Today, with an app called Kohler Konnect and a collection of new and updated products, Kohler is announcing the largest suite of smart bathroom and plumbing fixtures on the market.

XML pioneer and early blogger Tim Bray went looking through Google for some posts he knew about from 2006 and 2008 and found that Google couldn't retrieve either of them, not even if he searched for lengthy strings that were exact matches for text from the articles; he concluded that "from a busi­ness point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google in­dex­ing ev­ery­thing, no mat­ter how old and how obscure," and so we could not longer rely on "Google’s glob­al in­fras­truc­ture as my own per­son­al search in­dex for my own per­son­al pub­li­ca­tion­s."

The New York Times reports that Kinsa makes smartphone-paired digital thermometers claimed to be in 500,000 American homes and producing 25,000 data points  each day. From its data, Kinsa says, it can tell Missouri and Iowa are being hit hard by flu this winter, while New York and New England are getting off lighter than usual

Facebook’s ongoing experimentation with the content of the News Feed is boosting posts that promote fake news, reports The New York Times. The social networking site is currently testing a feature that separates users’ posts from content from professional news sites. News stories are instead placed in a separate feed called Explore, which is being tested in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Serbia.

OnePlus is investigating reports of customers’ credit card details being stolen after they bought goods from the smartphone maker online. The investigation began after a poll posted by users on OnePlus’ forums found that many customers had experienced the same problem. In the poll, 174 respondents said they had discovered fraudulent transactions on their cards after making a purchase from OnePlus. One customer who bought a OnePlus 5T wrote that he was alerted by the bank as someone tried to make an unauthorized purchase at Walmart worth $790.

One in six US adults (or around 39 million people) now own a voice-activated smart speaker, according to research from NPR and Edison Research. The Smart Audio Report claims that uptake of these devices over the last three years is “outpacing the adoption rates of smartphones and tablets.” Users spent time using speakers to find restaurants and businesses, playing games, setting timers and alarms, controlling smart home devices, sending messages, ordering food, and listening to music and books. Over half of respondents keep their smart speaker in the living room, followed by the kitchen (21 percent), and master bedroom (19 percent).

In December, a dispute following an online wageredCall of Duty match resulted in the death of a 28-year-old Kansas man after a faked call led a SWAT team to his house. Los Angeles police quickly arrested Tyler Barriss, the man responsible for making the call, and this week, he was charged with felony involuntary manslaughter and two additional counts.

Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist, has posted slides and notes from his talk at last December's Strata Data Conference in Singapore, "We need to build machine learning tools to augment machine learning engineers." (more…)

Facebook plans major changes to the News Feed in 2018 designed to promote more “meaningful” interactions, the company said Thursday. Facebook plans to promote posts that generate discussions over those that are passively consumed, it said. Company executives say they hope the changes will make people feel better about using Facebook, following a year in which critics have warned of its negative effects on society and high-profile former employees have distanced themselves from their creation.



I find it hard to get on board with the idea of filling my home with smart security cameras for a number of reasons, not the least of which is privacy. But there’s one smart camera at CES this year that has a clever solution to the whole spying-on-you problem: just have the camera look away.

Jeroen Boeye is a data scientist who was parsing the power output of his panels, and noticed that they were influenced -- as you'd expect -- by the trees near his house, which got in the way of direct sunlight.

Given an audio waveform, researchers can now produce a virtually identical version that makes speech-recognition software transcribe something else entirely.

In Delhi sollen Eltern in Zukunft den Unterricht Ihrer Kinder an staatlichen Schulen über eine App auf dem Mobiltelefon in Echtzeit verfolgen können. Behörden bekommen sogar einen umfassenderen Zugriff. Die App der Eltern soll Extra-Funktionen bekommen.

A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

Current state of online #tracking: your unspecified personal data is processed by unknown third parties for unknown purposes. It is literally unknown, even to the website you are visiting!

The goal of this article is to provide a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today in 2017. We’ll start from the beginning and build an example website like the dinosaurs did — no tools, just plain HTML and JavaScript. Then we’ll introduce different tools incrementally to see the problems that they solve one at a time. With this historical context, you’ll be better able to learn and adapt to the ever-changing JavaScript landscape going forward

Now let’s assume you have given consent to an app to get access to your account data at Lloyds and maybe your savings account at Nationwide building society, and the joint account you have with your partner at NatWest. The idea behind open banking is that apps (which must be FCA-regulated) will be able to “aggregate” everything in one single at-a-glance screen, constantly sweeping your accounts, helping you budget, spotting where you can make more savings, allowing you to more easily switch money from one provider to another, even analysing your gas bill to tell you of a £125 saving and doing all the switching work for you. It sounds great - until it goes wrong.

On an average day, people around the world watch one billion hours of video on YouTube. Most of those—70%—are recommended by YouTube’s algorithms, chief product officer Neal Mohan revealed at CES, as reported by CNET. The recommendations keep mobile users watching for more than 60 minutes at a time, on average, he said.

5000 Dollar Bug Bounty brachte einem europäischen Forscherteam das Aufspüren einer diffizilen Datenschutzlücke bei Facebook ein.

Ende Mai 2017 fanden Forscher aus den USA, Deutschland und Frankreich heraus, wie sich Werbekunden unautorisierten Zugriff auf die Telefonnummern von Facebook-Nutzern verschaffen können. In ihrem Forschungsbericht stellen sie dar, wie man das Marketing-Tool für Werbetreibende trickreich missbrauchen konnte.

Innenminister Kickl will auf die Location History auf den Smartphones Schutzsuchender zugreifen.