Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Among the techniques featured in a 2012 City Pages story on The 10 Most Corrupt Tax Loopholes was pretending to be Irish. Chris Parker wrote, "Most people associate such exhaustive money-laundering with drug cartels. But it's now standard practice at firms like Eli Lilly, Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Facebook. The only difference is that when drug dealers do it, the government shows up with Kevlar and automatic weapons instead of a refund check." The WSJ reports that Facebook and the Internal Revenue Service will square off in a U.S. Tax Court case next week (alt source) that could cost the social-media giant more than $9 billion and shape the government's ability to crack down on companies' efforts to shift profits to low-tax countries, capping off a nine-year dispute over how Facebook structured its international operations. The IRS argues that more of the company's profits should have been taxed at higher rates in the U.S., rather than in the company's Irish subsidiary. Facebook contends that it deserves a refund. "Facebook Ireland and Facebook's other foreign affiliates — not Facebook U.S. — led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell Facebook ads," the company wrote in its pretrial memo. "Facebook Ireland is entitled to profits from the foreign business it built." Countering that argument, the government quoted Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying that Facebook had to call Ireland its international headquarters for "tax purposes." While this tidbit didn't find its way into the why-Ireland statement Sandberg offered in Facebook's official Dublin HQ press release, it does square with a statement made by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who in a 2005 moment of candor explained, "Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise."

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Stunt Pope (Slashdot reader #3,287) writes: This article takes a look at Canada's Broadband Telecom Legislation Review (BTLR) which was commissioned by the federal government in 2018 to map out how Canada's communications and internet laws should be revised. It posed a set of sweeping recommendations (97 in all) that include imposing new taxes on streaming services, regulating content, and requiring all content creators to obtain a government license. The article concludes with a call-to-action to sign a petition that has been introduced into the House of Commons requesting that the government categorically reject the entire framework.

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The European probe will gather some of the most detailed ever pictures and movies of our star.

"Russia's intelligence services are apparently behind a well-coordinated social media campaign to blame the U.S. for creating and unleashing the Wuhan coronavirus on the world," reports the International Business Times. That conclusion comes from the Atlantic Council think tank (founded in 1961), which established its Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016. Eto Buziashvili, an analyst at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, published a report detailing how Russia's state propaganda units are disseminating different versions of conspiracies alleging the coronavirus is a U.S. creation. Western intelligence sources quoted by media said posts blaming the U.S. for attacking China with 2019-nCoV first began appearing on pro-Russia social media outlets such as VK (VKontakte) and Topcor.ru. The fake news has now spread to traditional Russian news media organizations such as Pravda and Izvestia and state propaganda platforms. State-controlled outlets are accusing the U.S. of using bioweapons against China... A Russian website called Katushya.org says the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed forces, is claiming the coronavirus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of destroying China from within. "So far, their efforts have gained very little traction," Eto Buziashvili wrote on January 30, while adding that it still "serves as a reminder of Russia's long history of employing anti-U.S. influence operations during public health crises." But the progressive political magazine Mother Jones argues that pro-Kremlin websites "are just one example of the kinds of outlets trying to capitalize on coronavirus fears. Some YouTube creators have been doing their best to get views and hawk money-making products and services on the backs of coronavirus fears; high-profile right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are doing the same. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to step up their efforts to curb misinformation linked to the virus, but hoaxes and conspiracies continue to seep through."

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Howard Weaver on the founders: "They expected African slaves, subservient women, indentured immigrant servants, government by elites. The Civil War and Great Depression were near-fatal system failures; both were remedied by extraordinary leadership and emerging communitarian values. Today demands no less."

Iwastheone quotes Inverse: In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond. On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission. "My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...." The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.

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Women Republicans of Utah who stand with Senator Romney. And I stand with them. This is how we heal as a country.

There is a Moneyball idea lurking in the current politics.

v3rgEz writes: Every day government decisions from bus routes to policing used to be based on limited information and human judgment. Governments now use the ability to collect and analyze hundreds of data points everyday to automate many of their decisions. The non-profit MuckRock, in partnership with Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law, has a database detailing how local governments across the U.S. are adopting algorithmic decision making, as well as an open collection of contracts, manuals, and other primary source documents detailing how these programs are implemented and overseen. "Automation and artificial intelligence could improve the notorious inefficiencies of government," argues one page at Muckrock, "and it could exacerbate existing errors in the data being used to power it..." "Does handing government decisions over to algorithms save time and money? Can algorithms be fairer or less biased than human decision making? Do they make us safer?"

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What happened when conservative activist Tom Fitton issued an inaccurate press release last week about Iowa's voter registration rolls? After being debunked by Republican state officials -- and identified as "false" by the Associated Press -- the false claims simply remained on both Facebook and Twitter. The Associated Press reports: Fitton, founder of Judicial Watch, tweeted a report claiming that eight Iowa counties have more people registered to vote than are actually eligible to vote. [Republican] Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate moved quickly to counter the false information... Pate tweeted a link to the secretary of state's website, for those who wanted to check the numbers. "The county population numbers you claim are way too low. Dallas County's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is nearly 9,000+ more than you claim, and Johnson County's is nearly 7,000 higher," Pate tweeted. But the false information circulated Sunday and throughout the day on social media. One tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times. But according to another report, that was just the beginning... The claim was amplified on Twitter by Fox TV host Sean Hannity, a close confidant of President Donald Trump... Fitton admitted in an interview that he "used older statistics and census numbers to reach his conclusion," the Associated Press reported. Judicial Watch's posts were still on Twitter and Facebook as of Wednesday afternoon. A Twitter spokesperson said the Judicial Watch tweet was "not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote." Twitter last year banned political advertising on its platform. Facebook, which controversially allows politicians to lie in political ads, did not provide a response to this news organization's inquiry about the Judicial Watch post. Facebook's director of product management has said the firm does not fact-check political ads for truthfulness and that those ads should be regulated by the federal government, not social media companies. The Republican Secretary of State said in a statement that the false claims "erode voter confidence in elections."

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The latest Bloomberg ad.

The Bay Area Newsgroup reports on Steve Wozniak's new interview with longtime Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki on Kawasaki's Remarkable People podcast. Woz reveals he's still on the Apple payroll -- he never left it -- and he's still receiving about $50 a week "out of loyalty. Because what could I do that's more important in my life?" Woz also remembered how the ways he'd differed from Steve Jobs made them a complementary pair: "I had a lot of values about disdaining money. I had the computer skills, the engineering skills. Steve had electronics knowledge, to a decent level. He could understand us (engineers), but he couldn't design things. He hung on to the marketing principles -- how do things look to the eye, that kind of beauty. And turning my design, the Apple II, into a product... "From the day we met, he was talking about people who changed humanity forever," Wozniak said. "He wanted to be one of them. He wanted to be that important person in life. This was his big chance. Now he was founder of a company. That's a title...." "His personality changed the day that he was founder of a company with big money," Wozniak said. "He had been a fun guy, go running off to concerts with me, chasing concert paraphernalia, driving around, playing pranks. We had a lot of fun times. He all of a sudden disdained that," Wozniak said. "Didn't want to talk about jokes, fun, kid things. Only (in a) business suit, talking business talk, learning how to speak it. He got kind of strict and wanted to make sure the world got a message. That all the computer thinking came from him." Still, Wozniak said Jobs' new personality didn't bother him, or have an effect on what he wanted to do at Apple. "I didn't care a bit," Wozniak said. "He was kind of like the smartest person in the room. Steve was getting what he wanted. I got what I wanted, a lab to run into even late at night. I was very much allowed to be the inventor."

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This week Medium's tech blog OneZero published a 4,500-word look at Google's "methodical, iterative" and massive "living experiment" on its own employees to see if they can nudge them into making healthier choices when they eat: The campaign isn't changing just the food itself, but how it's presented. Google's tactics include limiting portion sizes for meat and desserts and redesigning its premises to lead its "users" to choose water and fruit over soda and M&M's. The goal, says Michiel Bakker, Google's director of global workplace programs, is to make the healthy choice the easy choice... [T]he small changes make big differences. The plates on the buffet line are only eight to 10 inches wide, versus a standard 12 inches, which effectively limits serving sizes. Vegetables always come first on the line, so by the time you get to the meat or the snickerdoodles and chocolate tarts, there's not much space on your plate. "Spa water," bobbing with strawberries or cucumbers or lemons, is everywhere -- and deliberately more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. A burrito at Google weighed in at about 10 ounces -- 60% smaller than the whopping one-pound nine-ounce log filled with similar ingredients that I picked up at a Chipotle near my home in Washington, D.C.... "Early choice architecture focused specifically on the process," said Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and the director of the school's Center for Customer Insights, which partners with Google on food research. "You didn't change the set of alternatives, but you rearranged them." So, if the goal was to get people to eat more vegetables, you would make the salad bar the first thing people see in a cafeteria -- hungry people usually grab the first food they see -- and leave it at that. But it turns out that's not enough. You also have to make the vegetables more abundant and more compelling -- and do the opposite for meat. For example, moving the snacks table 10 feet further from the coffee machine reduced the likelihood of snacking by as much as 23% for men and 17% for women. But "Since then, Google has remade its 1,450 microkitchens. The unhealthy snacks -- now limited for the most part to M&M's and gummy bears -- are well away from the coffee machine, hidden in opaque canisters or in a drawer. "At the same time, a big bowl of fresh fruit sits alluringly in the center of the counter nearest the coffee machine..."

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Someone should write a piece about how much worse it's going to be with Trump than the press is willing to admit. This time he is going to have his political opponents prosecuted and jailed. He's not just going to get dirt on them, he's going to take them off the field.