Some Google Docs users are being locked out of their files (updated)

A number of Google Docs users have reported being locked out of their documents today for, according to the message that pops up when they try to access the affected document, violating Google’s terms of service . Users that have tweeted about the issue have said their locked-out pieces were about a range of topics including wildfire crimes, post-socialist eastern Europe and a response to reviewers of an academic journal submission. FYI according to this thread some Google spam system has gone rogue and is randomly blocking some Google Docs https://t.co/A83vuPOapo — SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) October 31, 2017 Tfw your finalizing a piece on E. Europe post-socialist parties in Google Drive and Google removes it because it’s in violation of its ToS?? — Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) October 31, 2017 Working away happily on @googledocs with a response to reviewers. Suddenly: “This document is in violation of Terms of Service”. #WTF pic.twitter.com/o2pjoTTTWo — Leighton Pumpkin

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Some Google Docs users are being locked out of their files (updated)

iOS 11.1 brings new emojis and important security updates

Apple has released iOS 11.1 and it comes with over 70 new emojis, the return of 3D Touch multitasking and a handful of bug fixes. Some of the new emojis include a cursing smiley face, a vampire, a hedgehog, Chinese takeout, a sandwich and a mermaid. Some existing emojis have been tweaked to improve their design as well. Once you update your OS, the new selections will appear in your keyboard, and if someone sends you one of the new emojis, they won’t show up properly on your phone until you’ve updated. As for 3D Touch multitasking, Apple had included it in earlier operating systems, but removed it. However, now you’ll again be able to touch the left side of the display with a little pressure in order to get back to your app carousel. Along with these improvements and additions, iOS 11.1 also comes with a handful of security updates, most notably a fix for a major WPA2 WiFi vulnerability. Prior to this update, attackers could use a key reinstallation attack , aka Krack, to pull out sensitive data and personal information by decrypting network traffic. That vulnerability has been patched for Apple mobile devices with iOS 11.1 and you can check out the full list of included security updates here . The update is available now for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and it’s just in time for the launch of iPhone X . Via: 9to5Mac Source: Apple

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iOS 11.1 brings new emojis and important security updates

What’s new in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

After a little more than two years, Microsoft has finally settled into a rhythm with its new, fast-paced development for Windows 10.

What Microsoft’s marketers are calling the Fall Creators Update (officially version 1709) began arriving on desktop PCs on 10/18 via Windows Update and will soon be available for download at all the usual places.

This is the fourth feature update to Windows 10 in a little over two years. And that pace will continue, with new feature updates (essentially full upgrades) due on a predictable twice-yearly cadence going forward. As with previous feature updates, there are no last-minute surprises in this update. It’s been developed in the open, with dozens of preview releases to members of the Windows Insider Program.

Every Wi-Fi connection now has a prominent option to configure whether it’s part of a public or private network, as shown here. In previous versions, that option was difficult to locate.

Similarly, the venerable Task Manager has several small improvements, including options that allow you to track GPU activity on a per-application basis and more convenient grouping of related processes. This release also incorporates changes designed to improve the experience of running Windows on high-DPI displays; built-in utilities like Registry Editor and Snipping Tool are no longer blurry when moving between multiple displays running at different scaling factors.

The Power Throttling feature makes its debut in this release, offering a simple slider-based option that lets you tune Windows 10 for better battery life or better performance. The built-in Windows 10 apps also include major improvements in this release.

Windows Update has also evolved significantly in the two years since Windows 10’s initial release. When new updates are available, you’ll see an interactive toast notification that doesn’t interrupt whatever you’re doing now. In addition, the Windows Update display now offers detailed information about the status of individual updates, so you don’t have to wonder whether anything’s happening in the background.

The long list of improvements to the security architecture of Windows 10 starts with a momentous change. The horribly insecure SMBv1 protocol is being removed from clean installs of Windows 10. (The SMBv1 components will continue to be included on upgrades where they are already installed.)

The Windows Defender Security Center, which was introduced in an earlier feature update, has two major additions. The first is Exploit Protection, which offers many of the mitigations that were previously part of the separate Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET).

The Fall Creators Update also debuts an anti-ransomware feature called Controlled Folder Access, which is also available through the Windows Defender Security Center, under Virus & Threat Protection Settings. When this feature is enabled, only approved apps can access Windows system files and data folders. (You can customize the list of data folders and whitelist specific apps, using the instructions in this online documentation: Protect important folders with Controlled folder access.)

Finally, there’s Windows Defender Application Guard, a security feature that uses Hyper-V virtualization to create sandboxed browser sessions using Microsoft Edge. For now, this feature is available only in Windows 10 Enterprise edition.

There are many other useful new features and updates as well, so this looks like a must-do free upgrade!

 

h/t zdnet

This Romanian graveyard has a surprisingly delightful sense of…

This Romanian graveyard has a surprisingly delightful sense of humor The Merry Cemetery’s incongruously colorful headstones and witty epitaphs smirk and wink in the face of death. See more photos at TheWeek.com .

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This Romanian graveyard has a surprisingly delightful sense of…

An AI detected colorectal cancer with 86 percent accuracy

We’ve heard of many different uses for AI within the medical field , including for prediction of heart attacks and detection of Alzheimer’s . Now, it looks as though machine intelligence could be applied to early detection of cancer as well. A group of Japanese researchers has figured out a way to use AI to spot colorectal cancer tumors before they become malignant, according to Inverse . The team compiled a database of over 30, 000 images of pre-cancerous and cancerous cells in order to help the AI detect the difference between the two. After the machine learning process had taken place, they fed it an image of a colorectal polyp that had its magnification increased by a factor of 500. The program was able to determine within a second whether that specific polyp was cancerous. Dr. Yuichi Mora from Showa University made a presentation about these results this week at the United European Gastroenterology Conference in Barcelona. He cited the AI’s detection accuracy at 86 percent, which is impressive. This is specifically important for colorectal cancer; it’s highly treatable in early stages, but detection often comes very late, after the cancer cells have spread into the bloodstream. The cancer originates as benign polyps in the rectum and colon that turn into malignant tumors. This AI could help detect colorectal cancer early, ensuring that the cancer is treatable for more people. Source: Inverse , PubMed

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An AI detected colorectal cancer with 86 percent accuracy

Nintendo expects Switch will beat Wii U lifetime sales in a year

Nintendo has announced it’s sold a further 2.93 million Switch consoles over the latest quarter, reaching just shy of 8 million units total. After another strong quarter, the company is now aiming to sell 14 million units by the time the Switch turns one year old — up from 10 million it aimed for previously. It’s also increased its forecast for the full year, from $6.59 billion to $8.44 billion. If Nintendo hits its targets, that would mean the Switch could best its predecessor, the Wii U, in a single year. The older console only reached 13.56 million sales over the entirety of its five-year lifetime — it wasn’t a hit for the games maker. Nintendo racked up $209 million in profit for the quarter, with revenues reaching $1.93 billion. The company managed to sell 22 million game titles in the last half year — a figure that doesn’t account for the recently launched Super Mario Odyssey , which is likely to sell consoles all by itself . According to a Reuters report , the company is now endeavoring to meet customer demand — it’s still not easy to buy a Switch in stores. “We’ve boosted Switch production in order to meet strong demand from our customers as it was difficult for customers to buy the consoles at retail stores, ” said Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima . While Nintendo doesn’t spin out mobile sales, it reported a revenue increases over 420 percent since last year, lead by Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes . It looks like the company has found a whale or two . The holy grail for in-app payment centric games, these players invest a lot of time and money into smartphone games. Animal Crossing will be the company’s next smartphone game property , and will also include in-app purchases to help deck out your digital campsite. Source: Nintendo

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Nintendo expects Switch will beat Wii U lifetime sales in a year

The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads

(video link) One of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world wasn’t contained in a nation or a city. It was a series of trade routes that crisscrossed Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa, and dubbed the “Silk Road” by modern explorers. For centuries, these routes passed through wealthy cities whose vibrant cultures were hybrids of Eastern and Western culture, joined by the spirit of trade and knowledge exchange. The Silk Road civilization thrived because it had no borders. In this episode of Ancient People Did Stuff , we talk about some of the more unusual discoveries that archaeologists have made at excavation sites along the ancient Silk Roads. One of the great medieval cities of the Silk Road was Samarkand, located today in Uzbekistan. Its people were called Sogdians, and their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road during roughly the 4 th through the 8 th centuries. And yet one of the only remaining examples we have of written Sogdian is in an angry letter that an abandoned wife sent to her husband, which was lost in a mailbag and found over a millennium later. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The strangest things archaeologists have found on the ancient Silk Roads

Cluster analysis shows that the golden age of The Simpsons ended in Season 10

It’s generally recognized that The Simpsons drifted from sharp comedy to cosy light entertainment as the years went by, and that a threshold was passed somewhere between seasons eight and eleven. Using data culled from IMDB and a contiguous cluster analysis, Nathan Cunn pinpoints the exact end of The Simpsons’ golden age to the half-hour: episode 11 of season 10 . This particular way of seeing things condemns no particular episode’s sins, merely putting a statistical dividing point between Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken and Sunday Cruddy Sunday . Compare to The Principal and the Pauper , the season 9 episode traditionally identified as the shark-jumper, which in this chart is a controversial blip on the road to all the disengaged meta to come. It’s remarkable that the show managed to go for over nine seasons, and over 200 episodes, with an average rating of 8.2. The latter seasons, in contrast, have an average rating of 6.9, with only three episodes in the latter 400+ episodes achieving a rating higher than the average golden age episode—those episodes being Trilogy of Error, Holidays of Futured Passed, and Barthood. Given that the ratings approximately follow a Gaussian distribution, we expect (and, indeed, observe) that roughly half of the golden age episodes exceeded this mean value. Although The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was, the decline in the show’s latter seasons is more testament to the impossibly high standards set by the earlier seasons than it is an indictment of what the show became. Nonetheless, the author also posits that further declines in standards may be masked after a certain point by survivorship bias : votes coming only from fans whose perception of quality won’t change so long as the quantity remains. On the other hand, internet ratings are not the be-all and end-all of America’s collective critical faculties, either.

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Cluster analysis shows that the golden age of The Simpsons ended in Season 10

After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month’s release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox… The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. “Sometimes, it’s better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development, ” Odvarko said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills ‘Firebug’ Dev Tool