Category: News and Views

Roku has lost 40% of its value as competition heats up | CNN

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Roku could be in trouble. Competition from much bigger companies is coming to the streaming market, and investors are bailing out of Roku’s stock.

Shares of Roku (ROKU), after a huge run up this year, plunged nearly 20% Friday after an analyst issued an extremely gloomy report. Roku stock was up 1% on Monday. The stock has now lost a third of its value since Apple (AAPL) unveiled its streaming service, Apple TV+, would cost only $4.99 a month. Roku’s stock is about 40% below its all-time high on September 9.

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Why Today Is the 1st Day of Autumn in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere | Live Science

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Happy Equinox!

This morning (Sept. 23) at 3:49 a.m. EDT (0749 GMT) marked the official celestial beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.

Although beaches have long been closed in many parts of the United States and there’s already been a meteorological shift from summer into autumn, today marks a special transition in which the sun crosses the celestial equator, or the projection of Earth’s equator onto the sky, from north to south. While the north gears up for chillier days, the south is welcoming springtime.

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YouTube, sorry for verification flap, reverses course | Fast Company

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The YouTubers are mad and YouTube is sorry.

Google’s video service says it “missed the mark” yesterday when it announced sweeping changes to its verification program. Those changes would have stripped the verification badges from some of YouTube’s most prominent users, which might have affected how they appear in search results, but now the service is apparently rethinking its approach.

In an apologetic statement sent out from the Twitter account of CEO Susan Wojcicki, the executive apologized “for the frustration & hurt that we caused with our new approach to verification.” YouTube is “working to address your concerns & we’ll have more updates soon,” Wojcicki said.

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Get popcorn for iOS 13’s privacy pop-ups of creepy Facebook data grabs | TechCrunch

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Privacy-minded changes to smartphone operating systems which foreground the background activity of third party apps are helping to spotlight more of the surveillance infrastructure deployed by adtech giants to track and profile human eyeballs for profit.

To wit: iOS 13, which will be generally released later this week, has already been spotted catching Facebook’s app trying to use Bluetooth to track nearby users.

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Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis | WIRED

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A few years ago, Joelle Pineau, a computer science professor at McGill, was helping her students design a new algorithm when they fell into a rut. Her lab studies reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence that’s used, among other things, to help virtual characters (“half cheetah” and “ant” are popular) teach themselves how to move about in virtual worlds. It’s a prerequisite to building autonomous robots and cars. Pineau’s students hoped to improve on another lab’s system. But first they had to rebuild it, and their design, for reasons unknown, was falling short of its promised results. Until, that is, the students tried some “creative manipulations” that didn’t appear in the other lab’s paper.

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Facebook has a gaping loophole in its fight against fake news | Mashable

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Facebook has a major loophole that allows nefarious users to get around its strategy to stop fake news.

The social media giant has been taking its fight against misinformation and fake news more seriously in recent years. The company has taken action against malicious accounts spreading disinformation. Its updated its policies to keep misinformation off the platform. Studies have even shown that the steps Facebook has taken are working. That’s all good news!

However, a recently discovered loophole proves that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of his company still have a lot more work to do.

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Amazon is hiring 30,000 workers. Here’s how to find out more | CNN

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Amazon is looking to fill 30,000 jobs and, to help accomplish that goal, it plans to host career days in six cities across the US next week.

The open spots span a variety of skill and experience levels, from entry-level positions at Amazon’s (AMZN) fulfillment centers to software development engineers. All of the jobs are permanent, and most of them are full-time posts. They all pay at least $15 an hour with benefits.

Amazon’s Career Day will take place on September 17 in Arlington, Virginia (the location of the company’s second headquarters), as well as in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville and its hometown of Seattle. The company said it expects to see significant growth in these cities in the future.

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Teen’s Junk Food Diet Caused Him to Go Blind, Doctors Say | Live Science

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A teen who ate nothing but fries, chips and other junk food for years slowly went blind as a result of his poor diet, according to a new report of the case.

The case highlights a perhaps little-known fact about poor diets: In addition to being tied to obesity, heart disease and cancer, they “can also permanently damage the nervous system, particularly vision,” according to the report, published today (Sept. 2) in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

The teen’s problems began at age 14, when he went to the doctor’s office complaining of tiredness.

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