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A South Korean court sentenced Samsung Electronics heir Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, otherwise known as Jay Y. Lee, to two-and-a-half years in prison on a bribery charge on Monday, a ruling which is likely to have ramifications for his leadership of the tech giant as well as South Korea's views toward big business. From a report: With this, Lee will be sidelined for the time being from major decision making at the company as it strives to overtake competitors. He will also be unable to oversee the process of inheritance from his father, who died in October, crucial to keeping control of Samsung. Lee, 52, was convicted of bribing an associate of former president Park Geun-hye and jailed for five years in 2017. He denied wrongdoing, the sentence was reduced and suspended on appeal, and he was released after serving a year.

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Just 16% of cloud spending in Q3 went to local tech services shops, says analyst

European cloud giants are finding themselves teetering on the brink of relevancy in their own backyards as they fail to ward off encroachment by US rivals, or so data from Synergy Research Group (SRG) has indicated.…

Hike, the messaging app backed by SoftBank Group that aimed to compete against WhatsApp in the world's second-most populous country, shut down and vanished from app stores Monday. From a report: The startup valued at $1.4 billion in a 2016 funding round announced its app was going off the air earlier this month without explanation. The app started by billionaire-family scion Kavin Bharti Mittal has failed over several years to displace Facebook's rival app as India's go-to venue for social media and mobile communications. The country remains WhatsApp's largest market globally. Hike, backed also by Chinese WeChat-operator Tencent Holdings, has in recent years ventured into adjacent areas such as no-frills phones and expanded even into spheres such as mobile entertainment. On Jan. 6, Mittal -- son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of India's No. 2 telecom carrier, Bharti Airtel Ltd. -- announced the closure of Hike StickerChat.

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Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history last week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries. From a report: The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google's 5 billion daily search queries but it's a positive sign that users are looking for alternatives. DuckDuckGo's popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension. More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.

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No documentation yet, but big ambitions for UI components tailored for AWS services

Amazon Web Services has released AWS UI, which the cloud services biz describes as "the first step in a larger process of creating a new open source design system."…

GitHub is admitting that a Jewish employee was fired in error and is offering him his job back. The news comes after the company hired an independent law firm to investigate the termination, and found that "significant mistakes were made." The company's head of HR, Carrie Olesen, is also resigning. From a report: "Yesterday evening, the investigation reached the conclusion that significant mistakes were made that are not consistent with our internal practices or the judgement we expect from our leaders," wrote GitHub CEO Nat Friedman in an internal message to employees on January 16th. He said the company would be issuing a public apology on its blog this weekend. In the post, GitHub COO Erica Brescia said: "To the employee we wish to say publicly: we sincerely apologize." The controversial firing came just two days after the employee warned colleagues in Washington DC to stay safe from Nazis -- news first reported by Business Insider. He posted the message on January 6th, the day of the insurrection in Washington DC, as rioters associated with neo-Nazi organizations stormed the Capitol. The warning sparked criticism from a colleague who took offense at the use of the word "Nazi" and prompted GitHub's HR team to reprimand the Jewish employee. Two days later, he was fired.

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Only been out 2 years

Seoul's High Court has sentenced Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-Yong to 30 months behind bars for bribery, concealment of criminal proceeds, and embezzlement.…

That technical issue the department said it had fixed? It didn't exist

Estimates detailing the loss of criminal evidence records by the UK Home Office and the police show the figure leaping from 150,000 to 400,000.…

Also: Departures from Redmond, going big with Surface Hub, and celebrating third place

In brief Build 21292 of Windows 10 arrived for Dev Channel Windows Insiders last week and while there was little of interest, the team was delighted to note that it had continued to work on the x64 emulation in the Arm edition of the operating system.…

Here's some news from CNN for the 30 million tourists visiting Venice, Italy each year: They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city. What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time. And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world.... Before Covid-19 struck, tourists were arriving in often unmanageable numbers, choking the main streets and filling up the waterbuses... Enter the Venice Control Room. On the island of Tronchetto, next to the two-mile bridge separating Venice from the Italian mainland, the Control Room opened in September 2020. A former warehouse that had been abandoned since the 1960s, it's part of a new headquarters for the city's police and government — a self-described "control tower" for the city. The building has offices for the mayor, other dignitaries, and a large CCTV room, with cameras feeding in images from around the city, watched over by the police. So far so normal. But then, across the corridor, there's the Smart Control Room — another bank of screens with images and information coming live from around the lagoon. They're not being monitored for crime, though; they're feeding information to the authorities that will create a profile of the hordes of people visiting Venice. The hope is that gathering the information will not only track footfall now, enabling the authorities to activate turnstiles and start charging for entrance on busy days. Eventually, they hope that the data will help create a more sustainable tourism plan for the future.... At 10am, the arrivals reached a peak of 2,411: most likely the daytrippers. The authorities can see where these new arrivals are from by analyzing their phone data (the information is all aggregated automatically, so no personal details can be gleaned).... The system took three years to build, at a cost of €3m ($3.5m). And although some might baulk at the privacy implications (although no personal data is recorded, you and your provenance is essentially being logged as you move around the city), the authorities are very proud.

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Zoom is great for status update meetings, says big cheese, but as for inspiring a workforce...

To some of us, the work-from-home revolution provides a welcome opportunity to spend time with family members, even though working and studying shoulder-to-shoulder might not be a frictionless process.…

Plus: Google trains 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model, popular software used for job screenings scraps facial-recognition feature

In brief Just days before President Trump is due to leave office, the White House created its National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which will sit under the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

Pat Gelsinger returning to Chipzilla as CEO is another extraordinary stroke of luck for the company

Column Intel has been many things. It has been a struggling startup, surfing the sudden successes and near-death experiences of 1970s Silicon Valley. It's been a relentless powerhouse, ruthlessly exploiting its dominance as personal computing rode Moore's Law to commercial and social revolution. Now it's in danger of seeing its supremacy crumble as rivals grab markets and mindshare with better manufacturing and marketing as Moore's Law itself turns to sand.…

"I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated user generated content on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways..." writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. And then he shares "a bit of history": Back in 1985 when I launched my "Stargate" experiment to broadcast Usenet Netnews over the broadcast television vertical blanking interval of national "Superstation WTBS," I decided that the project would only carry moderated Usenet newsgroups. Even more than 35 years ago, I was concerned about some of the behavior and content already beginning to become common on Usenet... My determination for Stargate to only carry moderated groups triggered cries of "censorship," but I did not feel that responsible moderation equated with censorship — and that is still my view today. And now, all these many years later, it's clear that we've made no real progress in these regards... But as it stands now, Weinstein believes were probably headed to "a combination of steps taken independently by social media firms and future legislative mandates." [M]y extremely strong preference is that we deal with these issues together as firms, organizations, customers, and users — rather than depend on government actions that, if history is any guide, will likely do enormous negative collateral damage. Time is of the essence. Weinstein suggests one possibility: that moderation at scale "may follow the model of AI-based first-level filtering, followed by layers of human moderators." But what's the alternative? Throngs of human moderators? Leaving it all to individual users? Limiting the amount of user-generated content? No moderation whatsoever? Share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. How should user-generated content be moderated?

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Oh good, you fixed it. Now, if you could just put your head on that plate...

Who, Me? Beware the perils of being too helpful as we kick the working week off with a Who, Me? starring both DNS and the need of management to put someone's – anyone's – head on a spike.…

Plus: Watch out for NTFS-corrupting folder, Mimecast hack, and more

In brief Last week ended with news that the venerable infosec mailing list Bugtraq was being shutdown at the end of the month.…

CNN reports: According to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases in the United States, there have been at least 23,754,315 cases of coronavirus in the U.S., and at least 395,785 deaths. On Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 198,218 new cases and 3,286 new deaths... On Friday, the CDC said new more contagious variants of the coronavirus will likely accelerate the spread of the virus and that means the US must double down on efforts to protect people. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates the country's entire population is 330,827,996 people. These figures suggest 7.18% of the American population has now experienced the disease — more than 1 out of every 14 Americans.

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CNN reports: A 70-foot rocket, riding beneath the wing of a retrofitted Boeing 747 aircraft, detached from the plane and fired itself into Earth's orbit on Sunday — marking the first successful launch for the California-based rocket startup Virgin Orbit. Virgin Orbit's 747, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, took off from California around 10:30 am PT with the rocket, called LauncherOne, nestled beneath the plane's left wing. The aircraft flew out over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was released, freeing LauncherOne and allowing it to power up its rocket motor and propel itself to more than 17,000 miles per hour, fast enough to begin orbiting the Earth... The rocket flew a group of tiny satellites on behalf of NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites, or ELaNa, program, which allows high school and college students to design and assemble small satellites that NASA then pays to launch into space... About four hours after takeoff on Saturday, Virgin Orbit confirmed in a tweet that all the satellites were "successfully deployed into our target orbit." The successful mission makes Virgin Orbit only the third so-called "New Space" company — startups hoping to overhaul the traditional industry with innovative technologies — to reach orbit, after SpaceX and Rocket Lab. The success also paves the way for Virgin Orbit to begin launching satellites for a host of customers that it already has lined up, including NASA, the military and private-sector companies that use satellites for commercial purposes. Virgin Orbit shared a 57-second video on Twitter showing the moment their rocket was released and then launched, saying the event went exactly as planned. "To say we're thrilled would be a massive understatement, but 240 characters couldn't do it justice anyway."

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology. Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon following inquiries from The Washington Post and other media outlets. Third-party merchants that attempt to evade Amazon's systems to list QAnon goods may find their selling privileges revoked, Fan added.

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CNN reports: Twitter on Sunday temporarily suspended the account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeated violations of new rules the social media platform put in place following the violent U.S. Capitol riot earlier this month, a company spokesperson told CNN. "The account referenced has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy," the spokesperson said. As a result, the congresswoman will be locked out of her account for 12 hours. CNN also notes that Greene is a QAnon supporter, and that during her 12-hour suspension she'd complained that conservative Americans "shouldn't have to fear being cancelled by American corporations where they work, do business, and use services. "They shouldn't be scared into submission by Socialists who want to end their way of life."

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