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Frontier Communications reportedly charged a cancellation fee of $4,302.17 to the operator of a one-person business in Wisconsin, even though she switched to a different Internet provider because Frontier's service was frequently unusable. From the report: Candace Lestina runs the Pardeeville Area Shopper, a weekly newspaper and family business that she took over when her mother retired. Before retiring, her mother had entered a three-year contract with Frontier to provide Internet service to the one-room office on North Main Street in Pardeeville. Six months into the contract, Candace Lestina decided to switch to the newly available Charter offering "for better service and a cheaper bill," according to a story yesterday by News 3 Now in Wisconsin. The Frontier Internet service "was dropping all the time," Lestina told the news station. This was a big problem for Lestina, who runs the paper on her own in Pardeeville, a town of about 2,000 people. "I actually am everything. I make the paper, I distribute the paper," she said. Because of Frontier's bad service, "I would have times where I need to send my paper -- I have very strict deadlines with my printer -- and my Internet's out."

Lestina figured she'd have to pay a cancellation fee when she switched to Charter's faster cable Internet but nothing near the $4,300 that Frontier later sent her a bill for, the News 3 Now report said. Charter offered to pay $500 toward the early termination penalty, but the fee is still so large that it could "put her out of business," the news report said. [...] Lestina said the early termination fee wasn't fully spelled out in her contract. "Nothing is ever described of what those cancellation fees actually are, which is that you will pay your entire bill for the rest of the contract," she said. Lestina said she pleaded her case to Frontier representatives, without success, even though Frontier had failed to provide a consistent Internet connection. "They did not really care that I was having such severe problems with the service. That does not bother them," she said. Instead of waiving or reducing the cancellation fee, Frontier threatened to send the matter to a collections agency, Lestina said.

Social network Pinterest has taken a big step to stop the spread of false content that is damaging people's health, which could put pressure on competitors to follow. From a report: Pinterest said Wednesday that it would no longer return any search results, including pins and boards, for terms related to vaccinations, whether in favor or against them. It took that step in late 2018 after noticing that the majority of shared images on Pinterest cautioned people against vaccinations, despite medical guidelines demonstrating that most vaccines are safe for most people. Pinterest told CNBC on Wednesday that it's been hard to remove this anti-vaccination content entirely, so it put the ban in place until it can figure out a more permanent strategy. It's working with health experts including doctors, as well as the social media analysis company called Storyful to come up with a better solution, the company said.

Why do zebras have stripes? From a report: Evolutionary biologists have proposed many possible theories, such as camouflage or vision aids for recognizing individual zebras. But in recent years, pest control has emerged as the leading explanation for zebra stripes. Researchers led by Tim Caro, an evolutionary ecologist at UC Davis, set out to test this idea in the field. The results, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, reveal that stripes are a powerful deterrent to horse flies, a common nuisance that suck blood and bite flesh. The experiment managed to find the most delightful way to help explain these uniquely patterned coats -- by getting horses to cosplay as zebras.

Thanks to recent changes to privacy legislation in Europe and South Korea aimed at protecting the living, we now have more power than ever over our personal information -- even from beyond the grave. While this may have felt like a gimmick in the past, cyber funerals -- where our personal data is removed from the web posthumously -- are slowly becoming a viable option. From a report: Digital undertaking is the act of erasing and tidying up your public data after you die. It's a relatively new idea, but one that's already taking off in South Korea, according to the Korean Employment Information Service. Think of it as a ghoulish version of the European Union's right to be forgotten legislation. For most digital undertakers, the tricky task is to contact the social media companies, search engines or even media companies who publish personal information, and request for it to be deleted when their client dies. If that doesn't work, then companies -- be they in South Korea, the USA or UK -- can bury search engine results by flooding Google with new, conflicting data about the deceased. Santa Cruise, a company based in Seoul, was one of the first in South Korea to take on the task of digital undertaking. Founded in 2008, it was originally an agency for entertainment figures but now specializes in removing personal data from the internet for clients both dead and alive. The company's scope includes digital undertaking and even "reputation management" for those who have been victims of revenge porn.

Reader theodp writes: Thanks to software, Bill and Melinda Gates report in their 2019 Annual Letter, textbooks are becoming obsolete. Bill writes: "I read more than my share of textbooks. But it's a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can't figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can't tell your teacher how well you grasped last night's assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past" (if so, it'll be a 60-year overnight success!). The Gates are putting their money where their mouths are -- their education investments include look-Ma-no-textbooks Khan Academy and Code.org. Code.org, whose AP Computer Science Principles course for high schools "does not require or follow a textbook", boasted in its just-released Annual Report that 38% of all AP CS exam takers in 2018 came from "Code.org Computer Science Principles classrooms," adding that it had spent $24.2 million of its donors' money on curriculum and its Code Studio learning platform (30,300 hours of coursework), another $46.7 million to prepare 87,000 new K-12 CS teachers, $12.4 million on Marketing, and $6.9 million on Government Affairs. So, do we still need textbooks?

Remember when America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported Tesla's Autopilot reduced crashes by 40%? Two years later the small research and consulting firm Quality Control Systems (QCS) finally obtained the underlying data -- and found flaws in the methodology "serious enough to completely discredit the 40 percent figure," reports Ars Technica, "which Tesla has cited multiple times over the last two years."
The majority of the vehicles in the Tesla data set suffered from missing data or other problems that made it impossible to say whether the activation of Autosteer increased or decreased the crash rate. But when QCS focused on 5,714 vehicles whose data didn't suffer from these problems, it found that the activation of Autosteer actually increased crash rates by 59 percent...

NHTSA undertook its study of Autopilot safety in the wake of the fatal crash of Tesla owner Josh Brown in 2016. Autopilot -- more specifically Tesla's lane-keeping function called Autosteer -- was active at the time of the crash, and Brown ignored multiple warnings to put his hands back on the wheel. Critics questioned whether Autopilot actually made Tesla owners less safe by encouraging them to pay less attention to the road. NHTSA's 2017 finding that Autosteer reduced crash rates by 40 percent seemed to put that concern to rest. When another Tesla customer, Walter Huang, died in an Autosteer-related crash last March, Tesla cited NHTSA's 40 percent figure in a blog post defending the technology. A few weeks later, Tesla CEO Elon Musk berated reporters for focusing on stories about crashes instead of touting the safety benefits of Autopilot....

[T]hese new findings are relevant to a larger debate about how the federal government oversees driver-assistance systems like Autopilot. By publishing that 40 percent figure, NHTSA conferred unwarranted legitimacy on Tesla's Autopilot technology. NHTSA then fought to prevent the public release of data that could help the public independently evaluate these findings, allowing Tesla to continue citing the figure for another year.... NHTSA fought QCS' FOIA request after Tesla indicated that the data was confidential and would cause Tesla competitive harm if it was released.
Last May the NHTSA finally clarified that their study "did not assess the effectiveness of this technology." Ars Technica also points out that the data focused on version 1 of Autopilot, "which Tesla hasn't sold since 2016."

A robot outfitted with remotely controlled pinchers poked at debris that's suspected to contain molten nuclear fuel at the bottom of one of Fukushima's nuclear reactors, World Nuclear News reports. From a report: The poking and prodding is part of the ongoing cleanup effort at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the site of a major nuclear accident in 2011. The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor on February 13th, according to a news release from the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). Unit 2 is one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that overheated after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, which caused the reactor core to melt. TEPCO suspects that radioactive fuel may have melted through the bottom of the reactor vessel to fall into the containment structure surrounding it. The company has to find the radioactive debris and figure out how to remove them, so TEPCO has been sending in a series of robots to scout out the reactors. It's a dangerous journey that some of the robots haven't survived.

New research from The NPD Group reveals that the smartwatch market overall is growing at an impressive rate and that the Apple Watch remains the best-selling wearable on the market. "Specifically, year-over-year smartwatch unit sales in the U.S. jumped by 61% while revenue jumped by 51%," reports BGR. "As for specific revenue figures, the report relays that smartwatch revenue from November of 2017 through November of 2018 checked in at $5 billion. One particularly interesting data point is that 88% of all smartwatch sales can be attributed to Apple, Samsung, and Fitbit." From the report: "Over the last 18 months smartwatch sales gained strong momentum, proving the naysayers, who didn't think the category could achieve mainstream acceptance, had potentially judged too soon," NPD analyst Weston Henderek said in a press release. "The ability to be truly connected via built-in LTE without the need to have a smartphone nearby proved to be a tipping point for consumers, as they now recognize the value in being able to complete a wide range of tasks on the device including receiving notifications, messaging, accessing smart home controls, and more."

Indeed, Apple executives have pointed to the inclusion of LTE connectivity on the Apple Watch Series 3 as a huge selling point. Notably, Apple Watch sales during the 2017 holiday quarter were record-breaking. More recently, Tim Cook said that revenue from Apple wearables line jumped by 50% "thanks to strong sales of both Apple Watch and AirPods."

J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called bitcoin a fraud in September 2017 and said, "You can't have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart." By January 2018 he had walked the remarks back but said he still was "not interested that much in the subject at all." In February 2018, J.P. Morgan called cryptocurrencies "risk factors" to its business, something it never previously said. And now J.P. Morgan has become the first U.S. bank to offer its own cryptocurrency. From a report: But don't expect it to become an investment vehicle -- at least for now. The cryptocurrency, called "JPM Coin," is intended for the bank's wholesale payments business that moves $6 trillion around the world daily. As long-time former banker and now cryptocurrency industry figure Alan Silbert said of Dimon in a January 2018 tweet, "Backpedaling is the first step in the program towards walking the path."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung's mobile internet browser, if you ask its users, is pretty great. A lot of folks even say it's better than Chrome. That appreciation has manifested in the app hitting a very exclusive Play Store milestone: Samsung Internet Browser now has more than one billion installs. That impressive figure puts the browser's install base ahead of those of Firefox and Opera combined. Now, there are a couple of caveats here: for one, Samsung's browser comes pre-loaded on Samsung devices, of which each activation counts as an "install." What's more, both Firefox's and Opera's Play Store listings report that each browser has "100,000,000+" installs, which, because of the somewhat silly way figures are reported on Android's app marketplace, means their combined installs total anywhere between 200 million and 999,999,998. Still, though, Samsung's browser is on more devices than the both of 'em.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won't even realize it. And they don't need to ask for permission. You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your knowledge. But TechCrunch has found several popular iPhone apps, from hoteliers, travel sites, airlines, cell phone carriers, banks and financiers, that don't ask or make it clear -- if at all -- that they know exactly how you're using their apps. Worse, even though these apps are meant to mask certain fields, some inadvertently expose sensitive data.

Apps like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines also use Glassbox, a customer experience analytics firm, one of a handful of companies that allows developers to embed "session replay" technology into their apps. These session replays let app developers record the screen and play them back to see how its users interacted with the app to figure out if something didn't work or if there was an error. Every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded -- effectively screenshotted -- and sent back to the app developers. [...] Apps that are submitted to Apple's App Store must have a privacy policy, but none of the apps we reviewed make it clear in their policies that they record a user's screen. Glassbox doesn't require any special permission from Apple or from the user, so there's no way a user would know. When asked, Glassbox said it doesn't enforce its customers to mention its usage in their privacy policy. A mobile expert known as The App Analyst recently found Air Canada's iPhone app to be improperly masking the session replays when they were sent, exposing passport numbers and credit card data in each replay session. Just weeks earlier, Air Canada said its app had a data breach, exposing 20,000 profiles.

A world-first study has called for the mass retraction of more than 400 scientific papers on organ transplantation, amid fears the organs were obtained unethically from Chinese prisoners. The Guardian reports: The Australian-led study exposes a mass failure of English language medical journals to comply with international ethical standards in place to ensure organ donors provide consent for transplantation. The study was published on Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ Open. Its author, the professor of clinical ethics Wendy Rogers, said journals, researchers and clinicians who used the research were complicit in "barbaric" methods of organ procurement.

"There's no real pressure from research leaders on China to be more transparent," Rogers, from Macquarie University in Sydney, said. "Everyone seems to say, 'It's not our job.' The world's silence on this barbaric issue must stop." A report published in 2016 found a large discrepancy between official transplant figures from the Chinese government and the number of transplants reported by hospitals. While the government says 10,000 transplants occur each year, hospital data shows between 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year. The report provides evidence that this gap is being made up by executed prisoners of conscience.

Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) believe that Pictionary could push machine intelligence beyond its current limits. To that end, they have devised an online version of the game that pairs a human player with an AI program. MIT Technology Review reports: In case you've never played it before, Pictionary involves trying to draw an image that conveys a written word or phrase for your teammates to guess. This tests a person's drawing skills but also the ability to convey complex meaning using simple concepts. Given the phrase "wedding ring," for example, a player might try to draw the object itself but also a bride and groom or a wedding ceremony.

That makes it the perfect vehicle to help teach machines. The team developed an online version of the game, called Iconary, that pairs a user with an AI bot called AllenAI. Both take turns as the artist and the guesser. Playing as artist, a user is given a phrase and then has to sketch things to convey it. The sketches are first turned into clip-art icons using computer vision; then the computer program tries to guess the phrase using a database of words and concepts and the relationship between them. If the program gets only part of the phrase, it will ask for another image to clarify. The AI program uses a combination of AI techniques to draw and guess. Over time, by playing against enough people, AllenAI should learn from their common-sense understanding of how concepts (like "books" and "pages") go together in everyday life, Fahadi says. It will also help the researchers explore ways for humans and machines to communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Google hired gig economy workers to help build out a controversial AI program that the company had paired with the Pentagon to build, according to a new report from The Intercept. "The workers were hired through a crowdsourcing gig company outfit called Figure Eight, which pays as little at $1 an hour for people to perform short, seemingly mindless tasks," reports The Verge. "Whether the individuals were identifying objects in CAPTCHA-like images, or other simple tasks, the workers were helping to train Google's AI that was created as part of a Defense Department initiative known as Project Maven." From the report: Project Maven is a Pentagon project intended to use machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to differentiate people and objects in thousands of hours of drone footage. By employing these crowdsourced microworkers, Google was able to use them to teach the algorithms it was running how to distinguish between human targets and surrounding objects. According to The Intercept, these workers had no idea who their work was benefitting or what they were building.

Figure Eight, which was previously known as Crowdflower, is one of the largest platforms that employs microworkers. On its website, Figure Eight says its platform "combines human intelligence at scale with cutting-edge models to create the highest quality training data for your machine learning (ML) projects." By partnering with these microworker outfits, Google could quickly and cheaply build out its AI. "You upload your data to our platform and we provide the annotations, judgments, and labels you need to create accurate ground truth for your models," the website reads. Google decided against renewing its contract with the Defense Department last June after over 3,000 employees signed a petition in protest of the company's involvement in Project Maven. The deal is set to end in March 2019.

2018 was the worst year ever for smartphone shipments, according to the latest figures from research firm IDC. It means Apple isn't the only company fighting to keep people interested in buying new phones every year. From a report: IDC said 1.4 billion smartphones were sold in 2018, marking a 4.1 percent decline for the year in an industry that's accustomed to rapid growth. In 2014, as well, 1.4 billion phones were shipped, which means the industry seems to have regressed about 5 years. Shipments shrank 4.9 percent for the fourth quarter of 2018, IDC said. Apple said earlier this week that iPhone revenues were 15 percent lower than last year. CEO Tim Cook said the strengthened dollar, an economic slowdown in China, lower subsidies on phones and its battery replacement program contributed to the drop in sales. Samsung phone shipments declined 5.5 percent and Apple's slipped 11.5 percent during the quarter, IDC said. But Huawei, which was able to capitalize on China, saw a 33.6 percent bump in shipments. Chinese vendors Oppo and Xiaomi also increased shipments, IDC said.

The production-weighted cash cost to create one Bitcoin averaged around $4,060 globally in the fourth quarter, according to analysts with JPMorgan Chase & Co. With Bitcoin itself currently trading below $3,600, that doesn't look like such a good deal. However, there's a big spread around the average, meaning that there are clear winners and losers. From a report: Low-cost Chinese miners are able to pay much less -- the estimate is around $2,400 per Bitcoin -- by leveraging direct power purchasing agreements with electricity generators such as aluminum smelters looking to sell excess power generation, JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva said in a wide-ranging Jan. 24 report about cryptocurrencies spearheaded by Joyce Chang. Electricity tends to be the biggest cost for miners, needed to run the high-powered computer rigs used to process data blocks to earn Bitcoin.

"The drop in Bitcoin prices from around $6,500 throughout much of October to below $4,000 now has increasingly pushed margins further and further negative for just about every region except low-cost Chinese miners," the analysts said, offering the caveat that their cost estimates may be skewed to the high side due to spotty data and conservative efficiency assumptions. The cost figures exclude equipment.

Following a record 35-day government shutdown, thousands of civil servants and contractors are heading back to work this week at NASA's various centers throughout the country. "These first few days back on the job will be consumed with practical matters, such as figuring out employee backpay and how to dive back into projects," reports The Verge. "The shutdown will undoubtedly result in delays for some of NASA's long-term programs, too, but it'll be a while before the space agency can fully assess the extent of the damage." From the report: To explain how NASA is adjusting in the wake of the shutdown, the space agency's administrator Jim Bridenstine addressed employees during a town hall meeting this afternoon at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC. "Welcome to 2019," he said during the meeting, which was live-streamed on NASATV. "NASA is now open and we're very thankful for that." The comment was met by applause from those in attendance, while Bridenstine went on to acknowledge that it's been a rough start to the year for the agency. "I want to say thank you for your patience and for your commitment to this agency and to the mission we all believe in so dearly."

Bridenstine told the room that some NASA employees did leave during the shutdown, though it wasn't a substantial amount. "We didn't have a mass exodus," he said. "I think had this gone on longer, we would have. But we did lose people -- onesies and twosies -- across the agency and even here at headquarters. That is absolutely true." Perhaps those hit hardest at NASA were the agency's contractors. [...] Each company funded by NASA has its own contract with the agency, and the provisions of those agreements differ from contract to contract. Some contractors were paid their funding in advance of the shutdown, allowing them to continue working mostly unfazed. However, the employees of contractors who did not receive funding in advance were unable to bill for the hours that they worked during the shutdown. And it's possible they'll never receive compensation for that time. "NASA is in the middle of selecting new planetary missions to pursue, as part of its New Frontiers and Discovery programs -- and the shutdown may have delayed that process, says Casey Dreier, chief advocate and senior space policy adviser at The Planetary Society," reports The Verge. "Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, pushed back the date for when the agency would accept applications for new science research proposals. And there's uncertainty surrounding the new giant rocket NASA is working on to take astronauts to the Moon and beyond, called the Space Launch System." Boeing told Politico that the shutdown delayed testing of the rocket's hardware.

In Venezuela, where media is controlled by the government, figuring out what is truth, rumor or propaganda has always been difficult. NPR reports: In recent days it's gotten even more confusing. President Nicolas Maduro has refused to cede power to the opposition party. There have been widespread protests and looting -- and the rumor mill has been churning on social media. But many Venezuelans have found a way to use social media in their favor.

Javier Rojo owns a pharmacy in the capital city of Caracas. As the chaos started, he gave his workers the day off, went home and turned on the TV -- only to find nothing was being reported. "Independent media has been gradually attacked or shut down over time," says professor Gregory Weeks, who teaches Latin American politics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "So that in general social media becomes the means by which you learn what's going on, on an ongoing basis."

Back at his house, Rojo says he started getting messages on WhatsApp like this one from from one of his employees: "Tanks are rolling into the park. They are launching tear gas." But then, Rojo started receiving WhatsApp messages with rumors from people he doesn't even know. One man, who says his aunt's husband is a military officer, swore that Maduro has resigned. Professor Raisa Urribarri researches technology and politics at Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela. She says it's hard to trace the origins of some messages in Venezuelan social media. They can be from panicked citizens, the opposition or the government.

Germany has laid out a $91 billion plan to phase out its use of coal by 2038, a government-appointed commission said Saturday. "Under the plan, half of the up to $91 billion will go to the regions shuttering plants in the west and east of the country, while the other half will be spent on preventing electricity prices from rising," ABS-CBN News reports. From the report: The commission agreed to the deadline after months of bitter wrangling as pressure mounts on Europe's top economy to step up its commitment to battling climate change. The panel, consisting of politicians, climate experts, unions and industry figures from coal regions, announced the deal after a final marathon session ended on Saturday morning. The commission's findings will now be passed on to the government, which is expected -- barring a surprise -- to follow the recommendations of the panel it set up. The plan will be discussed at a meeting between Chancellor Angela Merkel, Finance Minister Scholz and regional leaders on Thursday, national news agency DPA said.

Several plants using lignite or brown coal, which is more polluting than black coal, would be closed by 2022. Other plants will follow until 2030, when only 17 gigawatts of Germany's electricity will be supplied by coal, compared to today's 45 gigawatts. The last plant will close in 2038 at the latest, the commission said, but did not rule out moving this date forward to 2035 if conditions permit. The affected regions, where tens of thousands of jobs directly or indirectly linked to brown- and black-coal energy production, will receive 40 billion euros as compensation over the next two decades. Two billion euros will also be spent each year over the same period to stop customers from facing rising electricity prices.

Wave723 writes: To make its developers' jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.