firehose

Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin published a blog post this morning announcing Life Sciences as the first new company created under the Alphabet umbrella. The move was expected, as Alphabet CEO Larry Page wrote during the announcement of the new holding company that this area of focus was the perfect example of why Google needed to restructure itself. It's a bold bet with an enormous potential reward, but one that is far removed from Google's core business, and not likely to be financially self-sustaining anytime soon.

There are a number of already public projects that will be rolled up into life sciences:

Calico, which focuses on various approaches to radical life extension, or conquering death

Smart contact lenses that can monitor the blood sugar levels of diabetics

Nanoparticles that can be used to detect and fight cancer

A baseline study that will create the richest portrait yet of the human body and genome

The Life Sciences company will be headed up by Andy Conrad, who was previously the head of....Google Life Sciences. Not much will change under Alphabet, in other words, besides a shuffling of titles and corporate structure. Still, there is no denying that the company's goals are an exciting use of Google's ample profits for humanity, if perhaps not as appealing to investors in Google's advertising business.

"They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing — and, hopefully — transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease," wrote Brin. "The team is relatively new but very diverse, including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts. This is the type of company we hope will thrive as part of Alphabet and I can’t wait to see what they do next."

This week has been filled with reports of public figures behaving badly, so we’re going to indulge in some heartwarming news to cleanse the old palate. WWE superstar John Cena spends a lot of his non-wrestling time popping up in movies and TV shows and, it seems, playing genie: Coming Soon reports that the Trainwreck actor will soon grant his 500th wish via the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Cena has granted the most wishes of any celebrity by far and is reportedly the most requested. His long history with Make-A-Wish includes donating six million airline miles to help fulfill travel needs for wish kids. He’s even received a few awards for his do-gooding.

WWE shares in his charitable spirit and announced a million-dollar commitment to Make-A-Wish on Friday. The nonprofit thanked WWE and Cena for their generosity with a party at Dave & Buster’s, which prompted the wrestler’s ...

In recent weeks, Josh Ostrovsky, a.k.a. The Fat Jewish, a.k.a. The Fat Jew, has emerged as a sort of millennial boogeyman, taking all of the internet’s darkest, laziest, most attention-whoring impulses and manifesting them into one marginally talented loudmouth with ridiculous hair. The main charge against Ostrovsky is that he is a habitual joke thief, taking quips other people have posted on Twitter and Instagram and reposting them—frequently verbatim—without giving credit to the original author in a particularly egregious example of the dreaded “content aggregation.”

Now Ostrovsky has told his side of the story in an exclusive interview with Vulture, in which he refers to his schtick of scamming his way onto VIP guest lists by making a spectacle of himself as “performance art” and himself as a “Renaissance man of pop culture.” (It’s fine that he doesn’t attribute the content ...

My wife Toor Pekai and I are proud of Malala getting 6A*s and 4As. #education for every child. pic.twitter.com/lfoKBLMGYz

— Ziauddin Yousafzai (@ZiauddinY) August 21, 2015

Just found out that my dear sister #Malala got her GCSE results and got 6 A* and 4 A's #SoProud #Education #PrideOfPakistan

— Aseefa B Zardari (@AseefaBZ) August 21, 2015

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has ordered Google to remove links from its search results that point to news stories reporting on earlier removals of links from its search results. The nine further results that must be removed point to Web pages with details about the links relating to a criminal offence that were removed by Google following a request from the individual concerned. The Web pages involved in the latest ICO order repeated details of the original criminal offence, which were then included in the results displayed when searching for the complainant’s name on Google.

Understandably, Google is not very happy about this escalation of the EU's so-called "right to be forgotten"—strictly speaking, a right to have certain kinds of information removed from search engine results. According to the ICO press release on the new order, Google has refused to remove the later links from its search results: "It argued these links were to articles that concerned one of its decisions to delist a search result and that the articles were an essential part of a recent news story relating to a matter of significant public importance." The ICO "recognises that journalistic content relating to decisions to delist search results may be newsworthy and in the public interest." Nonetheless, it decided that including links to the news stories has "an unwarranted and negative impact on the individual’s privacy and is a breach of the Data Protection Act," and that they must be removed.

Google has 35 days to comply with the enforcement notice. If it does not, it faces financial sanctions, which can be significant. A few weeks ago, the ICO issued a £180,000 civil monetary penalty to The Money Shop following the loss of customer details when a server was stolen. Ignoring an ICO enforcement notice is even more serious. Failure to comply is a criminal offence, which can be tried at a Magistrate's Court, where unlimited fines can be imposed, the ICO told Ars in an e-mail. Google can, however, appeal against the order to the Information Tribunal, part of a fairly obscure aspect of the UK's court system called the General Regulatory Chamber.

Back in April, self-described “court jester” (and self-evident douche) Christian Englander went to see Dave Chappelle’s stand-up in Santa Fe. Englander brought his friend Johnny Appleseed, an Englander-certified “sensitive artist” (these guys must travel in packs). At some point, Chappelle made a crack about Appleseed doodling during his set. Despite his undoubtedly great sense of humor, Englander took offense on his friend’s behalf and threw a banana peel at Chappelle.

Englander insisted he was just expressing his displeasure with Chappelle’s set, like any good jester would. He shrugged off the racial implications of throwing a banana peel at a black comedian, even though he did the exact same thing to a different black man two nights later. Englander described the second incident as “ironic commentary” on the first. He was arrested and Santa Fe mayor Javier Gonzales vowed to throw the book at him.

It turns out ...

Online criminals aren't wasting any time taking advantage of this week's Ashley Madison data dump. Krebs on Security is reporting on one such scheme, noticed by an email provider in Milwaukee that found the following message being spammed to its subscribers:

Hello,

Unfortunately, your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I now have your information.

If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins (approx. value $225 USD) to the following address:

---

1B8eH7HR87vbVbMzX4gk9nYyus3KnXs4Ez

Sending the wrong amount means I won’t know it’s you who paid.

You have 7 days from receipt of this email to send the BTC. If you need help locating a place to purchase BTC, you can start here…..

The scheme doesn't seem to be working, since no one has transferred any bitcoin into the associated account, but it's a reminder of the tangible damage done by the attack. The available database makes it easy to send a mass mailing to all the associated emails — and with tens of millions of names in the mix, there are good odds that at least one of them will take the bait.

As these extortion schemes continue, it's important to note that many of the email addresses in the database do not correspond to actual Ashley Madison customers, since the company allowed for database entry without confirmation. That's led to awkward surprises for those who found their emails in the released data without ever having used the site. One such person described his experience on Github. "Since I have such a short email address people sign up for shit using it all the time," he writes. "The future is a funny place."

Dr. Dre has directly apologized for numerous incidents of assault that he committed against women during his time with his influential rap group N.W.A. Speaking to The New York Times, Dre addressed—albeit not by name—his violent attacks against journalist Dee Barnes, his one-time romantic partner Michel’le, and rapper Tairrie B—saying:

“Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life. However, none of this is an excuse for what I did. I’ve been married for 19 years and every day I’m working to be a better man for my family, seeking guidance along the way. I’m doing everything I can so I never resemble that man again. I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted ...

note-a-bear:

afloweroutofstone:

Rolling Stone interviewed the 15-year-old kid who filed the paperwork for Deez Nuts to run for President

God bless

See, instead of voting for Trump as a joke, I propose joke-voters vote for Deez Nuts, because I honestly feel like this kid would do better. (Even though legally, he can’t be president.)