New submitter AntiBrainWasher writes: Running away from the fear of legal/political persecution, the New York City-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) told editors of its roughly 200 journals yesterday that it feared "severe legal implications" from continuing to use Huawei scientists as reviewers in vetting technical papers. They can continue to serve on IEEE editorial boards, according to the memo, but "cannot handle any papers" until the sanctions are lifted. The IEEE ban has sparked outrage among Chinese scientists on social media. "I joined IEEE as a Ph.D. student because it is recognized as an International academic platform in electronics engineering," wrote Haixia (Alice) Zhang of Peking University in Beijing in a letter to IEEE leadership. "But this message is challenging my professional integrity. I have decided to quit the editorial boards [of two IEEE journals] until it restores our common professional integrity."

Meanwhile, the SD and Wi-Fi Alliance reinstated Huawei as a member, less than a week after they quietly removed the company from its membership list. Despite the lack of evidences, U.S. officials have alleged that the Chinese government could use equipment manufactured by Huawei, which is a global supplier of cellphones and wireless data networks, to spy on users or disrupt critical infrastructure, similar to what the NSA has done.

"It has become too easy to take Linux and FOSS for granted," warns a Linux Journal editorial by Doc Searls, complaining, for example, that today "We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts."

Long-time Slashdot reader whh3 wants to live differently -- and to model a different set values: After reading the recent Doc Searls article in Linux Journal, I realized that I need to get back to my roots. The first step will be to build/setup/run my own email server for my vanity domain.

The problem is, I haven't run my own email server since the 90s. It was easy back then -- there was much less SPAM and self-hosted email servers didn't have to jump through hoops to make sure that they weren't blacklisted as senders.

So, I am reaching out to this great community to find out if there are any good tutorials on modern-day best-practices for self hosting an email server. Any tips/tricks/pointers would be great appreciated!
A lot's changed in 20 years -- but for such a basic form of online communication, is it still possible to roll your own? Or are we trapped in a world where private conversations about valuing open source software take place inside Google's proprietary Gmail client.

Leave your own suggestions in the comments. How would you host your own email server?

An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook's F8 2019 developer conference dominated last week, with talk of AI and AR/VR and privacy. But the news and reactions were all largely expected, and frankly, I was disappointed there was no detail on end-to-end encryption messaging across Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. No, what really stood out for me this week was last night's Stripe announcement: Its fifth engineering hub will be remote. Stripe has decided that hiring 100 remote engineers makes more sense than hiring 100 engineers in one place. Housing and relocation certainly played a role in the decision, but not enough to just choose a location with a low cost of living. Stripe would rather hire the best 100 engineers, regardless of where they are in the world.

That's huge. It's also inevitable. Remote work is happening everywhere you look. Coffee shops and restaurants, temporary offices and co-working spaces, train stations and airports -- private and public spaces are full of people doing their job remotely. I've been thinking a lot about this, and not just because VentureBeat's editorial team is almost all remote workers. In my personal life, I've noticed a clear pattern. All my friends, and their friends, choose to "work from home" every chance they get. If their job allows once a month, they work from home once a month. If the maximum is once a week, they do exactly that. If their boss is on vacation or traveling for work, they work from home for as many days as the office environment permits. Whatever the maximum is, that's what they do.

Amazon Ring is building "a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors," reports the director Nieman Journalism Lab, in a post from The Atlantic: That's right: A doorbell company wants to report crime news. It already is, actually. Several people on LinkedIn describe their jobs as "news editors" at Ring... I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is a really bad idea. Crime has declined enormously over the past 25 years, but people's perception of how much crime there is has not. A majority of Americans have said that crime is increasing in each of the past 16 years -- despite crime in each major category being significantly lower today than it used to be. A 2016 Pew survey found that only 15 percent of Americans believed (correctly) that crime was lower in 2016 than it had been in 2008 -- versus 57 percent who thought it had gotten worse...

These mistaken beliefs are driven largely by the editorial decisions of local media -- especially local TV newscasts, which are just as bloody today as they were when murder rates were twice as high. There's a term for it: "mean world syndrome," the phenomenon where media consumption makes people see the world as more violent and dangerous than it really is... But news organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only one incentive: emphasizing that the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you....

So think about this managing-editor job. Ring wants to be "covering local crime" everywhere, down to the house and neighborhood level. So one managing editor, plus however many other people are on this team, is supposed to be creating a thoughtful, nonexploitative editorial product that is sending journalistically sound "breaking news crime alerts," in real time, all across the country. Are they really delivering news or just regular pulses of fear in push-notification form? If that's the job, it is literally impossible to do responsibly... It's like relying on the people who make antivirus software to tell you about the latest cybersecurity issues: Even when the reporting is sound, it's still prone to exaggerating the scale of the threat and still aimed at making you so afraid that you give them money.
The article's author spent 10 years working for newspapers (most recently the Dallas Morning News), and argues that "the reality is that 'breaking crime news alerts' are not something the majority of people needs -- especially if 'two Greenpeace volunteers stood on my porch for 30 seconds' is the bar we're talking about. It's not actionable intelligence -- it's puffing a little more air into an atmosphere of fear..."

He concludes that Amazon Ring "says it's selling safety, but it's really selling fear. "

"Whether it is consumers' data or competitors' code, Google's view seems to be the same: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine," argues Oracle executive vice president Kenneth Glueck.

Google had urged America's Supreme Court to rule in their ongoing legal case about access to Java's APIs, a case which Google says hinges on "whether developers should be able to create new applications using standard ways of accessing common functions. Those functions are the building blocks of computer programming, letting developers easily assemble the range of applications and tools we all use every day. Making it harder to connect with those functions would lock developers into existing platforms, thus reducing competition and, ultimately, hurting consumers. Access to software interfaces like these is the key to interoperability, the foundation of great software development."

That editorial -- written by Google's senior vice president for global affairs, Kent Walker, notes that 175 startups, developers, academics and other tech companies (including Microsoft) are also asking the Supreme Court to hear this case. Google warns of a risk to innovation posed if companies like Oracle become "gatekeepers to interoperability," calling it "a defining battle of the digital era."

Oracle's executive responds that "There are many 'defining battles' of the digital era -- 5G, Artificial Intelligence, autonomous devices -- but Oracle v. Google is surely not among them." Only in Google's world does weaker intellectual property protection lead to more innovation. It is settled in law and in economics that the opposite is true. And at a time when the U.S. is circling the globe to enhance the protection of U.S. intellectual property -- including strong copyright protection -- Google takes the opposite view...

In a stunning what's-up-is-down and down-is-up statement, Walker attempts to wrap Google in the cloak of interoperability. Java defined the era of interoperability with its "write once, run everywhere" architecture. It was Google that copied Java, built Android around it, and altered it so it was only interoperable with itself (i.e., write once, run only on Google). Android killed Java interoperability, and now Google argues that killing interoperability is good for interoperability?

Those facts are not in dispute. The only issue in dispute is Google's assertion that its actions were all "fair." On this point, the federal circuit court clearly analyzed and methodically decided against Google's fair-use defense. This makes sense because, under no interpretation of fair use, may you copy a competitor's software code and turn around and compete against that competitor in the marketplace. Hard stop... There is no matter of law in question, nor is there a conflict among circuit courts. Google was caught killing interoperability and is now trying to concoct a new "we are too important" legal defense.
Reuters reports that this week the Supreme Court asked the White House "to offer its views on whether it should hear Google's bid to end Oracle's copyright infringement lawsuit."

A reader tipped us off to a scathing editorial by the senior editor of Tom's Guide: Consider the F8 conference from a year ago that began with a prolonged apology over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a data mining firm got a hold of the personal data of 50 million Facebook users... Zuckerberg promised a Clear History feature that would let you easily delete information about apps and websites you've interacted with, sort of like erasing your browser history. "It's not enough to build powerful tools," Zuckerberg said at last year's F8. "We have to make sure they're used for good, and we will." So what's changed in the last year? Well, the Clear History feature never launched -- it's coming later in 2019, Facebook now says...

If we sat around previewing everything that's gone wrong for Facebook since last year's F8 conference, we'd wrap up just in time for the 2020 version to begin.
Meanwhile, a Forrester Research analyst complains the ongoing stream of news stories about Facebook's issues "proves they've never prioritized privacy over their business model," and the article argues there's just one way for Facebook to regain trust: If Zuckerberg wants to prove just how serious Facebook is about guarding user privacy...he should it prove it by announcing he's quitting.... [W]ith Zuckerberg still at the helm of Facebook, it will be hard to believe that the social media company is doing more than just paying lip service to the notion that it must do a better job of respecting the privacy and personal data of its users... Incidents where Facebook was too cavalier with user data stretch back years, and while the particulars change from scandal to scandal, the one constant is the guy sitting in the CEO chair.
The article's last line?

"Expect another apology a few months later when word of yet another breach leaks out."

Reader hackingbear shares a report: As soon as the European Southern Observatory released the black hole photo, under Creative Commons license, on April 10, Visual China Group (VCG), China's leading stock image provider that's compared to Getty Images, made the image available for sale in its library without attribution to the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. "This is an editorial image. Please call 400-818-2525 or consult our customer service representative for commercial use," said a note for the black hole image on VCG's website. Internet users took to social media slamming VCG for monetizing a photo intended for free distribution among the human race. VCG swiftly revised the note to say the black hole photo should not be used for commercial purposes, but the incident sparked a plethora of comments on Weibo condemning VCG's opportunist business practice.

For example, the price tag of the national emblem image ranges from150 yuan ($22) to 1,500 yuan ($220.) "Copyrights protection should definitely be promoted. The question is, why is VCG allowed to price photos of the black hole and the likes out of the market? Why is it able to exploit loopholes?," Du Yu, a Beijing-based freelance technology journalist, said to TechCrunch. China's the cyberspace watchdog of Tianjin ordered the photo site to end its illegal, rule-breaking practices. "We have taken down all non-compliant photos and closed down the site voluntarily for a revamp in accordance with related laws," said VCG. Shares of VCG, whose executives are mainly American and Canadian citizens and filed 16 copyright lawsuits per day on average (in Chinese, Google translate), plummeted 10 percent Friday morning in Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is facing a "ferocious" backlash in India, Bloomberg reports: Nowhere has resistance to the game been quite like India. Multiple cities have banned PUBG, as it's known, and police in Western India arrested 10 university students for playing. The national child rights commission has recommended barring the game for its violent nature. One of India's largest Hindi newspapers declared PUBG an "epidemic" that turned children into "manorogi," or psychopaths. "There are dangerous consequences to this game," the Navbharat Times warned in a March 20 editorial. "Many children have lost their mental balance...."

What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months. Rural communities that never had PCs or game consoles got smartphones in recent years -- and wireless service just became affordable for pretty much everyone after a price war last year. With half a billion internet users looking for entertainment, PUBG has set off a frenzy.
Over 250,000 students entered one recent PUBG competition, according to the article.

At least one local minister criticized the game as "the demon in every house."

More than 850 scientists and statisticians told the authors of a Nature commentary that they are endorsing an idea to ban "statistical significance." Critics say that declaring a result to be statistically significant or not essentially forces complicated questions to be answered as true or false. "The world is much more uncertain than that," says Nicoole Lazar, a professor of statistics at the University of Georgia. An entire issue of the journal The American Statistician is devoted to this question, with 43 articles and a 17,500-word editorial that Lazar co-authored.

"In the early 20th century, the father of statistics, R.A. Fisher, developed a test of significance," reports NPR. "It involves a variable called the p-value, that he intended to be a guide for judging results. Over the years, scientists have warped that idea beyond all recognition, creating an arbitrary threshold for the p-value, typically 0.05, and they use that to declare whether a scientific result is significant or not. Slashdot reader apoc.famine writes: In a nutshell, what the statisticians are recommending is that we embrace uncertainty, quantify it, and discuss it, rather than set arbitrary measures for when studies are worth publishing. This way research which appears interesting but which doesn't hit that magical p == 0.05 can be published and discussed, and scientists won't feel pressured to p-hack.

Slashdot reader grasshoppa writes: Kyle Bennett, long-time owner/operator of one of the last independent review sites, HardOCP, announced that effective April 1st he will be leaving it behind to start a new career at Intel. "Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel's Technology Leadership Marketing group," Bennett writes. "Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators. This is the part of our community that has great influence through word of mouth and online engagement. I'll be focusing on helping Intel get back in touch with this audience and re-establishing a voice and dialog on where the company is going with its future technologies. If you are reading this, you are very likely already part of this group."

He goes on to say that he does not want to sell HardOCP or HardForum and see those properties turned into something that he would not be proud of. Instead, "HardOCP will be 'mothballed,'" he writes. "It will no longer publish news, editorial, or hardware review content. [...] HardForum.com will be sold to a company that I have done business with for years, one that I can trust to run it in the way you are familiar with. HardForum will be demonetized and all advertising and commission links removed. Simply put, HardForum will not make money in any way..."

You can read Bennett's full statement here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden's massive trove of leaked National Security Agency documents. Over the past several years, The Intercept, which is owned by First Look Media, has maintained a research team to handle the large number of documents provided by Snowden to Intercept journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. But in an email to staff Wednesday evening, First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had "ceased reporting on it years ago," The Intercept had decided to "focus on other editorial priorities" after expending five years combing through the archive. "The Intercept is proud of its reporting on the Snowden archive, and we are thankful to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald for making it available to us," Bloom wrote. He added: "It is our hope that Glenn and Laura are able to find a new partner -- such as an academic institution or research facility -- that will continue to report on and publish the documents in the archive consistent with the public interest." Poitras reprimanded First Look Media for its decision to shut down its archives, and lay off 4 percent of its staff who had maintained them. "This decision and the way it was handled would be a disservice to our source, the risks we've all taken, and most importantly, to the public for whom Edward Snowden blew the whistle," she wrote.

"Late Thursday evening, Greenwald tweeted that both he and Poitras had full copies of the archives, and had been searching for a partner to continue research," reports The Daily Beast.

Rotten Tomatoes is finally addressing its troll problem. The review aggregation website has unveiled a new initiative to "modernize its audience rating system through a series of product enhancements," -- the first of which includes banning user reviews and comments prior to a movie's theatrical release. Getting rid of pre-release user reviews means internet trolls will not be able to flood film pages with negative scores before a movie comes out. As we saw earlier this week, Captain Marvel was at the receiving end of what appeared to be a targeted campaign to lower the upcoming movie's audience rating. Rotten Tomatoes is not banning user reviews entirely. It says it will offer this functionality to users once the movie has hit the theaters.

Further reading on Rotten Tomatoes: Movie Studios Are Blaming Rotten Tomatoes For Killing Movies No One Wants To See
Hollywood Producer Blames Rotten Tomatoes For Convincing People Not To See His Movie
Rotten Tomatoes Scores Don't Correlate To Box Office Success or Woes, Research Shows
DC Fans Angry Over Rotten Tomatoes 'Justice League' Ratings
Why Don't We Care About The Rotten Tomatoes Scores Of TV Shows?
Real Moviegoers Don't Care About Rotten Tomatoes.

An anonymous reader writes: In case you missed the latest drama to take place in the YouTube tech community, Ars Technica reports how Vox Media attempted to copyright strike two reaction videos that mocked The Verge's terrible PC build guide video that could have ruined a $2,000 system for a beginner PC builder. That effort failed when the tech community sounded the alarms; YouTube removed the copyright strikes and Vox Media had to retract their takedown notice.

From the report: "Last week, The Verge got a reminder about the power of the Streisand effect after its lawyers issued copyright takedown requests for two YouTube videos that criticized -- and heavily excerpted -- a video by The Verge. Each takedown came with a copyright 'strike.' It was a big deal for the creators of the videos, because three 'strikes' in a 90-day period are enough to get a YouTuber permanently banned from the platform. T.C. Sottek, the Verge's managing editor, blamed lawyers at the Verge's parent company, Vox Media, for the decision. 'The Verge's editorial structure was involved zero percent in the decision to issue a strike,' Sottek said in a direct message. 'Vox Media's legal team did this independently and informed us of it after the fact.' The move sparked an online backlash. Verge editor Nilay Patel (who, full disclosure, was briefly a colleague of mine at The Verge's sister publication Vox.com), says that when he learned about the decision, he asked that the strike be rescinded, leading to the videos being reinstated. Still, Patel defended the lawyers' legal reasoning, arguing that the videos 'crossed the line' into copyright infringement. It's hard to be sure if this is true since there are very few precedents in this area of the law. But the one legal precedent I was able to find suggests the opposite: that this kind of video is solidly within the bounds of copyright's fair use doctrine."

CNET just published a fierce pro-net neutrality editorial co-authored by Nancy Pelosi, the soon-to-be Majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mike Doyle, the expected Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and Frank Pallone, Jr. the expected Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The three representatives argue that "the Trump FCC ignored millions of comments from Americans pleading to keep strong net neutrality rules in place." The FCC's net neutrality repeal left the market for broadband internet access virtually lawless, giving ISPs an opening to control peoples' online activities at their discretion. Gone are rules that required ISPs to treat all internet traffic equally. Gone are rules that prevented ISPs from speeding up traffic of some websites for a fee or punishing others by slowing their traffic down....

Without the FCC acting as sheriff, it is unfortunately not surprising that big corporations have started exploring ways to change how consumers access the Internet in order to benefit their bottom line.... Research from independent analysts shows that nearly every mobile ISP is throttling at least one streaming video service or using discriminatory boosting practices. Wireless providers are openly throttling video traffic and charging consumers extra for watching high-definition streams. ISPs have rolled out internet plans that favor companies they are affiliated with, despite full-page ads swearing they value net neutrality. And most concerning, an ISP was found throttling so-called "unlimited" plans for a fire department during wildfires in California.

Make no mistake, these new practices are just ISPs sticking a toe in the water. Without an agency with the authority to investigate and punish unfair or discriminatory practices, ISPs will continue taking bolder and more blatantly anti-consumer steps. That is why we have fought over the past year to restore net neutrality rules and put a cop back on the ISP beat. In May, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill restoring net neutrality rules. Despite the support of a bipartisan majority of Americans, the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives refused our efforts to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

Fortunately, the time is fast coming when the people's voices will be heard.
The editorial closes by arguing that "Large corporations will no longer be able to block progress on this important consumer protection issue."

DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, offers a variety of useful features such as instant answers and bangs. The latter are particularly useful for people who want to use DuckDuckGo to search directly on other sites. Typing '!yt keyword', for instance, will do a direct search on YouTube, while '!w keyword' goes to Wikipedia. This library of bangs has been around for a long time and has grown to more than 10,000 over the years.

From a report: However, a few days ago, roughly 2,000 of these were removed. Interestingly, this included many bangs that link to torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG. Similarly, bangs for OpenSubtitles, Sci-Hub and LibGen are gone too. Initially, it was unclear what had happened, but after people started asking questions on Reddit, DuckDuckGo staff explained that this was part of a larger cleanup operation. DuckDuckGo went through its bangs library and removed all non-working versions, as well as verbose ones that were not actively used. In addition, many pirate site bangs were deleted as these are no longer"permitted."

"Bangs had been neglected for some time, and there were tons of broken ones. As part of the bang clean-up, we also removed some that were pointing to primarily illegal content," DuckDuckGo staffer Tagawa explains. The search engine still indexes the sites in question but it feels that offering curated search shortcuts for these sites in their service might cause problems. "It may not seem like so at first blush, but it is very different legally if it is a bang vs. in the search results because the bangs are added to the product by us explicitly, and can be interpreted legally as an editorial decision that is actively facilitating that site and its content," the staff wrote.

Charter has been using the argument that their First Amendment rights are being violated as it fights off state lawsuits for its poor service. "It recently tried to use the First Amendment card again in a legal battle with Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), which recently accused Charter of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by refusing to carry TV channels run by the African-American-owned ESN," reports Techdirt. "While Charter tried to have the suit dismissed by claiming that the First Amendment prohibits such claims because an ISP enjoys 'editorial discretion,' the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit didn't agree." From the report: The court noted that while ISPs and cable companies do enjoy some First Amendment protection, it doesn't apply here, just like it didn't apply in the net neutrality fight: "As part of its defense, Charter had told the court that by choosing which channels to carry, the company was engaging in a form of editorial discretion protected by the First Amendment. Therefore, it said, the court would have to use a stricter standard to evaluate Entertainment Studios' claim of a legal violation -- a standard that might result in the claim being rejected. The Ninth Circuit said otherwise, saying that just because Charter engages in corporate speech when it selects which channels to carry does not 'automatically' require the court to use the tougher standard."

As a result, the court is letting the case move forward. For its part, ESN's discrimination complaint alleges that its complaint is based on more than just having its channel withheld from the company's cable lineup: "The opinion on Charter's motion to dismiss also marks a victory for the 25-year-old programming firm founded by comedian Byron Allen, which bought the Weather Channel in March and accused Charter executives in court of hurling racist insults at Allen and other black Americans in numerous encounters. In one alleged instance, Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge called Allen, who is black, 'boy' at an industry conference and advised him to change his behavior, according to court documents. In another alleged example, the court said, Charter's senior executive in charge of programming, Allan Singer, approached a group of black protesters outside Charter's offices to tell them to 'get off of welfare.'"

Thu-Huong Ha, writing for Quartz: Amazon's power in books extends way beyond its ability to sell them super cheap and super fast. This year, a little over 40% of the print books sold in the US moved through the site, according to estimates from Bookstat, which tracks US online book retail. (NPD, which tracks 85% of US trade print sales, declined to provide data broken out by retailer.) In the US, Amazon dominates ebook sales and hosts hundreds of thousands of self-published ebooks on its platforms, many exclusively. It looms over the audiobook scene, in retail as well as production, and is one of the biggest marketplaces for used books in the US. Amazon also makes its own books -- more than 1,500 last year.

All that power comes with great data, which Amazon's publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want -- down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange. Though Amazon declined to comment specifically on whether it uses data to shape or determine the content of its own books, the company acknowledged that authors are recruited for their past sales (as is common in traditional publishing). "Amazon Publishing titles are thoughtfully acquired by our team -- made up of publishing-industry veterans and long-time Amazonians -- with many factors taken into consideration," says Amazon Publishing publisher Mikyla Bruder, "including the acquiring editor's enthusiasm, the strength of the story, quality of the writing, editorial fit for our list, and author backlist/comparable titles' sales track."

Amazon's Kindle e-reader, first released in 2007, is a data-collection device that doubles as reading material. Kindle knows the minutiae of how people read: what they highlight, the fonts they prefer, where in a book they lose interest, what kind of books they finish quickly, and which books gets skimmed rather than read all the way through. A year after the Kindle came out, Amazon acquired Audible. Audiobooks have been a rare bright spot in the publishing industry, with double-digit growth in total sales for the past few years. Audible now touts itself as the "world's largest seller and producer of downloadable audiobooks and other spoken-word entertainment," and its site has around 450,000 audio programs.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Podcasting has offered advertisers a new means of reaching demographically targeted consumers. Many podcasts feature extended endorsements, read by the host, that often include a discount code for a product or service. For listeners accustomed to a separation between advertising and editorial, the blurring of lines can be disconcerting (or embarrassing, such as when podcast hosts like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss expound on how much they enjoy wearing Me Undies). For advertisers that have spent heavily on podcasts, like the omnipresent Casper and Blue Apron, the effectiveness of such campaigns can be measured in increased sales. A representative for Blue Apron, which has launched its own branded podcast, "Why We Eat What We Eat," in addition to advertising on hundreds of shows, told me, "We view podcasts less as an advertising channel and more as a content channel to win new customers and engage existing customers."

Podcast advertising remains a relatively new science. Producers and advertisers can instantly tabulate how many times a show has been downloaded, but it's harder to ascertain how many people have listened to the whole thing. A commercial marketplace puts pressure on podcasters to create content that can attract millions of listeners, which does not necessarily make for the strongest, or most subtle, content. Linsky, with some frustration, noted that it doesn't matter much to an advertiser if a podcast takes an hour to record or months to report; all that matters is whether it attracts a lot of listeners. New ways of monetizing podcasts are being explored, including a paid-subscription model; apps such as Stitcher Premium offer ad-free listening and bonus episodes.

With PC makers like Asus and HP beginning to design laptops and tablets around ARM chips, ARM itself has decided to emerge from the shadows and unroll its roadmap to challenge Intel through at least 2020, PCWorld writes. From a report, which details ARM's announcement Thursday: ARM's now-public roadmap represents its first processors that are designed for the PC space. ARM, taking aim at the dominant player, claims its chips will equal and potentially even surpass Intel's in single-threaded performance. ARM is unveiling two new chip architectures: Deimos, a 7nm architecture to debut in 2019, and Hercules, a 5nm design for 2020. There's a catch, of course: Many Windows apps aren't natively written for the ARM instruction set, forcing them to pay a performance penalty via emulation. Comparing itself to Intel is a brightly-colored signpost that ARM remains committed to the PC market, however.

ARM-powered PCs like the Asus NovaGo offer game-changing battery life -- but the performance suffers, for two reasons: One, because the computing power of ARM's cores has lagged behind those of the Intel Core family; and two, because any apps that the ARM chip can't process natively have to be emulated. ARM can't do much about Microsoft's development path, but it can increase its own performance. Finally, if you were concerned that ARM PCs will be a flash in the pan, the answer is no, apparently not. Further reading: ARM Reveals First Public CPU Roadmap - Targeting Intel Performance (PC Perspective); and ARM Unveils Client CPU Performance Roadmap Through 2020 - Taking Intel Head On (AnandTech).

Journalists regularly weigh in on what platforms like Facebook and Google are and aren't doing to stop the spread of viral misinformation. But what do Americans at large think? From a report: Nothing good, according to a new survey published by Gallup and the Knight Foundation on Wednesday. The report, based on web surveys from a random sample of 1,203 U.S. adults, found that 85 percent of Americans don't think the platforms are doing enough to stop the spread of fake news. Additionally, 88 percent want tech companies to be transparent about how they surface content, while 79 percent think those companies should be regulated like other media organizations -- a common trope among journalists. That's despite the fact that the majority of people surveyed (54 percent) said social media platforms help keep them informed and that they're concerned about those companies making editorial judgments.