Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

But yesterday the official amount was only ¼ of our actual rain…… Our Rain Bucket shows that about 2 inches fell here in South Pasadena yesterday……. The official rain total is .53 of an inch……

EXCLUSIVE: GOOGLE EMPLOYEES DEBATED BURYING CONSERVATIVE MEDIA IN SEARCH By Peter Hasson | Reporter 310:19 PM 11/29/2018 | INVESTIGATIVE GROUP Google employees debated whether to bury The Daily Caller and other conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years,” one engineer wrote in a thread that included a Google vice president Google employees similarly sought to manipulate search results to combat Trump’s travel ban Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal. The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal. Trump’s election in 2016  shocked many Google emplo...

Twitter tumbles on fear of conservative backlash Noel Randewich November 29, 2018 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of Twitter Inc tumbled 6 percent on Thursday after reports that Fox News had not tweeted for three weeks sparked fears of a backlash by conservatives protesting a perceived liberal bias by the company. Twenty-First Century Fox Inc’s Fox News has not tweeted to its 18.3 million followers since Nov. 8, an apparent boycott of the social network, Politico reported on Wednesday. It stopped tweeting after activists used Twitter to post the home address of prominent news host Tucker Carlson, media news site Mediaite reported on Nov. 9. Demonstrators targeted Carlson’s home in Washington with a protest and shouted threats, he told the Washington Post. Fox News and Twitter declined to comment. Facebook and other social media networks are facing calls for increased regulation and criticism of their handling of user data and the role their platforms have pla...

DOJ unseals charges in alleged massive online ad fraud By JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 11/27/18 06:55 PM EST      The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday unsealed charges against eight individuals in an alleged widespread digital advertising fraud that reportedly used botnets to give the appearance of billions of humans looking at online ads. Aleksandr Zhukov, Boris Timokhin, Mikhail Andreev, Denis Avdeev, Dmitry Novikov, Sergey Ovsyannikov, Aleksandr Isaev and Yevgeniy Timchenko were charged with crimes including wire fraud, money laundering, computer intrusion and aggravated identity theft, according to a department release. The department also announced that a federal court unsealed seizure warrants allowing the FBI to take over 31 domains as well as seize data from 89 servers involved in the botnets, or networks of infected internet-connected devices that can be utilized by hackers. “As alleged in court filings, the defendants in this case used sophis...

Fearful of bias, Google blocks gender-based pronouns from new AI tool By Paresh Dave November 26, 2018 10:06 PM SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc’s Google in May introduced a slick feature for Gmail that automatically completes sentences for users as they type. Tap out “I love” and Gmail might propose “you” or “it.” But users are out of luck if the object of their affection is “him” or “her.” Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its “Smart Compose” technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users, product leaders revealed to Reuters in interviews. Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.” Consumers have become accustomed to embarrassing gaffes from a...

Google accused of manipulation to track users November 27, 2018 Seven European consumer groups filed complaints against Google with national regulators Tuesday, accusing the internet giant of covertly tracking users' movements in violation of an EU regulation on data protection. The complaints cited a study by the Norwegian Consumer Council that concluded the Internet giant used "deceptive design and misleading information, which results in users accepting to be constantly tracked." Council official Gro Mette Moen charged that "Google uses extremely detailed and comprehensive personal data without an appropriate judicial basis, and the data is acquired by means of manipulative techniques." Complaints against Google were filed in the Czech Republic, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia and Sweden. They are based on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect in May. Google is accused of tracking...

Lawmakers Post Photo of Empty Seat After Zuckerberg Fails to Turn Up          By Adveith Nair November 27 2018, 9:03 AM (Bloomberg) -- Lawmakers from Britain and other nations tore into a Facebook Inc. executive after the company’s decision not to send founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify at a  hearing . The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport  tweeted  an image of an empty chair captioned “Where is Mark Zuckerberg?,” after Facebook sent its vice president of policy solutions Richard Allan instead of its top executive. While Zuckerberg answered questions during U.S. congressional hearings in April, he has repeatedly refused to appear before U.K. lawmakers. The social network’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, was sent to answer questions in April. ©2018 Bloomberg L.P. https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/zuckerberg-no-show-prompts-lawmakers-to-post-photo-of-empty-seat

Jane Wong explains why she uncovers hidden app features that tech giants like Facebook want to keep secret The UMass-Dartmouth undergrad wants to understand what tech companies are doing with user data PUBLISHED: Monday, 26 November, 2018, 12:25pm Jane Manchun Wong is an introvert who fades into a crowd. But in the geeky world of app reverse-engineering (yes, there’s such a thing), the 23-year-old Hong Kong-born Ivy Leaguer is a rock star. The computer science major at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has made a name for herself in tech circles by uncovering hidden app features that the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat want to keep under wraps. Now on a gap year back home, we met at the Strokes, an indoor mini-golf club in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay shopping district. I had hoped that doing an activity together would help break the ice, and because watching her spend hours analysing source code did not seem particularly exciting. Besides, I was good at...

Twitter Permanently Bans Feminist For Writing That ‘Men Aren’t Women’ Months after Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey said his platform didn’t take sides, his platform is not only taking sides but becoming more progressive and Orwellian than ever. By Nicole Russell NOVEMBER 25, 2018 Despite its CEO telling Congress the contrary a few months ago, Twitter has amped up its pattern of politically one-sided application of its terms of service. Last week, the social media giant permanently banned Meghan Murphy, a writer based in British Columbia, for critiquing transgender ideology online. The platform repeatedly suspended her account for this then ultimately banned her last week, saying such behavior “violated [its] rules against hateful conduct.” Here’s a sampling of tweets Twitter required Murphy to delete as “objectionable” before allowing her access back to her account: At Feminist Current, Murphy writes about her ban: What is insane to me, though, is that while Twitter...

Digital ad duopoly under threat as pressure mounts on Facebook and Google Facebook and Google take around 55pc of every pound spent on digital advertising in the UK By Hannah Boland 24 NOVEMBER 2018 • 9:16AM Facebook and Google's duopoly in the digital advertising market could be under threat, after a number of leading British brands said they were reviewing their relationships with the companies amid mounting pressure to cut ties. A number of high street names, such as Marks & Spencer and Unilever, are thought to be constantly scrutinising where they spend their marketing budget, although no companies said they had pulled their adverts from the sites. MPs had on Thursday urged brands to re-allocate cash away from Facebook and Google, drawing advertising away from the sites, until those companies do more to stamp out terrorist activity. Currently, in the UK, Google and Facebook take around 55pc of every pound spent on digital advertising. "The int...

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL TO STAGE WORLDWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST GOOGLE’S “DYSTOPIAN” CENSORED SEARCH FOR CHINA By Ryan Gallagher November 26 2018, 4:01 p.m. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL HAS announced a new protest campaign calling on Google to cancel its controversial plan to launch a censored search engine in China. The human rights group on Monday launched a petition against the search engine and said that on Tuesday, it will stage demonstrations outside Google offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Spain. Google’s plan for China would “irreparably damage internet users’ trust in the tech company,” Amnesty said in statement, and “would set a dangerous precedent for tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments.” As The Intercept first reported in August, Google secretly developed the censored search engine as part of a project code-named Dragonfly. It was designed to blacklist words and phrases such as...

Volvo's self-driving trucks will haul limestone from a mine It's Volvo's first end-to-end autonomous transport offering. Jon Fingas November 26, 2018 Sometimes, it's the least glamorous uses of self-driving tech that can be the most important. Volvo has struck a deal that will have six of its autonomous trucks carrying limestone from a Brønnøy Kalk mine in Norway to a port roughly 3 miles away. That might not sound exciting on the surface, but the company isn't just selling the trucks and moving on. This is Volvo Trucks' very first end-to-end autonomous offering -- the mining company is paying for every metric tonne Volvo delivers. In other words, Volvo has a strong incentive to make sure its driverless tech works as promised, as it won't be paid otherwise. Volvo and Brønnøy Kalk have already been testing their solution and expect it to be in full service before the end of 2019. This isn't the most complicated operation. The Volvo t...

U.S. top court leans towards allowing Apple App Store antitrust suit       By Andrew Chung November 26, 2018 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared open to letting a lawsuit proceed against Apple Inc that accused it of breaking federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for iPhone software applications and causing consumers to overpay. The nine justices heard an hour of arguments in an appeal by the Cupertino, California-based technology company of a lower court's decision to revive the proposed class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in California in 2011 by a group of iPhone users seeking monetary damages. The lawsuit said Apple violated federal antitrust laws by requiring apps to be sold through the company's App Store and then taking a 30 percent commission from the purchases. The case may hinge on how the justices apply one of the court's past decisions to the claims against Apple. That 1977 pr...

Google Reveals Plans to Monitor Our Moods, Our Movements, and Our Children's Behavior at Home By PHIL BAKER November 24, 2018 Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up in privacy to Google, Facebook, and others thus far is minuscule compared to what is coming if these companies get their way. These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our home in order to learn more about us and better target us with advertising. It goes much further than the current Google Home speaker that’s promoted to answer our questions and provide useful information, and the Google-owned Nest thermostat that measures environmental conditions in our home. What the patents describe are sensors and cameras mounted in every room to follow us and analyze what we’r...

Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal Carole Cadwalladr Sat 24 Nov 2018 18.50 EST Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions. The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg. Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, ...

Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020 ·         China capital plans ‘social credit’ system by end of 2020 ·         Citizens with poor scores will be ‘unable to move’ a step November 21, 2018, 12:48 AM PST China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident. The capital city will pool data from several departments to reward and punish some 22 million citizens based on their actions and reputations by the end of 2020, according to a plan posted on the Beijing municipal government’s website on Monday. Those with better so-called social credit will get “green channel” benefits while those who violate laws will find life more difficult. The Beijing project will improve blacklist systems so that ...