaced 3D Touch with Haptic Touch on the iPhone XR in order to achieve a nearly edge-to-edge LCD on the device, and it is likely the feature will be expanded to all 2019 iPhones. Haptic Touch is simply a marketing name for a long press combined with haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine. Apple commentator John Gruber adds: 3D Touch is a great idea but Apple never rolled it out well, and it was never discoverable. I wouldn't be surprised if most people with 3D Touch-enabled iPhones have no idea it exists. In and of itself, the lack of discoverability isn't necessarily a problem. That's how power user features often work. Right-clicking on the Mac, for example, is in the same boat. What 3D Touch never got right is that power-user shortcuts should be just thatâ-- shortcuts for tasks with more obvious ways to do them. Now imagine if right-clicking only worked on certain high-end Macs, but didn't work on others. That's what happened with 3D Touch. I think it should have always been a shortcut for a long-press, pure and simple. Just a faster way to long-press. But because 3D Touch is not just a shortcut for a long-press, but is not available on any iPad nor many iPhones, developers could never count on it, so they never really did anything with it. It doesn't get used much because there's not much you can do with it.

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A prominent British children's charity found that racially-motivated crimes against minors occur at an average of 29 incidents a day.

Thousands attend as Bharatiya Janata Party leader assumes office in New Delhi ceremony after landslide election win.

Benedict Evans: There are about 5.3bn people on earth aged over 15. Of these, around 5bn have a mobile phone. This is an estimate: I'm going with the GSMA's but most others are in the same range. The data challenge is that mobile operators collectively know how many people have a SIM card, but a lot of people have more than one. Meanwhile, ownership starts at aged 10 or so in developed markets, whereas in some developing markets half of the population is under 15, which means that a penetration number given as a share of the total population masks a much higher penetration of the adult population. [...] How many of these are online? These sources are all based on devices that connect to the internet regularly in order for them to be counted, but 'connection' is a pretty fuzzy thing. The entry price for low-end Android is now well under $50, and cellular data connectivity is relatively expensive for people earning less than $10 or $5 a day (and yes, all of these people are getting phones). Charging your phone is also expensive -- if you live without grid electricity, you may need to pay the neighbor who owns a generator, solar cells or car battery to top up your battery. Hence, MTN Nigeria recently reported that 47% of its users had a smartphone but only 27% were active data users (defined as using >5 meg/month). Of course, some of these will be limiting their use to wifi, where they can get it. These issues will obviously intensify as the next billion convert to smartphones (or near-smartphones like KaiOS) in the next few years. There are lots of paths to address this, including the continuing cost efficiencies of cellular, cheaper backhaul (perhaps using LEO satellites), and cheap solar panels (and indeed more wifi). The fratricidal price wars started by Jio in India are another contributor, though you can't really rely on that to happen globally. But this issue means that on one hand there are actually more than 4bn smartphones in use in some way, but on the other that fewer than 4bn are really online.

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Brigitte Bierlein will lead an interim administration until new elections are held following the government's collapse.

What Steve Jobs says here is true. You find new ways of doing things by building tools to do them, and follow your nose.

NYT: "Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats."

New elections will be held in Israel after Benjamin Netanyahu failed to cobble together a coalition government.

Groups on behalf of young rape survivors from Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua call on region to provide abortion access.