Google's hyperlocal news service called Bulletin is shutting down in November. Android Police reports: The idea behind bulletin was that users could post news from their neighborhood, allowing others in the same area to hear stories that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle. The service also relied on AMP to load pages quickly. Google started with just a few cities, but Bulletin later expanded to all of the U.S. and Canada. Bulletin never gained traction, probably because Google failed to promote it in any way, and now it's shutting down.

Google says Bulletin will close for good on November 22nd, at which time it will delete all remaining Bulletin content. If you used Bulletin and would like to save your stories, Google has added an export option. Google suggests Bulletin users can start posting on the Blogger platform, but that naturally lacks all the location-aware features of Bulletin.

NPR explains why a man "applied to borrow a 360-degree camera through Google's Street View camera loan program." Kanhema, who works as a product manager in Silicon Valley and is a freelance photographer in his spare time, volunteered to carry Google's Street View gear to map what amounted to 2,000 miles of his home country. The Berkeley, California, resident has filled in the map of other areas in Africa and Canada as well.... Google says it has "largely mapped" only 87 of nearly 200 countries on the platform, which launched in 2007. Many other countries on the planet have at least some Street View coverage, Google says. But there are sizable gaps in regions like Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia, while areas such as the U.S. and Europe are mostly filled in.

While users can see almost every street corner in places such as Paris or New York, they can't do the same for Algiers, Algeria, or Kabul, Afghanistan. "We start in the large metropolitan areas where we know we have users, where it's easy for us to drive and we can execute quickly," says Stafford Marquardt, a product manager for Street View. He says the team is working to expand the service's reach. To do that, Google often relies on volunteers who can either borrow the company's camera equipment or take photos using their own. Most images on Street View are collected by drivers, and most of these drivers are employed by third parties that work with Google. But when it comes to the places Google hasn't prioritized, people like Kanhema can fill in the gaps...

All this is a lot of work, but for Kanhema, it's a hobby. Google doesn't pay him or the other volunteers -- whom the company calls "contributors" -- for the content they upload. Kanhema, for example, spent around $5,000 of his own money to travel across Zimbabwe for the project. "What motivates me is just being that constant nudge on these companies and this system to pay attention to those parts of the world," he says.

Craig Dalton, an assistant professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, says Google's business model plays a big role in which places are added to Street View first. "Google Maps is not a public service. Google Maps is a product from a company, and things are included and excluded based on the company's needs," Dalton says. "Sometimes that means that things are excluded that have a lot of merit but that don't fit the business plan..." Although the company's end goal is to make a global street map, Kanhema is unsure when places like his hometown would be visible on the platform without volunteered images. "There's not always going to be a business case to tell the story of how people live across the world," he says.
The volunteer contributors to Street View can sometimes receive funding from tourism boards or travel agencies, according to the article, but Street View's product manager adds that Google currently has no plans to compensate its volunteers. He says instead that Google compensates its volunteer contributors "in a lot of other ways" by offering "a platform to host gigabytes and terabytes of imagery and publish it to the entire world, absolutely for free."

Remember concerns about possible "sonic attacks" in Cuba? Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey shares an update: In the wake of the health problems experienced over the past three years by US and Canadian staff in Havana, Cuba embassies, Global Affairs Canada commissioned a clinical study by a team of multidisciplinary researchers.

Now, the working hypothesis is that the cause could instead be neurotoxic agents used in pesticide fumigation.

The BBC has more coverage on this, saying it may have been merely mosquito gas.
"The researchers found that since 2016, Cuba launched an aggressive campaign against mosquitoes to stop the spread of the Zika virus," reports the CBC: The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside diplomatic residences -- sometimes five times more frequently than usual. Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according to embassy records...

The researchers are now looking to collaborate with Cuban officials to determine whether any Cubans suffered similar brain injuries...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Two individuals were arrested this week in connection with a fraud scheme that manipulated thousands of victims into paying for invented tech services that they didn't need. The Department of Justice announced that the two individuals Romana Leyva, 35, and Ariful Haque, 33, were arrested Wednesday for their alleged participation in the fraud scheme, which involved convincing victims -- many of whom were elderly -- in both the U.S. and Canada that they needed tech and virus protection services that were neither real nor required.

Between March 2015 and December 2018, both Ariful and Haque were allegedly involved with the fraud ring responsible for the crimes. According to an unsealed indictment, the scheme involved targeting victims with pop-up windows -- sometimes under the guise of being a legitimate tech company -- that claimed their computer had been infected with a virus and directed them to call a number for technical support. In some cases, the message threatened that if the individual closed the window or shut down their computer, it would either bork their device or result in a "complete data loss." Once users contacted the number, they were connected with a fake technician. To convince victims to hand over money, after receiving "permission" from the victim, the fraud ring allegedly remotely accessed the individual's computer, loaded an anti-virus tool that's available for free online, and informed the individual that their computer was infected with a virus (which, again, was a lie). The DOJ says the scheme was able to successfully scam "at least" 7,500 victims out of a combined $10 million.

Both of the individuals arrested are charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Each count carries a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment.

After successfully predicting laboratory earthquakes, a team of geophysicists has applied a machine learning algorithm to quakes in the Pacific Northwest. From a report: In May of last year, after a 13-month slumber, the ground beneath Washington's Puget Sound rumbled to life. The quake began more than 20 miles below the Olympic mountains and, over the course of a few weeks, drifted northwest, reaching Canada's Vancouver Island. It then briefly reversed course, migrating back across the U.S. border before going silent again. All told, the monthlong earthquake likely released enough energy to register as a magnitude 6. By the time it was done, the southern tip of Vancouver Island had been thrust a centimeter or so closer to the Pacific Ocean. Because the quake was so spread out in time and space, however, it's likely that no one felt it. These kinds of phantom earthquakes, which occur deeper underground than conventional, fast earthquakes, are known as "slow slips." They occur roughly once a year in the Pacific Northwest, along a stretch of fault where the Juan de Fuca plate is slowly wedging itself beneath the North American plate.

More than a dozen slow slips have been detected by the region's sprawling network of seismic stations since 2003. And for the past year and a half, these events have been the focus of a new effort at earthquake prediction by the geophysicist Paul Johnson. Johnson's team is among a handful of groups that are using machine learning to try to demystify earthquake physics and tease out the warning signs of impending quakes. Two years ago, using pattern-finding algorithms similar to those behind recent advances in image and speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence, he and his collaborators successfully predicted temblors in a model laboratory system -- a feat that has since been duplicated by researchers in Europe. Now, in a paper posted this week on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org, Johnson and his team report that they've tested their algorithm on slow slip quakes in the Pacific Northwest. The paper has yet to undergo peer review, but outside experts say the results are tantalizing. According to Johnson, they indicate that the algorithm can predict the start of a slow slip earthquake to "within a few days -- and possibly better."

The US spends more per capita on medication than anywhere else in the world. It's a key electoral issue. From a report on Financial Times (paywalled): All over the world, drugmakers are granted time-limited monopolies -- in the form of patents -- to encourage innovation. But America is one of the only countries that does not combine this carrot with the stick of price controls. The US government's refusal to negotiate prices has contributed to spiralling healthcare costs which, said billionaire investor Warren Buffett last year, act "as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." Medical bills are the primary reason why Americans go bankrupt. Employers foot much of the bill for the majority of health-insurance plans for working-age adults, creating a huge cost for business.

In February, Congress called in executives from seven of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and asked them: why do drugs here cost so much? The drugmakers' answer is that America is carrying the cost of research and development for the rest of the world. They argue that if Americans stopped paying such high prices for drugs, investment in innovative treatments would fall. President Trump agrees with this argument, in line with his "America first" narrative, which sees other countries as guilty of freeloading. For the patients on the trip, the notion is galling: insulin was discovered 100 years ago, by scientists in Canada who sold the patent to the University of Toronto for just $1. The medication has been improved since then but there seems to have been no major innovation to justify tripling the list price for insulin, as happened in the US between 2002 and 2013.

Slowly, steadily and almost imperceptibly, North America's bird population is dwindling. From a report: The sparrows and finches that visit backyard feeders number fewer each year. The flutelike song of the western meadowlark -- the official bird of six U.S. states -- is growing more rare. The continent has lost nearly 3 billion birds representing hundreds of species over the past five decades, in an enormous loss that signals an "overlooked biodiversity crisis," according to a study from top ornithologists and government agencies. This is not an extinction crisis -- yet. It is a more insidious decline in abundance as humans dramatically alter the landscape: There are 29 percent fewer birds in the United States and Canada today than in 1970, the study concludes.

Grassland species have been hardest hit, probably because of agricultural intensification that has engulfed habitats and spread pesticides that kill the insects many birds eat. But the victims include warblers, thrushes, swallows and other familiar birds. "That's really what was so staggering about this," said lead author Ken Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy. "The generalist, adaptable, so-called common species were not compensating for the losses, and in fact they were experiencing losses themselves. This major loss was pervasive across all the bird groups."

The BBC reports that Kickstarter has been accused of "union-busting" after firing three employees: Taylor Moore, the company's head of comedy and podcasts, tweeted that he and another employee were fired on Thursday, while tech and design lead Clarissa Redwine was fired last week. All three were heavily involved in the formation of a Kickstarter union this year, Mr Moore added.

Kickstarter confirmed the employees were fired, but denied that it was because of their union activity.

Mr Moore tweeted that he had worked at the company for six years. He said that when Kickstarter fired him they "offered me no real reasons, but one month's severance for signing an NDA" -- a non-disclosure agreement. "I will not be signing it... The union busting campaign that Kickstarter management is engaging in is illegal and wrong," he added.

The remains of a man who went missing two decades ago in Florida have been found in a submerged car visible on Google Maps. The BBC reports: William Moldt, 40, was reported missing from Lantana, Florida, on November 7, 1997. He failed to return home from a night out at a club when he was 40 years old. A missing person investigation was launched by police but the case went cold. On August 28 this year -- 22 years on -- police were called to reports of a car found in a pond in Moon Bay Circle, Wellington.

When the vehicle was pulled from the water, skeletal remains were found inside. One week later the remains were positively identified as belonging to Mr Moldt. A report by the Charley Project, an online database of cold cases in the U.S., said "a property surveyor saw the car while looking at Google Earth." "Amazingly, a vehicle had plainly [been] visible on a Google Earth satellite photo of the area since 2007, but apparently no-one had noticed it until 2019," according to the report. What appears to be a silver car submerged in the pond can still be viewed on Google Maps.

GameStop will close as many 200 stores before the end of 2019 following another quarter of sharply declining sales and a $32 million loss, the company stated. From a report: In a statement yesterday, the company's chief financial officer attributed the drop in sales to trends "consistent with what we have historically observed towards the end of a hardware cycle." That said, it's yet another quarter with a double-digit decline, down 14.3 percent over the same one last year. For the quarter ending March 2019, GameStop reported a 13.3 sales decline and the company's stock price plunged 40 percent in one day, recovering only slightly since then. James Bell, GameStop's chief financial officer, told investors that the closures will affect between 180 and 200 "underperforming" stores between now and the end of 2019. The company's most recent annual report listed 5,830 locations worldwide, with more than 4,000 of them in the United States and Canada. In yesterday's earnings call, Bell said that the vast majority -- 95 percent -- of stores were profitable. But more closures, in larger numbers than today's news, are expected over the next one to two years, he added.

New video analytics systems can "identify people, suspicious behavior and guns" in real-time, and the technology is being used by Fortune 500 companies, stadiums, retailers, and police departments, reports the Los Angeles Times.

But schools are "among the most enthusiastic adopters," they note, citing an interview with Paul Hildreth, the "emergency operations coordinator" at an Atlanta school district A year after an expelled student killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Broward County installed cameras from Avigilon of Canada throughout the district in February. Hildreth's Atlanta district will spend $16.5 million to put the cameras in its roughly 100 buildings in coming years. In Greeley, Colo., the school district has used Avigilon cameras for about five years, and the technology has advanced rapidly, said John Tait, security manager for Weld County School District 6...

Schools are the largest market for video surveillance systems in the U.S., estimated at $450 million in 2018, according to IHS Markit, a London data and information services company. The overall market for real-time video analytics was estimated at $3.2 billion worldwide in 2018 -- and it's expected to grow to $9 billion by 2023, according to one estimate... Shannon Flounnory, executive director for safety and security for Fulton County Schools, said no privacy concerns have been heard there. "The events of Parkland kind of changed the game," he said. "We have not had any arguments or any pushback right now...."

One company, Athena Security, has cameras that spot when someone has a weapon. And in a bid to help retailers, it recently expanded its capabilities to help identify big spenders when they visit a store... Both ZeroEyes and Athena Security in Austin, Texas, say their systems can detect weapons with more than 90% accuracy, but acknowledge their products haven't been tested in a real-life scenario. And both systems are unable to detect weapons if they're covered -- a limitation the companies say they are working to overcome.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Own a rifle? Got a scope to go with it? The government might soon know who you are, where you live and how to reach you. That's because Apple and Google have been ordered by the U.S. government to hand over names, phone numbers and other identifying data of at least 10,000 users of a single gun scope app, Forbes has discovered. It's an unprecedented move: never before has a case been disclosed in which American investigators demanded personal data of users of a single app from Apple and Google. And never has an order been made public where the feds have asked the Silicon Valley giants for info on so many thousands of people in one go.

According to a court order filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on 5 September, investigators want information on users of Obsidian 4, a tool used to control rifle scopes made by night vision specialist American Technologies Network Corp. The app allows gun owners to get a live stream, take video and calibrate their gun scope from an Android or iPhone device. According to the Google Play page for Obsidian 4, it has more than 10,000 downloads. Apple doesn't provide download numbers, so it's unclear how many iPhone owners have been swept up in this latest government data grab. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department is seeking information as part of a broad investigation into possible breaches of weapons export regulations. It's looking into illegal exports of ATN's scope, though the company itself isn't under investigation, according to the order. As part of that, investigators are looking for a quick way to find out where the app is in use, as that will likely indicate where the hardware has been shipped. ICE has repeatedly intercepted illegal shipments of the scope, which is controlled under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), according to the government court filing. They included shipments to Canada, the Netherlands and Hong Kong where the necessary licenses hadn't been obtained. The two companies must hand over names, telephone numbers and IP addresses of anyone who downloaded the scope app from August 1, 2017, to the current date. The government also wants to know when users were operating the app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: In spring 2018, Facebook announced that it was launching its own version of Tinder -- but designed for people who are interested in meaningful relationships. Now, after rolling out in 19 countries including Colombia, Thailand, and Canada, Facebook's dating service is available in the United States. Instead of the rapid-fire swiping found in many dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, Facebook Dating users have to tap into each profile before they can "pass" on someone or express interest by sending them a message (there is no mutual interest necessary for someone to start a conversation, which could cause problems for women who already face harassment and unsolicited messages on dating apps). The company's algorithm selects matches for you based on location -- which you verify using location services on your phone -- along with your stated preference and interests that you've indicated on Facebook. The service is entirely opt-in, for people ages 18 and over, and you won't ever be matched with your friends.

A key element of helping people get to know potential matches is Instagram. For the U.S. launch, Facebook Dating will enable you to include photos from your Instagram feed inside your dating profile, and by the end of the year, users will be able to directly add Instagram stories to Dating as well, allowing potential future matches and people you're already conversing with to be able to get a sense of the slightly less filtered version of your life. "We think it's incredibly important to go where people are and allow them to bring all of these different networks and types of content to help them get the things they're trying to do done," says Fidji Simo, a vice president at Facebook and head of the Facebook app. Even though Dating is integrated directly into Facebook's app, the company has worked to create an entirely separate experience, including a separate profile and separate message thread.

"Facebook also says that none of your activity on Dating will be used for advertising, based on people's feedback about privacy (something Facebook has historically failed to provide)," reports Fast Company. "Facebook does put that data to use though: Information the company collects on you will be used to inform future matches that it shows you."

Facebook could soon start hiding the Like counter on News Feed posts to protect users from envy and dissuade them from self-censorship. From a report: Instagram is already testing this in 7 countries including Canada and Brazil, showing a post's audience just a few names of mutual friends who've Liked it instead of the total number. The idea is to prevent users from destructively comparing themselves to others and potentially fleeing if their posts don't get as many Likes. It could also stop users from deleting posts they think aren't getting enough Likes or not sharing in the first place. Reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong spotted Facebook prototyping the hidden Like counts in its Android app. When we asked Facebook, the company confirmed to TechCrunch that it's considering testing removal of Like counts. However it's not live for users yet.

A federal grand jury yesterday indicted eight people who allegedly ran two pirate streaming services that "offered more television programs and movies than legitimate streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime Video," the Department of Justice said. From a report: Jetflicks, which operated from 2007 to 2017, obtained its video from torrent sites and Usenet sites "using automated programs and databases such as SickRage, Sick Beard, SABnzbd, and TheTVDB," the indictment said. Jetflicks made "those episodes available on servers in the United States and Canada to Jetflicks subscribers for streaming and/or downloading," the indictment said. Torrent sites that Jetflicks operators relied on allegedly included the Pirate Bay, RARBG, and Torrentz.

With this method, defendants often "provid[ed] episodes to subscribers the day after the shows originally aired on television," a DOJ announcement yesterday said. Jetflicks charged subscription fees as low as $9.99 per month, letting subscribers "watch an unlimited number of commercial-free television programs," the indictment said. The service claimed to have more than 37,000 subscribers.

One of the eight defendants, 36-year-old Darryl Julius Polo, left Jetflicks to create another site called iStreamItAll, which was still online today. iStreamItAll likely won't stay online long, though, as the indictment said the site's domain names are subject to forfeiture. The Jetflicks domain names were also subject to forfeiture orders, and the website is offline. Jetflicks "claimed to have more than 183,200 different television episodes," while iStreamItAll "at one point claimed to have 115,849 different television episodes and 10,511 individual movies," the DOJ said. iStreamItAll "publicly asserted that it had more content than Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and Amazon Prime," the DOJ said. (Netflix offered 4,010 movies and 1,569 TV shows as of 2018, according to Netflix search engine Fixable.)

Uber isn't letting tech workers join the ride, at least for now. From a report: The ride-hailing giant canceled scheduled on-site interviews for tech roles last week, and job applicants have been told positions are being put on hold due to a hiring freeze in engineering teams in the U.S. and Canada, according to multiple people who received the communications. In emails sent to job interviewees, Uber recruiters explained "there have been some changes" and the opportunity has been "put on hold for now," according to emails reviewed by Yahoo Finance. The hiring freeze comes after 400 layoffs in its marketing department earlier this month, which raised concerns and fears company-wide. During a recent all-hands meeting, a question about potential layoffs in the engineering department was also raised, but executives didn't provide any timelines. The number of hiring posts for software engineer roles at Uber peaked in March, according to data tracking firm Thinknum. The move highlights the challenges that Uber faces as it scrambles to prove to Wall Street, since its IPO in May, that it's on the right track to achieve profitability. The company, with 100 million monthly active users, reported $5.23 billion in losses for the second quarter last week.

A new study published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging found that blood pressure can be measured accurately by taking a quick video selfie. An anonymous reader quotes this announcement from the University of Toronto: Kang Lee, a professor of applied psychology and human development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Canada Research Chair in developmental neuroscience, was the lead author of the study... Using a technology co-discovered by Lee and his postdoctoral researcher Paul Zheng called transdermal optical imaging, researchers measured the blood pressure of 1,328 Canadian and Chinese adults by capturing two-minute videos of their faces on an iPhone. Results were compared to standard devices used to measure blood pressure. The researchers found they were able to measure three types of blood pressure with 95 to 96 per cent accuracy.
Lee co-founded a company to turn their technology into a smartphone app (named Anura) that reports stress-level measurements and resting heart rate from a 30-second video of your face -- with plans to release a new version also returning blood pressure results sometime this fall in China.

The university also notes that the researchers now hope to extend their technology so it can measure blood-gluclose levels and cholesterol.

Verizon is refusing to waive or reduce $880 of charges accidentally ran up from someone who borrowed a mobile hotspot from a small library. "The library has an 'unlimited' data plan for the hotspots, but Verizon says it has to pay the $880 to cover less than half a gigabyte of data usage that happened across the border with Canada," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Tully Free Library in Tully, New York, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, lends out three Verizon hotspots to a rural population that has limited Internet access. The library started the hotspot-lending program with a grant from the Central New York Library Resources Council, which paid the bill for two years. Crucially, the service plan with Verizon blocked international roaming so that library borrowers wouldn't rack up unintentional charges if they happened to cross the Canadian border. But when the grant ran out, Tully Free Library had to get a new contract and service plan, and the organization began paying the bill itself. The new plan seemed to be identical to the old one, but it enabled international roaming. "They never said to us, 'Do you want international roaming blocked?'" Tully Free Library Director Annabeth Hayes told Ars. "That wasn't something that occurred to me because it was blocked before." The person who borrowed the hotspot used it while driving through Canada for a few hours to take his brother to the airport. "He was only over the border for about four hours and he said he wasn't even using the hotspot," Hayes said. "It was just on in the car and apparently it was pinging a tower so that tower was incurring all these fees."

The bill from Verizon included an $880.30 charge for about 440MB of international data. "I ended up contacting their executive communications department, and the person there said she had to contact their legal team because our contract was under the government/educational department," Hayes said. "She contacted the legal team and they went back and forth and finally decided that no, we couldn't have our fee waived."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: U.S.-based Chase Bank is forgiving all outstanding debt owed by users of its two Canadian credit cards: the Amazon.ca Rewards Visa and the Marriott Rewards Premier Visa. The bank retired both cards last year and said it's wiping out cardholders' debt to complete its exit from the Canadian credit card market. After 13 years in the Canadian market, Chase decided to fold its two Visa cards in March 2018.

The bank -- which is part of global financial services firm JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- wouldn't say how many Canadians had signed up for the cards or how much debt was outstanding. Credit card rewards expert Patrick Sojka said Chase likely concluded that debt forgiveness was ultimately cheaper than continuing to collect credit card payments in Canada. But he's stumped as to why the bank didn't instead opt to sell the debt to a third-party debt collector, which would allow Chase to recoup some cash. Chase spokesperson Maria Martinez said in an email to CBC News: "Ultimately, we felt it was a better decision for all parties, particularly our customers."

European climate researchers said Monday that last month was the hottest July -- and thus the hottest month -- ever recorded (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), slightly eclipsing the previous record-holder, July 2016. "While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally, by a very small margin," Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. The New York Times reports: The service, part of an intergovernmental organization supported by European countries, said the global average temperature last month was about 0.07 degree Fahrenheit (0.04 Celsius) hotter than July 2016. The researchers noted that their finding was based on analysis of only one of several data sets compiled by agencies around the world. The climate service noted some regional temperature differences in July. Western Europe was above average, in part because of a heat wave that occurred during the last week of the month and set temperature records in Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere. A rapid analysis released last week found that climate change made the heat wave more likely. "The highest above-average conditions were recorded across Alaska, Greenland and large swathes of Siberia," the report adds. "Large parts of Africa and Australia were warmer than normal, as was much of Central Asia. Cooler than average temperatures prevailed in Eastern Europe, much of Asia, the Northern Plains and Pacific Northwest of the United States and over large parts of Western Canada."