An anonymous reader writes: Data mining startup Stealth Data is working to help websites uncover the "individual names, phone numbers, emails and physical addresses" of the users who visit websites. This information "can include a website visitor's job title, employer, annual income, age, and personal and professional social media profiles" so that businesses can use this data for marketing purposes.Stealth Data's third co-founder Chad Sneed experienced marketing frustrations firsthand through his family's dealership, Dennis Sneed Ford in Gower, Missouri. Sneed, who's a vice president and partner, said the dealership spends a significant amount on marketing, from search engines to third-party advertising. A bulk of the dealership's website visitors were anonymous, however, which meant it couldn't follow-up with visitors to try and close a sale. Sneed wanted to unlock that information and started talking to the dealership's outside marketing firm, Phame Influence, to see if it was possible. Puckett, who co-founded Phame with Paris, also is a trial lawyer. "My lawyer hat instantly says no," Puckett said. But after digging further, he discovered it's legal and that using the information for cold calling and emailing is fair game. Co-founder Chad Sneed noted that he doesn't see any privacy issues.

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Bing, the search engine owned by Microsoft, is not displaying image results for a search for "Tank man," even when searching from the United States. The apparent censorship comes on the anniversary of China's violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From a report: "There are no results for tank man," the Bing website reads after searching for the term. "Tank man" relates to the infamous image of a single protester standing in front of a line of Chinese tanks during the crackdown. China censors and blocks distribution of discussion of tank man and Tiananmen Square more generally. This year, anniversary events in Hong Kong have dwindled in size after authorities banned a vigil. Motherboard verified that the issue also impacts image searches on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, which both use Bing.

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Marco Arment, a widely respected programmer, app developer and commentator on Apple, has analyzed Apple's arguments and its thinking as officially portrayed in its lawsuit against Epic. He writes: Apple's leaders continue to deny developers deny developers of two obvious truths: 1. That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple. 2. That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store. For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting -- not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers. This isn't about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple's many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It's about what Apple's leadership thinks of us and our work. It isn't the App Store's responsibility to the rest of Apple to "pay its way" by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today. If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly "pay the way" of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple's own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers. The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The "way" is already paid by the hardware -- but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip. And that's just business. Apple's a lot of things, and "generous" isn't one. But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple's feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting.

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Towns and cities across Scotland would be devastated if the country's coastline was hit by a tsunami of the kind that happened 8,200 years ago, according to an academics' study. From a report: While about 370 miles of Scotland's northern and eastern coastline were affected when the Storegga tsunami struck, the study suggests a modern-day disaster of the same magnitude would have worse consequences. The researchers at the universities of Sheffield, St Andrews and York attributed this to denser human populations and higher sea levels that could potentially destroy seafront and port areas of Arbroath, Stonehaven, Aberdeen, Inverness and Wick, all of which have significant built-up areas less than 10 metres above sea level and directly face the sea. The study which maps the impact of the ancient tsunami for the first time, used modelling to estimate how far the wave would have travelled inland. The estimates suggest the water could have encroached up to 18 miles inland. That distance today would probably leave a town such as Montrose, which overlooks a tidal lagoon and has a population of 12,000, completely devastated.

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A great demo for how outlines work in planning meetings. It would have worked even better if they projected the outline and updated it in real time as people discussed.

All of a sudden Chrome is adding a weird black thing to tabs in my browser window. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

Some 150 birds named for people tied to slavery and white supremacy could eventually get new monikers as part of an ongoing reckoning with racism within the world of birding. The Verge: That includes Jameson's firefinch, named for a British naturalist who bought a young girl while in Africa "as a joke" and then drew pictures of her being brutally killed. In a new story this week, Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears breaks down the horrific history of ornithology that has managed to be scrubbed clean in many history books. Fears also writes about the names these birds already had, given to them by Indigenous peoples who understood the animals long before white settlers supposedly "discovered" the creatures. There's a push now to return to some of those names or use new ones in local languages, which continue to be mocked by a cadre of birding elite that is still largely white. Just last year the American Ornithological Society apologized for "inappropriate comments" its members made nearly 10 years ago about a proposal to rename the Maui parrotbill to the Hawaiian name Kiwikiu.

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Amazon's massive cloud-computing unit is aggressively recruiting U.S. government officials as it pushes to make itself essential to branches such as the military and the intelligence community, POLITICO reported Friday. From the report: Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That's a small portion of AWS' tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. That's on top of more than 600 hires of government officials across all of Amazon during the same time -- itself a mark of the company's expanding footprint in the D.C. region. Amazon employs more than 1 million people overall, after adding 500,000 new jobs last year alone. The hiring spree highlights how tech companies are becoming more entrenched in the operations of the government itself -- and indispensable to Cabinet agencies and national security operations -- even as politicians shout about the danger of letting them get too powerful.

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Facebook announced Friday that former President Donald Trump's account will remain suspended for at least two years, setting a timetable for his potential return after its oversight board criticized the company's indefinite ban. From a report: "Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump's suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols," Facebook's vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a blog post. "We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year." The social media giant said after that period it would evaluate whether "the risk to public safety has receded," and make a call on his possible reinstatement.

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Why does every efficiency in the USPS result in breaking users? Calling attention to the fact that the management isn't trying to provide a reliable service. I suppose the silver lining is it means we'll migrate away from the post office more. Burn less carbon.

Jason Shellen found a Google podcasts app on the web.

From my point of view, tech is drowning in too many ways to do the same thing, at all levels.

The Nigerian government suspended all Twitter operations in the country on Friday. From a report: Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the Nigerian minister of information and culture, said the decision stemmed from citizens using the platform for activities "capable of undermining Nigeria's corporate existence," according to a press release. The move follows Twitter's decision to remove a post by Nigeria's president Muhammadu Buhari that threatened to punish those responsible for recent attacks on electoral offices and police stations, and referenced the country's 1960s civil war that killed 1 million people, Reuters reported. "Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand," Buhari said in a tweet before Twitter removed the post for violating its "abusive behavior" policy.

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A California man has filed for a class action lawsuit against PC manufacturer Dell, claiming that the company "intentionally misled and deceived" buyers of its Alienware Area 51-m R1 gaming laptop, which was advertised to be more upgradeable than other gaming notebooks. From a report: The plaintiff, Robert Felter, who is based in San Francisco, alleges that Dell misleads customers to believe that the laptop would be upgradeable, possibly into future generations of components. The case, Felter v. Dell Technologies, Inc. (3:21-cv-04187) has been filed with the United States District Court in the Northern District of California. The Alienware Area 51-m was announced at CES 2019 and launched soon after. (The complaint claims the announcement was made in the summer of 2019, which is incorrect.). Among the Area 51-m's biggest touted innovations were a user-replaceable CPU and GPU. At media briefings, Alienware representatives told the press that the CPU could be upgraded as long as it used Intel's Z390 chipset. The laptop used Intel's 9th Gen Core desktop processors, up to the Intel Core i9-9900K. Dell developed separate proprietary Dell Graphics Form Factor (DGFF) modules for the Nvidia graphics. The lawsuit, however, claims that consumers were told that "core components" (meaning the CPU and GPU) could be replaced beyond the current generation of hardware. "Dell's advertisement to the public didn't place any restrictions on the upgradeability of the laptop," lawyer David W. Kani said in an email to Tom's Hardware. "They also never disclosed that those with the highest spec CPU and/or GPU that their device would not be upgradeable."

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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Thursday that bans U.S. entities from investing in dozens of Chinese companies with alleged ties to defense or surveillance technology sectors. From a report: The move, which his administration says expands the scope of a legally flawed Trump-era order, drew anger from Beijing. The Treasury Department will enforce and update on a "rolling basis" the new list of about 59 companies, which bars buying or selling publicly traded securities in target companies, and replaces an earlier list from the Department of Defense, senior administration officials told reporters. The order prevents U.S. investment from supporting the Chinese military-industrial complex, as well as military, intelligence, and security research and development programs, Biden said in the order. "In addition, I find that the use of Chinese surveillance technology outside the PRC and the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse constitute unusual and extraordinary threats," Biden said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China.

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