The 2019 Women's Football World Cup has kicked off in France.

An anonymous reader quotes Slate: The overall argument of Billion Dollar Bully, the new documentary about Yelp released on Amazon and iTunes in May, is that Yelp extorts small business owners for advertising fees in return for helping to manage and improve reviews on their platform... Yelp has fought back against the allegations made in the film, arguing that "There has never been a connection between ratings and reviews on Yelp and buying advertising...." But the issue for small business owners has always been broader than advertising: Local businesses feel that Yelp offers no due process to resolve disputes and misunderstandings. That's because the company's standard position is to absolve itself of any responsibility to get involved.... Yelp is combating the claims made in the film by purchasing the domain BillionDollarBully.com and redirecting it to a Yelp page that explains that the company does not extort local businesses to manipulate ratings. The Hustle argues that despite "legions" of anecdotal evidence from business owners, "the linkage between these two things ultimately can't be proven without transparency around Yelp's filtering algorithm." This is apparently leaving some restauranteurs feeling powerless and angry: In isolated bids to circumvent the "oppression" of online reviews, business owners have plunked "NO YELPERS" signs in their windows, shamed rude reviewers on Instagram, and launched anti-Yelp websites. Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces... "I've had friends get fired over bad Yelp reviews, even if the review was untrue," says Neves. ReviewFraud.org investigated the people interviewed for the documentary, and suggested that in some cases the real victims may be Yelp's unsuspecting reviewers. "A few negative reviewers claimed that the owner harassed them or contacted their employer to have them fired." Billion Dollar Bully raised money on Kickstarter. I was excited to see this film see the light of day. Sadly, I was disappointed... not all businesses are good, not all business owners are reputable, and not all pieces of investigative "journalism" are credible. Had the filmmakers taken a closer look at these business and other review platforms, I doubt that this movie would have been made. I've made that clear by looking at the reviews of those claiming extortion. For me, this was a massive failure and should be titled A Billion Dollar Scapegoat.

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Sheikh Mohammed urges both sides to engage, 'come up with ideas that open the doors' and find a compromise.

"Police departments are piggybacking on Ring's network to build out their surveillance networks..." reports CNET, adding that Ring "helps police avoid roadblocks for surveillance technology, whether a lack of funding or the public's concerns about privacy." While residential neighborhoods aren't usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbell's popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments. Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people, have offered free or discounted Ring doorbells to citizens, sometimes using taxpayer funds to pay for Amazon's products. While Ring owners are supposed to have a choice on providing police footage, in some giveaways, police require recipients to turn over footage when requested. Ring said Tuesday that it would start cracking down on those strings attached... While more surveillance footage in neighborhoods could help police investigate crimes, the sheer number of cameras run by Amazon's Ring business raises questions about privacy involving both law enforcement and tech giants... More than 50 local police departments across the US have partnered with Ring over the last two years, lauding how the Amazon-owned product allows them to access security footage in areas that typically don't have cameras -- on suburban doorsteps. But privacy advocates argue this partnership gives law enforcement an unprecedented amount of surveillance. "What we have here is a perfect marriage between law enforcement and one of the world's biggest companies creating conditions for a society that few people would want to be a part of," said Mohammad Tajsar, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California... Despite its benefits, the relationship between police departments and Ring raises concerns about surveillance and privacy, as Amazon is working with law enforcement to blanket communities with cameras.... "Essentially, we're creating a culture where everybody is the nosy neighbor looking out the window with their binoculars," said Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is creating this giant pool of data that allows the government to analyze our every move, whether or not a crime is being committed." On a heat map of Bloomfield, there are hardly any spots in the New Jersey township out of sight of a Ring camera. Tajsar says in some scenarios "they're basically commandeering people's homes as surveillance outposts for law enforcement," and the articles notes that when police departments partner with Ring, "they have access to a law enforcement dashboard, where they can geofence areas and request footage filmed at specific times." While law enforcement "can only get footage from the app if residents choose to send it," if the residents refuse, police can still try to obtain the footage with a subpoena to Amazon's Ring.

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Consumer Reports does rate online banks, but the page with their ratings and reviews is 404. I reported the broken link a few days ago, but it's still broken.

Wirecutter on rating online banks: "We haven't covered this yet. We're planning to eventually, but it will be a big project and we want to get it right, so it's a ways out."

"I am not saying that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto," writes the features editor at Reason. "What I am saying is: Would it really be surprising if he were?" This prompted a strong rebuke from CCN Markets: The article starts, "Consider the possibility that Neal Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin." Let's not do that. That's like saying let's consider the possibility that anyone at all is Satoshi Nakamoto. In one respect, it doesn't matter. In another, it's exhausting the lengths people will go with this... if someone doesn't advance the idea that they are Satoshi Nakamoto themselves, there's no reason to put that sort of grief upon them. If someone is just brilliant, you can tell them that without insinuating that they invented the blockchain and Bitcoin.... You don't just off-handedly claim someone might be Satoshi Nakamoto. There needs to be a reason. Reason had written that "For nearly three decades, Stephenson's novels have displayed an obsessive, technically astute fascination with cryptography, digital currency, the social and technological infrastructure of a post-government world, and Asian culture," and that the science fiction author "described the core concepts of cryptocurrency years before Bitcoin became a technical reality." They also note later that "Satoshi Nakamoto's initials are SN; Neal Stephenson's are NS." Coin Telegraph writes that the question "has seemingly come to a head over the last couple of months, as a number of people have gone a step further" -- not only publicly claiming to be the creator of bitcoin, but even filing copyright and trademark claims. Their list of "Satoshi posers" includes Craig Wright, Wei Liu, and the brother of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. (And another new theory also suggests "global criminal kingpin" Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt.

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Many protesters say the election did not offer them a real choice.

Court suspends President Igor Dodon and appoints ex-PM Pavel Filip as interim leader, who calls for September snap vote.

In a controversial pharmaceutical story, this week the Washington Post reported "that Pfizer had evidence that [their drug] Enbrel could be useful in Alzheimer's disease, and didn't do anything with it," according to a blog post from Science magazine: This came from an analysis of insurance claim data: a set of about 127,000 patients with an Alzheimer's diagnosis and a set of 127,000 without. It turns out that more people in the second group had been treated with Enbrel (302 patients) versus the first (110 patients). The Post obtained internal Pfizer documents discussing this and whether it was worth further investigation, and the company had concluded it wasn't. Why wouldn't they? Several reasons. The biggest, though, is that no one undertakes an Alzheimer's trial lightly. The clinical success rate for Alzheimer's trials is arguably zero per cent... The article does note that Pfizer was getting out of Alzheimer's in general at the time (2015), but it also explicitly makes clear that Enbrel was nearing the end of its patent lifetime and brings up the idea that Pfizer deliberately took a pass because they weren't going to reap as much profit. Well, you'll have to trust me on this, it's a little out there, but drug companies don't generally walk away from big profits if they can help it. I've had my problems with Pfizer over the years, but I have never called into question their ability to make money. If Pfizer really thought that this was a promising lead into an Alzheimer's therapy, they would have found a way to turn a profit off of it. The blogger also argues that Pfizer's data represented "a noticeable-but-small signal, and by itself (I cannot state this strongly enough), it would not be enough for anyone to launch an Alzheimer's trial."

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An early heatwave in Scandinavia has been pushed away by the remains of storm Miguel.

New York-based Human Rights Watch says the Himalayan country's move to legalise gay sex is 'welcome and progressive'.

An anonymous reader reminded us about the open source reimplementation of Java Web Start, a framework originally developed by Sun Microsystems that allowed users to more easily run Java applications in an applet-like sandbox using a web browser. From OpenWebStart.com: Java Web Start (JWS) was deprecated in Java 9, and starting with Java 11, Oracle removed JWS from their JDK distributions. This means that clients that have the latest version of Java installed can no longer use JWS-based applications. And since public support of Java 8 has ended in Q2/2019, companies no longer get any updates and security fixes for Java Web Start. This is why we decided to create OpenWebStart, an open source reimplementation of the Java Web Start technology. Our replacement will provide the most commonly used features of Java Web Start and the JNLP standard, so that your customers can continue using applications based on Java Web Start and JNLP without any change. Red Hat is apparently involved in its parent project, IcedTea-Web, which it distributes as part of their Windows OpenJDK distribution.

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The Indian leader visits church bombed during Easter on his first trip to neighbouring Sri Lanka since his re-election.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Uber Technologies Inc. is testing a helicopter service in New York City, according to documents outlining the program obtained by Bloomberg. Passengers will be able to use the Uber app to book a flight through the service, called Uber Copter, the documents show. Tests flights took off from a Manhattan heliport near Wall Street to John F. Kennedy International Airport. After Bloomberg asked Uber for comment Wednesday, the New York Times published a story about the program. It says customers will be able to book flights starting July 9 in New York City and that the average ride will cost $200 to $225 a person. Eric Allison, the head of Uber's flight business, told the Times that the company plans to eventually offer helicopter rides in other cities... Each helicopter can accommodate five passengers, and like Uber car rides, prices will fluctuate based on demand and other factors.

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