The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a case regarding whether Yelp is culpable for removing defamatory reviews from its site, resolving a case that could have affected web platforms' legal protections. Today's list of Supreme Court orders denies a complaint brought by Dawn Hassell, an attorney who requested that Yelp take down false, negative reviews about her practice. This means that a California Supreme Court decision will stand, and Yelp isn't liable for the reviews. The Verge reports: Hassell v. Bird was filed in 2016 as a complaint against one of Hassell's former clients, not Yelp. However, Yelp protested a court order to remove the reviews, arguing that it was protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Yelp has said it independently removes reviews it finds to be defamatory since they violate its terms of service.) Lower courts disagreed, but in mid-2018, the California Supreme Court ruled in Yelp's favor. Then, the firm of Charles Harder -- a member of President Donald Trump's legal team who's known for high-profile defamation lawsuits -- petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a complaint against Yelp. Yelp praised the California Supreme Court's decision last year, calling it a win for "those of us who value sharing one another's opinions and experiences" on the internet. It commended today's decision as well. "We are happy to see the Supreme Court has ended Hassell's efforts to sidestep the law to compel Yelp to remove online reviews. This takes away a tool that could have been easily abused by litigants to obtain easy removal of entirely truthful consumer opinions," a spokesperson told The Verge.

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The AirPods continue to be a smash hit sensation for Apple. However, having launched more than 2 years ago at this point, the focus in the tech community has moved to expectations as to when the AirPods 2 will come out, the first hardware update to Apple’s wireless earbuds.

A report from Digitimes today says Apple will release AirPods 2 within the first six months of 2019. Moreover, it claims that the earbuds will be redesigned to support health monitoring functions.

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The post Digitimes: AirPods 2 launching in first half of this year, redesigned to support ‘health monitoring’ features appeared first on 9to5Mac.

WADSWORTH — Beloved family tales, fading photos and personal effects tell the story of ancestors, but it is genealogy that ties all the loose ends together into a complete family history.

YORK TOWNSHIP –– If the way in which community members were able to pull together Tuesday’s benefit dinner is any indication, residents in Medina County not only recognize the struggles furloughed and unpaid federal workers feel in the face of the government shutdown, but also want to help.

Researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and Georgia Tech have developed a new system that absorbs carbon dioxide and produces electricity and useable hydrogen fuel. New Atlas reports: The new device, which the team calls a Hybrid Na-CO2 System, is basically a big liquid battery. A sodium metal anode is placed in an organic electrolyte, while the cathode is contained in an aqueous solution. The two liquids are separated by a sodium Super Ionic Conductor (NASICON) membrane. When CO2 is injected into the aqueous electrolyte, it reacts with the cathode, turning the solution more acidic, which in turn generates electricity and creates hydrogen. In tests, the team reported a CO2 conversion efficiency of 50 percent, and the system was stable enough to run for over 1,000 hours without causing any damage to the electrodes. Unlike other designs, it doesn't release any CO2 as a gas during normal operation -- instead, the remaining half of the CO2 was recovered from the electrolyte as plain old baking soda. The research was published in the journal iScience.

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In today's episode, we investigate the fabled Deep State to find out what people even say they are, and whether or not they would be doing the things people say they're doing if they happen to be what people say they are.

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Source List "Is Donald Trump Being Targeted By The Deep State?" - https://goo.gl/1AtVV6

David Campbell, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Billionaires made some eye-popping donations in 2018.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans to spend US$2 billion to help the homeless and create a network of free preschools. Media mogul and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University, his alma mater. Those were just the biggest of the nearly 800 donations of $1 million or more from very rich people over the course of the year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

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The top nominations are:

Best Picture
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice

Best Actress
Yalitza Aparicio, Roma
Glenn Close, The Wife
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams, Vice
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite

Best Actor
Christian Bale, Vice
Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortensen, Green Book

Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman
Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Sam Rockwell, Vice

Best Director
Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman
Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War
Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite
Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
Adam McKay, Vice

Of course, there are always those who don't care about such things:

Why is everyone talking about me? SCRAM!

Proper words to describe the sound that this band from Arkansas makes? Hmmm, a glorious slimy racket perhaps?

One part Z-movie, another the dirt from an abandoned stock car track then shaken in bathtub gin by few psych-punk ghosts, Fayetteville's Ten High splatter rock-n-roll blood in the brightest of reds. If you're in need of another dose of their noise after this one, catch a different blast from them in the most recent edition of my podcast too.

What are you listening to tonight?

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The nominations for the 91st Academy Awards were announced this morning. Roma and The Favourite lead the pack in nominations, with 10 each. The Best Picture category has eight nominees this time around, with Black Panther becoming the first film of the superhero genre to garner a nomination. Among the snubs being discussed are no nomination for Bradley Cooper for directing A Star Is Born. After considerable conservative whining prior to its release, Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man received no nominations in the major categories, and Emily Blunt did not get any recognition for either A Quiet Place or Marry Poppins Returns.

These awards have not been without controversy. In previous years, the Oscars have been plagued with issues surrounding the diversity of the nominees, as well as the demographics of the voters for the Academy, which is about as white and old as the electorate for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. There is no announced host for next month’s ceremony, after previous homophobic tweets by comedian Kevin Hart forced his withdrawal. Then there was a public will-he-or-won’t-he return publicity blitz, which involved a controversial appearance on Ellen.

Two of the films nominated for Best Picture have been the subject of online debates. Green Book has been beset by questions over accuracy, as well as past comments by co-writer Nick Vallelonga defending and supporting Donald Trump’s claim of Muslims celebrating in the streets of New Jersey after the September 11 attacks. Bohemian Rhapsody has faced similar criticisms over what really happened or what was invented for dramatic license, but has also engendered debates over how Freddie Mercury’s sexual orientation is depicted and questions about Bryan Singer’s involvement with the film. Even though Singer is still credited as Bohemian Rhapsody’s director, he was fired two weeks into filming and has been beset by allegations of sexual misconduct.

So which film is your favorite? Which will win? Which deserves to win in the following categories?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie. The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration's plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies have been given permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys haven't started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor. Some scientists say the noises from air guns, ship sonar and general tanker traffic can cause the gradual or even outright death of sea creatures, from the giants to the tiniest — whales, dolphins, fish, squid, octopuses and even plankton. Other effects include impairing animals' hearing, brain hemorrhaging and the drowning out of communication sounds important for survival, experts say. So great is the growing din in the world's oceans that experts fear it is fundamentally disrupting the marine ecosystem, diminishing populations of some species as the noise levels disturb feeding, reproduction and social behavior. A 2017 study, for example, found that a loud blast, softer than the sound of a seismic air gun, killed nearly two-thirds of the zooplankton in three-quarters of a mile on either side. Tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain, zooplankton provide a food source for everything from great whales to shrimp. Krill, a tiny crustacean vital to whales and other animals, were especially hard hit, according to one study.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has published today an "emergency directive" that contains guidance in regards to a recent report detailing a wave of DNS hijacking incidents perpetrated out of Iran. ZDNet reports: The emergency directive [1, 2] orders government agencies to audit DNS records for unauthorized edits, change passwords, and enable multi-factor authentication for all accounts through which DNS records can be managed. The DHS documents also urges government IT personnel to monitor Certificate Transparency (CT) logs for newly-issued TLS certificates that have been issued for government domains, but which have not been requested by government workers. The emergency directive comes after last week, the DHS issued an alert about ongoing DNS hijacking attacks through its US-CERT division. The DHS US-CERT alert was based on a report published last week by U.S. cyber-security firm FireEye. The now infamous report detailed a coordinated hacking campaign during which a cyber-espionage group believed to operate out of Iran had manipulated DNS records for the domains of private companies and government agencies. The purpose of these DNS hijacks was to redirect web traffic meant for companies and agencies' internal email servers towards malicious clones, where the Iranian hackers would record login credentials.

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As the streaming TV market continues to evolve, Viacom today announced that it has acquired streaming service Pluto TV for $340 million. As reported by Variety, the deal is expected to close this quarter.

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The post Viacom acquires completely free, ad-based TV streaming service ‘Pluto TV’ appeared first on 9to5Mac.

According to new research from marketing technology firm Audience Project, the majority (57%) of UK customers would stop watching Netflix if commercials were introduced, and even lowering subscriptions would cause a significant drop off of 42%. Here are some of the other key findings: - In the UK, Netflix takes the lion's share of the streaming audience at 70%, followed by BBC iPlayer (61%). Interestingly, YouTube, ITV Player and All4, all of which host ads, saw a decline. - TV is still the preferred streaming device in the UK used by 42% of respondents. - Streaming is on the rise particularly amongst the young, with almost as many 15-25 year olds streaming/downloading (63%) as watching traditional TV (65%) "This is proof, if it were needed, that Netflix is right to focus on growing through its investment in content rather than considering hosting advertising any time soon," Netimperative reports. Martyn Bentley, Commercial Director UK at Audience Project, comments: "Our findings highlight the growing importance of targeting and relevance in advertising. As consumers have increasing choice over whether or not they see ads, both broadcasters and advertisers alike need to work hard to ensure that campaigns enhance experience, rather than detract -- plus it suggests that greater inroads need to be made with Connected TV as a means to help tailor advertising at a granular level."

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