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Forget glossy travel brochures and whizzy online sites; one of the most cost-effective ways tourism chiefs can drive business to their towns or cities is by updating their Wikipedia page. From a report: An experiment by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra $130,000 a year in tourism revenue for a small city, underscoring the power of the free online encyclopaedia. The researchers randomly selected cities across Spain to receive targeted improvements to their Wikipedia pages, adding a few paragraphs of information on their history and local attractions, as well as high-quality photos of the local area. It didn't take an expert, either. Most of the content added was simply translated over from the Spanish Wikipedia into either French, German, Italian or Dutch. Doing so had an immediate and remarkable effect: adding just two paragraphs of text and a single photo to the article increased the number of nights spent in the city by about 9% during the tourist season. In some instances, the increase was even larger. For cities with barely anything on their Wikipedia pages, a minor edit could raise visits by a third.

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Some aspects are 'eerily similar to the peak of the 2000 bubble' warns Bernstein

In a week that saw three tech companies float on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street analyst Bernstein is mulling the potential of a share price crash based on similar indicators prevalent during the .com bust.…

Two dozen award-winning computer scientists, in a rebuke of President Trump's immigration policies, said on Friday that they were endorsing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November's presidential election. From a report: The scientists, including John Hennessy, the executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, are all winners of the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing. In a group interview, four of the scientists said the Trump administration's restrictive immigration rules were a threat to computer research in the United States and could do long-term damage to the tech industry, which for decades has been one of the country's economic engines. "The most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students, but now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsewhere," said one of the scientists who organized the endorsement, David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The Turing winners are the latest members of the scientific community to find their political voice as the election nears. The research journal Scientific American also endorsed Mr. Biden this week, citing, among other criticisms, Mr. Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic and his skepticism of climate change. It was the first time in its 175 years that the publication endorsed a presidential candidate. The Turing winners' endorsement -- also a first for them -- was made against the backdrop of the Trump administration's increasingly antagonistic relationship with the tech industry. Several federal agencies are investigating the business practices of tech's biggest companies, and the Justice Department could bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month.

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Richest boys' club wealth grew by $101.7bn between March and June

Astounding though it is, there are members of the human race about whom it can confidently be said: "Look, they're having a good pandemic."…

NBCUniversal plans to black out more than 11 channels on Roku's streaming platform Saturday morning, escalating a standoff with the company over its refusal to carry a new video app, Peacock. From a report: NBC's Peacock and AT&T's HBO Max have been unable to secure spots on Roku and Amazon.com's Fire TV since launching their streaming services earlier this year. Roku is demanding, among other things, a cut of the advertising inventory on those apps to sell on its own. Comcast's NBC and WarnerMedia, the AT&T division that runs HBO Max, are rejecting that push because they want to make money from ads on their streaming services. In a statement Friday, NBC said Roku's "unreasonable demands ultimately hurt both their consumers and their consumer equipment partners to whom they've promised access to all apps in the marketplace." Roku used similar wording in a statement. "Comcast is removingâthe channels in order to try to force Roku to distribute its new Peacock service on unreasonable terms,," a spokesperson said.

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AT&T is considering offering wireless phone plans partially subsidized by advertising as soon as a year from now, Chief Executive John Stankey said in an interview on Tuesday. From a report: The consideration, which has not been previously disclosed, underscores AT&T's commitment to the advertising business as the U.S. phone carrier reviews its portfolio to identify assets to sell in order to reduce its debt load. AT&T is considering selling its advertising-technology unit Xandr, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters. "I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill," Stankey said. Various companies including Amazon.com, Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint's Boost Mobile have tested advertising supported phone services since the early 2000s but they have not caught on. AT&T is hoping that better advertising targeting could revive the idea.

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Unless the Orange One steps in to save the day. Fancy that!

The US Department of Commerce has threatened to ban new downloads of Chinese-owned social media platforms Tiktok and Wechat from app stores this weekend.…

The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the Open Courts Act -- legislation to overhaul PACER, the federal courts' system for accessing public documents. The proposal would guarantee free public access to judicial documents, ending the current practice of charging 10 cents per page for many documents -- as well as search results. From a report: The bill must still be passed by the full House and the Senate and signed by the president. With Election Day just seven weeks away, the act is unlikely to become law during this session of Congress. Still, the vote is significant because it indicates the breadth of congressional support for tearing down the PACER paywall. The legislation is co-sponsored by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), whose bill we covered in 2018, and a fellow Georgian, Democrat Hank Johnson. Prior to Tuesday's vote of the House Judiciary Committee, the bill received a strong endorsement from Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "It is indefensible that the public must pay fees, and unjustifiably high fees at that, to know what is happening in their own courts," Nadler said.

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All is well. Unless you trust everything you see on the internet

An airliner that appeared to crash into the North Sea earlier this week in fact landed safely. Yet multiple flight tracker websites showed it spiralling into the ocean. Experts have explained to The Register what really happened.…

The US Commerce Department has issued a new order to block people in the US from downloading the popular video-sharing app TikTok as of September 20th, Reuters first reported Friday. From a report: The full order was published by the Department of Commerce on Friday morning. "Any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd," the order reads, "shall be prohibited to the extent permitted under applicable law." It is set to take effect on September 20th. Over the last few weeks, TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has been engaged in talks with US companies like Microsoft and Oracle to create a new company, TikTok Global, that would meet the Trump administration's concerns over user data security.

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Pull on your gold hoodie and Darth Vader breathing apparatus and take a trip with us to 2051

Worried about the impact of Brexit and COVID-19 on your supply chain? Wondering about the operating systems of the future? A reseller has the inside scoop on when you should expect that shipment of 17 "Windows XP" cams, and it's 2051.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday outlined to employees a new set of principles to guide debates and conversations within Workplace, the company's internal social network. Zuckerberg outlined the changes to address "a lot of very tense conversations happening out in the world," according to company spokesman Joe Osborne. The new principles follow a set of similar changes at Google, which is increasing the moderation of its internal message boards, CNBC reported earlier this week. "We deeply value expression and open discussion. What we've heard from our employees is that they want the option to join debates on social and political issues rather than see them unexpectedly in their work feed," Osborne said in a statement. "We're updating our employee policies and work tools to ensure our culture remains respectful and inclusive." Under the new set of principles, Zuckerberg said, Facebook will ensure all employees feel supported at work, especially the company's Black community, by strengthening the company's harassment policy with more protections for underrepresented employees. The company will also be more specific about which parts of Workplace can be used to discuss social and political issues. This change will be so that employees do not have to confront social issues during their day-to-day work. Facebook's new principles also ask that employees communicate with professionalism and continue to debate about the company's work but do so in a respectful manner.

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Namesco says soz, Brit data watchdog investigating

The last vestige of ye olde UK ISP Demon Internet, in the form of the demon.co.uk subdomain, was given its marching orders this year as internet services outfit Namesco told customers to change email address by 29 May or lose it.…

As the wisdom of the crowd decides

Register Debate You’d think debating the benefits of database consolidation for storage would be a relatively straightforward affair. Not when it’s a Register Debate.…

Flushed out

Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows pops up in the strangest of places. Sure, digital signage – been there, done that. But as something to stare at when one should be directing one's undercarriage? That's a new one.…

The kiddiwonks won't even know they're learning

Review The Raspberry Pi's pitch is simple: it's a dirt-cheap, low-stakes computer designed to inspire experimentation in software engineering and electronics. Since it first hit the market in 2013, a flood of third-party accessories popped up to help foster that. Take, for example, the Elecrow CrowPi2.…

So says Check Point, piecing together Telegram-busting malware clues

Infosec outfit Check Point says it has uncovered a six-year Iranian cyber-spying campaign directed at expats and dissidents worldwide.…

In a Wednesday interview, Sony Interactive Entertainment chief Jim Ryan confirmed that the upcoming PlayStation 5 console won't natively support PS1, PS2, or PS3 games. Ars Technica reports: Ryan explained that "PS5-specific engineering" meant the design team was mostly focused on "the simultaneous use of high-speed SSDs and the new DualSense controller." This prevented Sony from delivering compatibility with older consoles, Ryan told Famitsu, even though he made clear that Sony wanted to support PlayStation 4's "100 million players" by developing compatibility with "99%" of PS4 games, since "we thought that they would like to play PS4 titles on the PS5, as well." This announcement doesn't clarify whether PS1 games purchased for use on PS4 will transfer to PS5. It also doesn't mention the existing ability for players to stream older-generation games to PS4 from the PlayStation Now cloud-subscription service or whether we should expect that functionality to seamlessly transfer to PS5 in November. [...] Wednesday's dump of PlayStation 5 news did not go into further detail about additional boosts to PS4 games as played on the upcoming console. Instead, we learned that some major PlayStation 5 games, particularly Horizon: Forbidden West and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, will launch simultaneously on PS5 and PS4. This appears to run somewhat counter to Sony's recent comments about maintaining "generations" instead of supporting an Xbox-style "forward-compatible" plan for its biggest games.

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A charm offensive, or just plain offensive?

Amazon tried to head off negative column inches about its tax-efficient operations in Britain by cherry-picking journalists to brief on its latest financial results days before they hit Companies House.…

Explainability, model testing, experience reports – we've got everything you need next month

Event Remember the days of coming together at a conference and venting about work stuff while learning something that may actually help you move your company's machine learning initiative forward?…