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22 Mar 15:29

EU antitrust cops probe Microsoft ties between Entra ID and 365 services

by Paul Kunert

Google claims rival has made an 'art and science' out of licensing

Exclusive  Google says the European Union's antitrust authorities have asked if Microsoft unfairly ties authentication to Azure, in a further sign that officials are considering multiple aspects of Redmond's policies.…

28 Feb 08:49

World’s super-rich head to Gujarat for wedding party thrown by India’s richest person

by Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi

Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump among guests expected at pre-wedding party for son of Mukesh Ambani, Anant, and his fiancee Radhika Merchant

For one of India’s richest families, a wedding is not just a wedding – it’s a spectacle designed to dazzle even the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people.

It was back in 2018 that India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, threw his daughter the most expensive wedding the country had ever seen, where Beyoncé performed and guests attended receptions in Italy’s Lake Como, as well as Mumbai and Rajasthan, at a cost of almost $100bn.

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02 Jan 22:47

Make money online with this lifetime subscription to AI eBook Creation Pro for only $34.99

by Boing Boing's Shop

TL;DR: Start making money on the internet with this lifetime subscription to My AI eBook Creation Pro, giving you the ability to write your own ebook and sell it online, for only $34.99 (Reg. $400), saving $365.

Ever wondered how to make money online? — Read the rest

The post Make money online with this lifetime subscription to AI eBook Creation Pro for only $34.99 appeared first on Boing Boing.

23 Nov 00:26

Home secretary described Stockton-on-Tees as ‘shit-hole’, MP claims

by Ben Quinn Political correspondent

Alex Cunningham, MP for Stockton North, claims James Cleverly made comment during Wednesday’s PMQs

A Labour MP has claimed that his constituency was described as a “shit-hole” by the home secretary, James Cleverly, during prime minister’s questions.

Alex Cunningham said Cleverly had uttered the phrase when the Labour MP for Stockton North asked: “Why are 34% of children in my constituency living in poverty?”

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25 Oct 15:31

Lewis Edwards: Snapchat sex abuse images police officer jailed

Lewis Edwards targeted more than 200 girls and blackmailed them to send sexual images.
15 Jun 07:35

Watch: Tourist fights off feisty kangaroo in Australia

An American tourist came to a local woman's aid when the animal became aggressive at a sanctuary.
17 May 07:20

Visiting Taiwan, ex-UK PM Liz Truss calls for tough line on China

Truss, who held office for just 44 days, says democracies need to make clear there are consequences for aggression.
19 Dec 18:18

Covid at Christmas: 'Chris Whitty is more popular than Britney Spears'

England's chief medical officer and his deputy Jonathan Van-Tam prove popular with shoppers.
06 Apr 08:27

No, Matt Hancock: biotech giants are not leading Germany's coronavirus fight | Peter Kuras

by Peter Kuras

The health minister should look to other factors in Germany’s response – including a continually well-funded health system

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When Olfert Landt first heard about a novel virus ravaging parts of China, he sprung into action, and by the 10 January, according to Bloomberg, the microbiologist, working with researchers at Berlin’s Charité hospital, had developed a viable test for the disease.

TIB Molbiol Syntheselabor GmbH, the small company Landt leads, had produced more than 4 million tests by 12 March. It’s the kind of story that has fuelled claims that Germany’s strong biotech industry has provided the country with a unique advantage in combating the coronavirus. Donald Trump retweeted the Bloomberg story about Landt. The UK’s health minister, Matt Hancock, who held his first press conference on Thursday after recovering from coronavirus himself, didn’t mention Landt, but he was quick to point to the strength of the German pharmaceutical industry as the primary reason for the country’s aggressive testing regime and low death rate: “My German counterpart, for instance,” Hancock said, “could call upon 100 test labs ready and waiting when the crisis stuck, thanks in large part to Roche, one of the biggest diagnostic companies in the world.”

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21 Feb 14:27

From Greaves in '66 to Manchester City, many football fans live in alternate reality

by Max Rushden

I still think Jimmy Greaves should have started the World Cup final, so can understand City fans sticking to conspiracy theories

The footage of a suited Jimmy Greaves trying to celebrate with his England teammates while they dance around Wembley with the World Cup makes for painful viewing. As BT Sport’s excellent documentary explains, Spurs’ record goalscorer had just about got over a kick in a group game – his second recovery after getting over hepatitis that season. Alf Ramsey stuck with Geoff Hurst and you could argue it turned out to be a sensible decision.

The 1966 World Cup was the last without substitutes. With extra time, surely Ramsey would have given Greaves 20 minutes. When those people were on the pitch thinking it was all over, Jimmy wouldn’t have lamped it into the top left-hand corner – it wasn’t his style. He would have just passed it in.

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23 Jun 13:49

The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic

by EditorDavid
Technology writer Matthew MacDonald began writing QuickBASIC code back in 1988 on the DOS operating system, sharing it on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. "I still remember writing code in white text on its cheery blue background..." He tells his readers on Medium that "I have a confession to make. Before I became a respectable developer working with modern curly-bracket languages like C# and Java (and that hot mess of a platform we call JavaScript), I was a dedicated fan of the wildly popular misfit Visual Basic..." At the same time that Microsoft released Windows 3.0 -- the first version that was truly successful -- they also launched Visual Basic 1.0. Here was something entirely new. You could create buttons for your programs by drawing them on the surface of a window, like it was some kind of art canvas. To make a button do something, all you had to do was double-click it in the design environment and write some code. And you didn't use cryptic C++ code, with piles of classes, complex memory management, and obscure calls into the Windows API. Instead, you wrote friendly-looking VB code, like a civilized person. All the graphical pizzazz was impressive, but the real secret to VB's success was its practicality. There was simply no other tool that a developer could use to sketch out a complete user interface and get coding as quickly as VB... By the release of VB 6 -- the last version of classic Visual Basic -- it was estimated that there were ten times more coders writing in VB than in the unforgiving C++ language. And they weren't just mocking up toy applications. Visual Basic wormed its way into company offices and even onto the web through ASP (Active Server Pages), another monstrously popular technology. Now you could create web pages that talked to VB components, called databases, and wrote HTML on the fly... Today, Visual Basic is in a strange position. It has roughly 0% of the mindshare among professional developers -- it doesn't even chart in professional developer surveys or show up in GitHub repositories. However, it's still out there in the wild, holding Office macros together, powering old Access databases and ancient ASP web pages, and attracting .NET newcomers. The TIOBE index, which attempts to gauge language popularity by looking at search results, still ranks VB in the top five most talked-about languages. But it seems that the momentum has shifted for the last time. In 2017, Microsoft announced that it would begin adding new language features to C# that might never appear in Visual Basic. The change doesn't return VB to ugly duckling status, but it does take away some of its .NET status.... Visual Basic has been threatened before. But this time feels different. It seems like the sun is finally setting on one of the world's most popular programming languages. Even if it's true, Visual Basic won't disappear for decades. Instead, it will become another legacy product, an overlooked tool without a passion or a future. He remembers that the last versions of Visual Basic even supported object-oriented programming with interfaces, polymorphism, and class libraries, but argues that to create .NET, Microsoft "had to throw away almost all of classic VB." For example, "Classic VB programmers had to change the way they counted array elements. No longer could they start at 1, like ordinary people. Now they had to start at 0, like official programmers."

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27 Dec 09:08

Chris Grayling under fire as promise to boost electric cars backfires

by Adam Vaughan Energy correspondent

Less than 2% of vehicles used by transport department are electric, despite minister’s vow

Chris Grayling has been accused of failing to back up his positive words on electric cars with action after it emerged they account for less than 2% of his department’s car fleet.

The UK transport secretary said the government would “lead consumer uptake” of the cars when he laid out his plan for tackling air pollution with a switch to battery-powered vehicles.

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24 Nov 13:38

Ipswich school triggers inquiry into 'pupil aged 30'

The Home Office has launched an inquiry into how the man was allowed to become a student.
05 Nov 21:53

1982 Hyde Park bomb suspect arrested

John Downey is to be charged with murdering two UDR soldiers in Northern Ireland in 1972.
15 Aug 22:28

Install and Use The Signal Encrypted Messenger App

by Nick Congleton
Do you wish there was a more secure option for sending text messages and even making calls from your phone? Wouldn't it be great if that option utilized end-to-end encryption to ensure that your communications were entirely protected? Well, that option exists in the form of Signal.
01 Jul 08:04

Designer makes figures that are simultaneously charming and troubling

by Andrea James

Jun seo Hahm likes to create strange and wondrous beings, like this mouth-walker or these "negative-metaballs" below: (more…)

22 Jun 17:01

Why the 'feudal' tech monopolies run rings around competition watchdogs

by Andrew Orlowski

Rather than break up Google, can we try owning our data?

Interview  Competition watchdogs need to move faster and consider the bigger picture to deal effectively with transnational tech behemoths like Google, says BT's former chief lawyer.…

10 Apr 20:09

Another itty bitty bluetooth speaker for under $8

by Mark Frauenfelder

This tiny bluetooth speaker has great reviews on Amazon. It's on sale for one day on Amazon for $7.49. It is about the same size as this mini speaker I bought last month, which now costs $13.

27 Mar 22:07

Baby Beatrix steals show at Luton Town match

A baby steals the show at Luton Town as Danny Hylton picks her out for a goal celebration.
13 Mar 07:22

China ALTERED its public vuln database to conceal spy agency tinkering – research

by John Leyden

Report claims vuln-botherers share building with Ministry of State Security

China has altered public vulnerability data to conceal the influence of its spy agency in the country's national information security bug reporting process.…

22 Feb 07:18

Winter Olympics: Anna Gasser wins women's big air final with last jump

Austria's Anna Gasser secures gold in the the women's big air with the last jump of the day to snatch gold from Jamie Anderson.
15 Feb 16:39

Airbus takes new €1.3bn hit on A400M troop carrier

The aerospace group has now written off a total of €8bn in losses on the military transport plane.
15 Feb 16:33

Oxfam scandal: Ex-director hits out at 'lies and exaggerations'

Accused of hiring prostitutes in Haiti, the former executive hits out at "lies and exaggerations".
04 Feb 23:22

Gerry Adams backs Jeremy Corbyn as next PM

The outgoing Sinn Féin leader praises the Labour leader's past role in the peace process.
02 Feb 18:06

Anti-Isis fighters gather in Dorset for funeral of UK sniper Jac Holmes

by Matt Blake

Volunteers from Kurdish YPG force pay tribute to former IT worker killed in action in Syria

Anti-Islamic State fighters from around the globe were among hundreds of mourners who flooded a small Dorset community hall on Friday to celebrate the life of a British former IT worker killed fighting the jihadist group in Syria.

Jac Holmes, 24, from Bournemouth, was one of the longest-serving international volunteers with Syria’s Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), having travelled to northern Syria three times since August 2015.

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09 Jan 07:41

CCTV commish: Bring all surveillance systems under code of practice

by Rebecca Hill

Proliferation of video tracking in Blighty 'undermines' efforts to improve

The UK's surveillance camera commissioner has told the British government to adopt a "common sense position" and bring all bodies using surveillance camera systems under its code of practice.…

11 Dec 22:44

The Brexit situation is a 'shambles': your best comments on the Guardian today

by Guardian readers

Your reaction to David Davis’ suggestion the UK could back out of its Brexit deal on the Irish border, and comments on weather woes and travel chaos


Discussion today looks at the latest from Brexit secretary David Davis as he retracts his suggestion that the UK could back out of its Brexit deal on the Irish border. We also follow the latest on plunging temperatures in the UK and the travel chaos it has created.

Related: David Davis clashes with Ireland over Brexit deal

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06 Dec 11:29

Theresa May’s Brexit red lines were reckless. Now she has to cross them | Keir Starmer

by Keir Starmer
This week’s farcical talks exposed the flaws in her government’s approach. She is hostage to the DUP and has made promises she cannot sensibly keep

The breakdown of the Brexit talks yesterday was the latest, but most serious, setback so far. It further eroded the prime minister’s already limited authority. It raised the stakes in Northern Ireland even higher. And it increased the risk of negotiations not progressing to the crucial next phase and a long overdue agreement on transitional arrangements.

Related: Brexit talks: bad-tempered breakdown in sight as deadline looms | Dan Roberts

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26 Nov 23:02

Franken 'embarrassed and ashamed' over groping allegations

Sen. Al Franken said Sunday that he plans to return to the Senate on Monday and expressed embarrassment and shame after several women said he had touched them inappropriately.
22 Nov 15:17

Indescribable King of the Hill creepywave remix video

by Rob Beschizza

"Clouds?"

Now I'll be spending all day seeing what other divine nightmares await in the kingdom of KoTH YouTube poop.