Toyota wants to evolve from a car-maker to a mobility company. An anonymous reader shares a report: To do that, it's launching Kinto, a new brand that will provide full-service leasing, car sharing, carpooling and subscription-based leases. Unfortunately, those offerings will only be available in Europe. Toyota is evaluating other services, like ride-hailing and a multi-modal app, and says it will work with cities, companies and individuals. The full service-leasing, Kinto One, will combine the lease, service and insurance in a single monthly payment. The car sharing service, Kinto Share, will offer hybrid vehicles. The carpooling, Kinto Join, will emphasize the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions, and Kinto Flex, the subscription-based car leasing, will offer greater flexibility.

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I created my own show notes outline and shared it.

One more thing for Doc re LO2. If your outline is something you want to share with me and the other people listening to your podcasts, it's pretty easy. In the File menu choose Get public link. It will confirm that you want to make the outline public. Then a dialog will appear with a link to a page on instantoutliner.com. Copy that link, view it in the browser, send it to whoever you want to share it with. If you send it to me, I'll post it on Scripting News. Now any changes you make in your outline will be reflected immediately for everyone who's watching it.

The US Navy says it has classified documents and video related to a 2004 UFO encounter and releasing those materials would threaten national security. From a report: The Pentagon has Top Secret-classified briefings and a Secret-classified video about an infamous UFO incident, the U.S. Navy said in response to a public records request. The files concern the 2004 encounter between the USS Nimitz and a with strange unknown aerial objects. In 2017 and 2018, three videos of bizarre aircraft taken by Navy pilots from their fighter planes made national news. In December 2017, The New York Times ran a story about Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego on November 14th, 2004, and managed to shoot video of the object with their F-18's gun camera. In September of 2019, Motherboard reported that the Navy confirmed the videos contained footage of "unknown aerial phenomena." In response to a Freedom of Information Act request sent by researcher Christian Lambright seeking more information on the incident, the Navy said it had "discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET. A review of these materials indicates that are currently and appropriate Marked and Classified TOP SECRET under Executive Order 13526, and the Original Classification Authority has determined that the release of these materials would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States." "We have also determined that ONI possesses a video classified SECRET that ONI is not the Original Classification Authority for," the letter continued.

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Until now, there's been little evidence our evolutionary relatives could swim.

The 2010s were the hottest decade ever measured on Earth, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever measured, scientists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today. From a report: After a year of flash droughts, rampant wildfires, and searing heatwaves that set all-time records across Europe and turned parts of Greenland's ice sheet into slush, the finding was not a surprise to researchers, or likely anyone else. But it capped an anxious decade that saw human-caused climate change transform from a far-off threat to an everyday fact of life. Last year was 1.8 degree Fahrenheit -- or just under one degree Celsius -- warmer than the 20th century average, Gavin Schmidt, the chief climate scientist at NASA, said at a briefing announcing the news. Almost everywhere on the planet's surface was warmer than average, though the Arctic was especially searing. "Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the decade previous," he said. In short, it's bad, but you probably knew that already. At least four different groups of scientists, each working independently, have now concluded that the 2010s were the hottest decade of the modern era. (NASA and NOAA start this era at 1880, when they say weather record-keeping became reliable and widespread enough to trust, but the nonprofit research agency Berkeley Earth argues that 2019 was the second warmest year since at least 1850.) What's worse is that greenhouse-gas pollution from fossil fuels, which are the biggest driver of climate change, also surged to an all-time high last year, according to a preliminary estimate. Deke Arndt, a chief climate scientist at NOAA, said at a briefing today that "an obvious signal" of this greenhouse-gas-powered heating had appeared in the upper layers of the ocean, which broke the all-time heat record last year.

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An Italian court has ruled that prolonged use of mobile phones can cause head tumors despite scientists overwhelmingly agreeing there is no evidence to back this up. From a report: The Turin court of appeal on Tuesday upheld a ruling issued by a lower court in 2017 in relation to a man with neurinoma of the acoustic nerve, a benign but disabling tumor. The decision was based on studies provided by two court-appointed doctors that showed an increased risk of head tumours among those who talked on their phones for 30 minutes a day over a 10-year period. Judges concluded that there was a link between the frequent use of a mobile phone by Roberto Romeo, who worked for Telecom Italia, and his condition. Romeo is said to have used his phone for four to five hours a day. "There are solid elements to affirm a causal role between the exposure of the person to radio frequencies from mobile phones and the disease that arose," the judges said in their ruling. Inail, a workplace accident insurance agency, has been ordered to compensate Romeo, although it could take the case to the supreme court.

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In light of this week's rumor that a Pro Mode -- which will supposedly boost performance on Macs with Catalina operating system -- may be coming, long time developer and Apple commentator Marco Arment makes the case for a Low Power Mode on macOS. He writes: Modern hardware constantly pushes thermal and power limits, trying to strike a balance that minimizes noise and heat while maximizing performance and battery life. Software also plays a role, trying to keep everything background-updated, content-indexed, and photo-analyzed so itâ(TM)s ready for us when we want it, but not so aggressively that we notice any cost to performance or battery life. Apple's customers don't usually have control over these balances, and they're usually fixed at design time with little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer priorities. The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they'll need it. Mac laptops need Low Power Mode, too. I believe so strongly in its potential because I've been using it on my laptops (in a way) for years, and itâ(TM)'s fantastic. I've been disabling Intel Turbo Boost on my laptops with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro most of the time since 2015. In 2018, I first argued for Low Power Mode on macOS with a list of possible tweaks, concluding that disabling Turbo Boost was still the best bang-for-the-buck tweak to improve battery life without a noticeable performance cost in most tasks. Recently, as Intel has crammed more cores and higher clocks into smaller form factors and pushed thermal limits to new extremes, the gains have become even more significant. [...] With Turbo Boost disabled, peak CPU power consumption drops by 62%, with a correspondingly huge reduction in temperature. This has two massive benefits: The fans never audibly spin up. [...] It runs significantly cooler. Turbo Boost lets laptops get too hot to comfortably hold in your lap, and so much heat radiates out that it can make hands sweaty. Disable it, and the laptop only gets moderately warm, not hot, and hands stay comfortably dry. I haven't done formal battery testing on the 16-inch, since it's so difficult and time-consuming to do in a controlled way that's actually useful to people, but anecdotally, I'm seeing similar battery gains by disabling Turbo Boost that I've seen with previous laptops: significantly longer battery life that I'd estimate to be between 30-50%.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Call Screening service has allowed you to record screened calls for quite some time, but many people have been asking for a native solution letting them save any phone conversation. It looks like Google is working on introducing this functionality to its Phone app. XDA Developers peeked at the code of the current Phone app beta version 43.0.289191107 and found that Google has already added a new layout, an icon, and more assets that hint at call recording through the application. Some strings also point to a new in-call button that should allow you to quickly start saving audio.

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Microsoft today launched its new Edge browser based on Google's Chromium open source project. You can download Chromium Edge now for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and macOS directly from microsoft.com/edge in more than 90 languages. From a report: Business features aside, there's also support for Chrome-based extensions, 4K streaming, Dolby audio, inking in PDF, and privacy tools. For the last one, it's worth noting that tracking prevention is on by default and offers three levels of control, like Firefox's tracking protection. Chrome extension support is probably the most important feature for most users. By default, extensions that have been ported over to Edge can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store. Chromium Edge also has an option to "Allow extensions from other stores" to get Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web Store. There are still a few features missing from Chromium Edge, most notably history sync and extension sync. Microsoft is working on these and some other inking functionality that it still wants to port from legacy Edge, as Microsoft is calling it. Microsoft also claims that Chromium Edge is "twice as fast as legacy Edge." Curiously, the team isn't making any claims against other browsers -- at least not yet.

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Security researchers from Sophos say they've discovered a new set of "fleeceware" apps that appear to have been downloaded and installed by more than 600 million Android users. From a report: The term fleeceware is a recent addition to the cyber-security jargon. It was coined by UK cyber-security firm Sophos last September following an investigation that discovered a new type of financial fraud on the official Google Play Store. It refers to apps that abuse the ability for Android apps to run trial periods before a payment is charged to the user's account. By default, all users who sign up for an Android app trial period, have to cancel the trial period manually to avoid being charged. However, most users just uninstall an app when they don't like it. The vast majority of app developers interpret this action -- a user uninstalling their app -- as a trial period cancelation and don't follow through with a charge. But last year, Sophos discovered that some Android app developers didn't cancel an app's trial period once the app is uninstalled and they don't receive a specific request from the user. Sophos said it initially discovered 24 Android apps that were charging obscene fees (between $100 and $240 per year) for the most basic and simplistic apps, such as QR/barcode readers and calculators.

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A team of programmers scraped a pet adoption website to cheat in a $10,000 contest that was intended to help shelter pets get adopted. From a report: Kaggle, an online data science community that regularly hosts machine learning competitions with prizes often in the tens of thousands of dollars, has uncovered a cheating scandal involving a winning team. The Google subsidiary announced late last week that the winner of a competition involving a pet adoption site had been disqualified from the contest for fraudulently obtaining and obscuring test set data. The fact that a team cheated in a competition nominally intended to help shelter animals also raises questions about whether the people who participate in machine learning competitions like Kaggle are actually interested in making the world a better place, or whether they simply want to win prize money and climb virtual leaderboards. The competition asked contestants to develop algorithms to predict the rate of pet adoption based on pet listings from PetFinder.my, a Malaysian pet adoption site. The goal, according to the competition, was to help discover what makes a shelter pet's online profile appealing for adopters. The winning team's entry would be "adapted into AI tools that will guide shelters and rescuers around the world on improving their pet profiles' appeal, reducing animal suffering and euthanization," the competition site said. The algorithm from BestPetting, the first place team, seemed to almost perfectly predict the rate of adoption for the test set against which the submissions were evaluated, winning with a nearly perfect score of 0.912 (out of 1.0). As a reward for their winning solution, the team of three was awarded the top prize of $10,000. Nine months after the close of the competition, however, one observant teenager found that the impressive results were too good to be true.

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Since the dawn of Twitter, users have been begging and pleading for a way to edit Tweets. Sadly, despite the entreaties of those upon whose usage the service depends, Twitter head honcho Jack Dorsey says you'll "probably" never be able to edit a tweet. From a report: Dorsey was asked during a video Q&A with Twitter users conducted by Wired whether 2020 would be the year Twitter would introduce an edit function. Dorsey's short answer? "No." "The reason there's no edit button ... is we started as an SMS, text messaging service. So, as you all know, when you send a text message, you can't really take it back," Dorsey says, adding that Twitter wants "to preserve that vibe, that feeling, uh, in the early days."

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Doc's next cast. The quote he was looking for is "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." Maybe I don't get what you're trying to do Doc. But I actually think we're talking about the same thing. So glad Doc is using LO2. Esquire's Doubious Achievement Awards. Yes! Doc is going to watch Fargo. If this were in Iowa it would be a state park. (His house in Santa Barbara.) You can see 25 million people from the top of Mt Wilson.

Global data from three agencies also shows that 2019 was the second warmest year since 1850.