Month: February 2020

Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison. (credit: Oracle PR / Flickr)

About 300 Oracle employees walked off the job on Thursday to protest founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison's decision to hold a fundraiser for President Donald Trump the previous evening, Bloomberg reports. It was a rare sign of dissent for a company known for its stodgy corporate culture. But the circumstances of the small-scale protest also suggest that Ellison has less reason to worry about future employee revolts than some of his fellow tech moguls.

"The protest, called No Ethics/No Work, involved about 300 employees walking out of their offices or stopping work at remote locations at noon local time and devoting the rest of the day to volunteering or civic engagement," Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg's source asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

Oracle has more than 130,000 employees, so a walkout by 300 workers is hardly a serious threat to the company. Some employees, worried about retaliation from management, chose to give to charities opposing Trump's agenda rather than participate in the walkout. Others took vacation time for their afternoon off. In short, Oracle employees took a less confrontational approach than employees at other tech giants, including Google and Amazon.

Enlarge / The iPhone 11. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple is seriously considering the possibility of allowing users to change the default apps for Web browsing, mail, or music on their iPhones. The company might also allow users to listen to Spotify or other music streaming services besides Apple Music via Siri on the iPhone or on the HomePod smart speaker.

These revelations were outlined in a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman this morning, who cited multiple people familiar with Apple's internal plans.

While Apple's plans are not final, the changes could go into effect as soon as Apple's iOS 14 release later this year, which means they would likely be introduced during Apple's developer conference this June.

It has been a long wait, but HBO just dropped a full trailer for the third season of Westworld, HBO's Emmy-award-winning science fiction series. And it looks like we're in for another wild, mind-bending ride through multiple dystopian timelines.

(Warning: major spoilers for the first two seasons of Westworld below.)

The titular Westworld is one of six immersive theme parks owned and operated by a company called Delos Inc. The park is populated with a "cast" of very human-looking androids, called hosts. The park's well-heeled visitors can pretty much do whatever they like to the hosts and don't generally view the hosts as anything more than unfeeling props in their private dramas. But the hosts' creator/co-founder and park director of Westworld, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), "awakens" a host named Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) to true sentience. S1 concluded with a bloody massacre, as the reprogrammed hosts rise up to take revenge on the guests. 

Enlarge / OK, which one of you is the father? (credit: picture alliance / Getty Images)

Shortly before the publication of the first Neanderthal genome, a number of researchers had seen hints that there might be something strange lurking in the statistics of the human genome. The publication of the genome erased any doubts about these hints and provided a clear identity for the strangeness: a few percent of the bases in European and Asian populations came from our now-extinct relatives.

But what if we didn't have the certainty provided by the Neanderthal genome? That's the situation we find ourselves in now, as several studies have recently identified "ghost lineages"—hints of branches in the human family tree for which we have no DNA sequence but find their imprint on the genomes of populations alive today. The existence of these ghost lineages is based on statistical arguments, so it's very dependent upon statistical methods and underlying assumptions, which are prone to being the subject of disagreement within the community that studies human evolution.

Now, researchers at the University of Utah are arguing they have evidence of a very old ghost lineage contributing to Neanderthals and Denisovans (and so, indirectly, possibly to us). This is undoubtedly going to be a claim that others in the field contest, in part because the evidence comes from an analysis that would also revise the dates of many key events in human evolution. But it's interesting to look at in light of how scientists deal with a question that may never be answered by definitive data.

Enlarge / Rep. Dana Rohrabacher on November 6, 2018, in Costa Mesa, California, just before he learned he had lost his seat to a Democratic challenger. Rohrabacher, the most Putin-friendly member of Congress, visited with Julian Assange in 2017 to offer him a pardon in exchange for proof that Seth Rich, not Russian intelligence, had leaked the DNC emails. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

A former California congressman confirmed in an interview with Yahoo News' Michael Isikoff that he did offer to broker a pardon for Julian Assange in exchange for information that would exonerate Russia from the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and members of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign organization. Republican Dana Rohrabacher was seeking to prove that the emails were leaked by DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered in July 2016—and were not the product of a hacking campaign by Russian intelligence organizations.

Rohrabacher, who lost his seat in 2018, was a long-time cheerleader in Washington for Russian President Vladimir Putin's government. Using information provided to him directly by the Kremlin, Rohrabacher personally promoted an effort to remove the name of Sergei Magnitsky from the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, an anti-corruption law intended to sanction and punish officials involved in Magnitsky's imprisonment and death. (Magnitsky was a Russian tax lawyer murdered after he decided to testify against Russian Interior Ministry officials who had taken over the investment companies of his client and embezzled 5.4 billion rubles (about $230 million) from the Russian government himself.)

Rohrabacher is now a consultant to the cannabis industry. But in August 2017, while he was still a congressman, he visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, with Assange's attorney present. He claimed his goal was to "prove" Seth Rich's involvement—an already widely debunked conspiracy theory—and disprove charges that would later take the form of an indictment of 12 officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (GRU).

Enlarge / European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen launching "A Europe fit for the Digital Age" initiative at a press conference on February 19, 2020 in Brussels. (credit: Kenzo Tribouillard | AFP | Getty Images)

A comprehensive new grand strategy for handling European regulation in the "Digital Age" seeks to thread the technological needle, mitigating the harms of the information era—such as fraud, misinformation, and loss of privacy—while still reaping the benefits. The proposed plan, as released by the European Commission this week, names no names but still makes quite clear that the biggest US tech titans—especially Facebook and Google—would be squarely in the sights of any new legislation.

The data strategy plan (PDF) is just that: a plan, not a piece of legislation. As such, it's chock-full of aspirational language and lofty goals and relatively low on details. Its structure, however, lays out a clear framework for how the EU intends to approach data going forward.

The core idea is to make the treatment of data more universal and less segmented. One piece of legislation EU leaders plan to put forward later this year would "facilitate cross-border data use and prioritize interoperability requirements and standards within and across sectors," for example.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headed up by a solid discount on a 12-month subscription to Sony's PlayStation Plus service. Typically available between $50-60 online, Newegg has memberships available for $40 with the code "EMCDFFD52" at checkout. Note that the deal applies to digital codes, not physical cards.

PlayStation Plus itself is still needed to play most PS4 games online, and subscribing still nets you access to a couple free titles every month. There hasn't been anything to suggest that Sony's online policy will change with the forthcoming PlayStation 5, so you should be safe to top up regardless of whether your current subscription is running out or you just want to stock up on service time. For reference, these 1-year subscriptions retailed for $45 on Black Friday; while we have seen them available for less than $40 on occasion, those instances have been rare.

If you're not much of a PlayStation fan, though, we also have deals on internal SSDs, Amazon Fire tablets, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, and more. Have a look below for the full rundown.