Facebook won't use the phone numbers some users give it for two-factor authentication for its "people you may know" feature. From a report: The social network says the move is "part of a wide-ranging overhaul of its privacy practices." It previously used phone numbers to serve ads too but says it stopped doing that in June. Two-factor authentication is a great way to reduce the risk of accounts being compromised, so giving users reasons to avoid using it is vile, even by Facebook's admittedly low standards. When news broke last year that Facebook was misusing phone numbers in that way it was met with appropriate opprobrium from the media and privacy advocates.

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Ukraine fought to pivot westwards, but Trump's impeachment is 'toxic advertising' for the nation, say analysts.

Because some internet websites unfairly block browsers from accessing their services, starting with Vivaldi 2.10, released today, the Vivaldi browser plans to disguise itself as Chrome to allow users to access websites that unfairly block them. From a report: Vivaldi will do this by modifying its default user-agent (UA) string to the UA string used by Chrome. A UA string is a piece of text that browsers send to websites when they initiate a connection. The UA String contains data about the browser type, rendering engine, and operating system. For example, a UA string for Firefox on Windows looks like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0. UA strings have been in use since the 90s. For decades, websites have used UA agent strings to fine-tune performance and features or block outdated browsers. However, many website owners these days use UA strings to block users from accessing their sites. Some do it because they're not willing to deal with browser-specific bugs, some do it because of pettiness, while big tech companies like Google and Microsoft have done it (and continue to do it) to sabotage competitors on the browser market.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It's not an easy time to be an American farmer. The number of farms in the US is declining, according to the Department of Agriculture, as consolidation makes big operations even bigger. In 2017, the most recent year for the USDA's industry census, the average farm income was just $43,053, and less than half of farms reported positive net cash. The price of commodities like corn, wheat, and milk have fallen, making it harder to turn a profit. Extreme weather, like this year's devastating floods in the midwest, puts additional pressure on farms. Many have also been negatively impacted by the US trade war with China. "The weather still dictates a huge amount of our lives, input costs have skyrocketed, meaning most of us live under a mountain of debt that we hope we can make the payments on every year," says Zach Johnson, a fifth-generation farmer whose channel Millennial Farmer has nearly 400,000 subscribers. On YouTube, though, the picture is sometimes much rosier. There, farming can seem more like an aspirational lifestyle choice rather than a precarious livelihood. Buxton says YouTube has seen an influx of new creators who specifically chronicle what it's like to open a farm after living in a city or working a corporate job. Like #VanLife videos, where creators share how they abandoned the mainstream to live on the road, farming content serves as a how-to guide to an alternative way of living. [...] Jake and Becky, who asked that only the first initial of their last name be used to protect their privacy, have over 400,00 subscribers, a large enough audience to turn YouTube into their main source of income. Some of their most popular videos revolve around their livestock, which isn't surprising -- animal videos have powered the internet's content machinery for decades. But that enduring appeal can make some situations complex for farmers to navigate. "The animal lovers don't want to see anything happen to the animals. That's been a tricky balance," Jake says.

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Court orders Department of Basic Education to pay damages to Michael Komape's family for 'emotional shock and grief'.

Abdelmadjid Tebboune sworn in following months of anti-government protests.

Apps promising to "advance" a user's wages say they aren't payday lenders. So what are they? From a report: Earnin does not call its service a loan. Rather, it's an "advance": Users are borrowing from their own paychecks -- not from the app. It does not require a credit check, and promises no hidden fees or additional financing charges, even if users don't tip or repay. Its terms of service say it will never attempt to collect on an advance that wasn't repaid. Earnin is one of a new class of online lending apps, marketed as frictionless alternatives to traditional payday lenders. They are advertised on dating apps, YouTube, and in between episodes of a Hulu binge. Crucially, rather than charging interest or a financing fee, these apps collect their money via those "tips," as do the companies Dave and Moneylion. Unlike with, say, a food-delivery app, tips don't go toward augmenting a low-wage worker's hourly rate, but simply toward the companies themselves: Dave says tips are "what keep our lights on," and Moneylion says its tips "help us cover the high costs of keeping Instacash interest free." Earlier this year, after a probe by New York State regulators, Earnin ended its practice of increasing users' borrowing limit based on how much they tipped. It still tells users "if the Earnin community keeps [tipping], we'll be able to expand our services." There's an analog for the services these apps offer: payday lending, which more than a dozen states have effectively prohibited. Payday lenders peddle small-dollar loans, available right away, then debit the amount borrowed, plus a financing fee, on the borrower's next payday. The financing fees and interest rates associated with payday loans are enormously high, as much as $30 per every $100 borrowed, according to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

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Hundreds of supporters greet Henry Costa, a radio show host and frequent critic of President George Weah's government.

When a Senate trial will take place and what it will look like remains a major point of contention between the parties.

orange shares a report: The organization responsible for allocating internet addresses across Africa has yet again become embroiled in scandal, this time over long-standing claims of corruption. A founding employee of Afrinic resigned soon after allegations emerged that millions of its valuable public-facing IPv4 addresses had been stolen and sold or leased to others through companies he controlled. Soon after, Afrinicâ(TM)s external auditor PwC informed the organization it, too, was resigning from its role. In both cases, Afrinic's board has attempted to place itself above the issue by ordering an investigation and sending a letter to PwC asking for an explanation. But internet insiders say the rot goes far deeper, and note that warnings of unusual activity at Afrinic, including misdirected organizational funds, have long gone unanswered by a series of CEOs and boards, despite a series of "investigations." In an explosive article earlier this month, the lease and sale of allegedly stolen blocks of IP addresses going back years was traced directly to the organization's second employee, Ernest Byaruhanga, Afrinic's policy coordinator.

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Facebook doesn't want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. From a report: That's why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft's Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information's Alex Heath. "We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us," says Facebook's VP of hardware Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth. "We don't think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that's the case. And so we're gonna do it ourselves." By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction -- and hopefully privacy -- deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of Oculus, Portal, or future gadgets. One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.

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Fossil trees, dating back 386 million years, have been found at an abandoned quarry in New York.

Gunman who opened fire outside headquarters of Russia's security agency in Moscow 'neutralised'.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, researchers installed the world's highest weather station on the upper reaches of Mount Everest. The roughly 50-kilogram station, taller than a person, is one of five on and near the mountain that are collecting data about jet steam winds and warming conditions in High Mountain Asia, a region jam-packed with the most glaciers outside of Earth's poles. Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, and Paul Mayewski, a glaciologist at the University of Maine in Orono, were part of the record-setting expedition. Matthews presented some of the group's results last week here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The two researchers chatted with Science about working at extreme altitudes, the power of body heat, and dealing with crowds on one of the world's most dangerous mountains.

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An idea for a reforming the government. North and South Dakota remain separate states, but only have two senators between them. Probably should dilute the power of other very low population states. And that of course will have a corresponding effect on the Electoral College. The voters of these states have been terrorizing the rest of the country because of quirks in how the country grew. The cleanest fix is to undo some of the messes those compromises made.