Mozilla’s Internet Health Report 2018 explored concentration of power and centralization online through a spotlight article, “Too big tech?” Meanwhile Republican Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin called for a serious look at the power of tech companies, and Democratic Senator Mark Warner outlined a 20 point regulatory proposal for social media and technology firms. We submitted to the FTC written comments to identify a few key pieces that we believe are worthy of discussion over the course of this proceeding, and that speak to the dynamic we are experiencing with the internet today, as well as key pieces of the path forward to improve the health of the internet.

It was a simple plan: obtain the rights to pornographic films, share copies of them online, then threaten to sue those downloading the skin flicks for copyright infringement unless they paid a $3,000 settlement fee. Between 2011 and 2014, the scaper earned about $3m for two former Minnesota attorneys, Paul R. Hansmeier and John L. Steele, through front companies like Prenda Law. As part of his guilty plea, Hansmeier admitted that he and Steele created fictitious business entities to obtain copyrights of pornographic films – buying the rights or actually creating the X-rated movies – and distribute them through file-sharing websites like The Pirate Bay to encourage people to download them.

Squirrel Curve Studio is an intuitive easy-to-use app for creating beautiful spline curves (free-form curves). Motivated by the lack of freely available curve designers, Squirrel provides a clean UI for designing, exporting and importing free-form curves. I am currently looking towards decreasing the app size using Neutralino.js.

The five categories are:

Every window in the system is associated with a particular application message queue. Because it contains most of the data used by the Windows messaging system, think of the queue as a sort of command center linking a window handle to a particular task, and serving as the keeper of the status bits vital to GetMessage()/PeekMessage(). Only QS_POSTEVENT messages exist in the application message queue; other message types imply messages synthesized by the system.

It was a simple plan: obtain the rights to pornographic films, share copies of them online, then threaten to sue those downloading the skin flicks for copyright infringement unless they paid a $3,000 settlement fee. Between 2011 and 2014, the scaper earned about $3m for two former Minnesota attorneys, Paul R. Hansmeier and John L. Steele, through front companies like Prenda Law. As part of his guilty plea, Hansmeier admitted that he and Steele created fictitious business entities to obtain copyrights of pornographic films – buying the rights or actually creating the X-rated movies – and distribute them through file-sharing websites like The Pirate Bay to encourage people to download them.

Eagle researcher Jim Watson from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife says “swimming is not an unusual activity” for these birds. If it catches a large fish, Watson says the eagle can actually grip the fish with its talons as it gracefully swims to shore. And even though an eagle swimming is not necessarily a sign of distress because the birds are capable swimmers, Watson says there have been cases of eagles drowning.

But “Amazon’s Choice” isn’t that at all, and here’s the disappointing news: It’s a label automatically awarded to listings by an algorithm based on customer reviews, price, and whether the product is in stock. “Amazon’s Choice is just our recommendation, and customers can always ask for specific brands or products if they choose,” an Amazon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News / Via Amazon

Amazon has said that it is “investing heavily” in ways to detect and prevent inauthentic reviews, as well as removing selling privileges from sellers that list different products on the same listing, which is against Amazon’s rules.

Photographers take wide-angle shots to enjoy expanding views, group portraits that never miss anyone, or composite subjects with spectacular scenery background. In spite of the rapid proliferation of wide-angle cameras on mobile phones, a wider field-of-view (FOV) introduces a stronger perspective distortion. This paper introduces a new algorithm to undistort faces without affecting other parts of the photo.

When I animated the URL bar with emojis I mentioned that I’d like to take it to the next level by putting a teeny game inside the URL bar. But because it’s not the page that opened the popups it has no references to them and can’t change their URLs…

This really threw me for a loop, and I tried all kinds of schemes, until I realized I could simply assign an array of popups over to the “controller popup” like this:

Another pleasant technical detail that made this whole thing work was using:

to find the vertical size of the browser’s toolbar. NOTE: On Windows the emoji are not fixed width, so they don’t line up properly in any of these games… :[

Strangely sometimes an emoji in the URL bar will instead display as a non-emoji character.

“Technically, what is going on is that the Earth, Sun and all the planets are orbiting around the center of mass of the solar system,” writes Cathy Jordan, a Cornell University Ask an Astronomer contributor. “The center of mass of our solar system very close to the Sun itself, but not exactly at the Sun’s center.” The solar system is basically a massive game of tug of war, and all of the yanking balances out at a specific point: the center of mass, or “barycenter.”