Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Alan Levine)

California regulators won't require ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft to get fingerprinted as part of their background checks to operate in the Golden State. Taxi drivers, however, must be fingerprinted in California.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates the ride-hailing industry, said that "after much consideration and debate," criminal background checks on drivers that don't include fingerprint checks are all that will be required, and those checks must be done by an accredited company and performed annually.

The CPUC, however, said Wednesday that it won't require biometric screening because "doing so would not add a greater level of safety." The agency is expected to approve the plan on November 9.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin. (credit: Wikimedia Commons/Maria Joner)

Back in April, Facebook published a report called "Information Operations and Facebook" that detailed the company's efforts to combat fake news and other misinformation campaigns on the site. The report was released in the midst of an uproar over potential Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the report doesn't mention Russia by name, saying only that Facebook's data "does not contradict" a January report by the Obama administration detailing Russian meddling in the election.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision not to mention Russia was hotly debated inside Facebook. An earlier draft of the report discussed what Facebook knew at that time about Russian meddling, but that material was ultimately removed from the report before publication.

"Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, according to one of the people," according to the Journal.

Enlarge / A Google Fiber installation box in Kansas City, Kansas. (credit: Julie Denesha/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Google Fiber won't be offering packages of traditional television service in the future. In a recent blog post, the company has said it's focusing on its main goal—"to bring superfast Internet to more people."

When Fiber gets to its newest markets in Louisville and San Antonio, it's going to just offer Internet, without the traditional TV packages.

"[M]ore and more people are moving away from traditional methods of viewing television content," writes Google's Cathy Fogler. "Customers today want to control what, where, when, and how they get content. They want to do it their way, and we want to help them."

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so resoundingly terrible that it achieves perfection. It doesn't just have a lame twist, awful acting, or some kind of cheesy technology. It has everything. And that's exactly the vibe you'll get from Replicas, the astoundingly ridiculous new movie starring Keanu Reeves and the robot from I, Robot.

So here's the plot of Replicas, insofar as one can call it a plot. Reeves is a neuroscientist who has a heads-up display that allows him to teleport (???) his dead wife and children's minds into other bodies (???) or maybe robots (???) or maybe clone them (???). Any movie that earns 12 question marks based on the trailer alone is already destined for cult-classic status.

There are robots that look just like the CGI from I, Robot, which is convenient. Also there is some kind of technology that plunges a needle into your eye, because as I said, this movie has everything. Reeves' lab partner is played by Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley), which made me think that at any moment, a crazy VC was going to show up and try to invest in something. A social media platform that stabs your eyes preemptively before you start posting? Sounds great! [Bong hit.]

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If you still have an AOL Instant Messenger account, now might be a good time to start saying your goodbyes. In ten weeks—the morning of December 15th to be precise—AIM will be shut down. The writing has been on the wall for some time—in March, AIM stopped supporting MD5 authentication, cutting off many third-party IM clients (like Adium) from accessing the service.

Now the plan is to disable all AIM services other than @aim.com e-mail addresses, according to a help page. Any images, attachments, or transcripts need to be saved before then because everything is being deleted.

Still, the service has had a pretty good run. Twenty years is a very long time on the Internet—just ask Myspace—and it has outlasted its biggest rival, which was killed off in 2014. Launched in 1997, AIM was the instant messaging platform of the Internet's golden years, spawning an entire new dialect of chatspeak that remains with us today.  But nothing lasts forever, and the rise of the smartphone and platforms like WhatsApp have supplanted IM as the way most of us communicate.

Enlarge / A scene from the now-deleted trailer for the now-cancelled Dirty Chinese Restaurant

Developer Big-O-Tree games has halted development and promotion of a planned mobile game called Dirty Chinese Restaurant after the title drew negative attention from sources including a US Congresswoman for racist portrayals of Asian-Americans.

"After careful consideration and taking the time to listen to the publics [sic] opinion we have decided it’s not in anyone’s best interest to release Dirty Chinese Restaurant," Big-O-Tree writes in a message on its website yesterday. "We would like to make a sincere and formal apology to the Chinese community and wish to assure them that this game was not created with an intentional interest of inflicting harm or malice against Chinese culture."

Official trailers for the game have been removed from YouTube, but archived copies show the planned games' depiction of two Asian caricatures, named Wang Fu and Wong Fu, managing a restaurant by chasing stray animals for meat, finding produce in trash cans, and being threatened for deportation by immigration officials.