• Pinterest has temporarily stopped displaying results for searches related to vaccinations in an effort to stop the spread of what it considers anti-vaxxer misinformation.

More bad news for YouTube....

• Disney, Nestle, Epic Games, and others have reportedly pulled ad spend from YouTube after a blogger alleged the platform was being used for a “soft-core pedophilia ring.”

What do you want to bet they will be back next quarter and this is some sort of publicity stunt to promote their own family "Wholesome" values while steering money away from Google?

Big business is dirty.

They all know that Youtube houses millions upon millions of videos of every sort .... even BEFORE they ever started advertising on it.

and they also now soft-core stuff on there won't last long with reports....

Geez Disney.... Don't you own a few risque move studios yourself?

He just can't help himself....

an itchy-thumbed CEO new social media habits. Elon Musk was at it again, firing off questionable tweets about just how many cars Tesla plans to crank out this year.

Musk first said Tesla (-1.01%) would make 500,000 cars in 2019. Then he backtracked, confirming he meant the company would be producing cars at an annualized rate of 500K by year-end.

Elon Musk? Tweeting out material company information? To his 24.8 million followers? You don’t say. The string of tweets felt oddly similar to last summer’s notorious “funding secured” fiasco.

• Remember, in settling with the SEC over *that* Twitter misfire, Tesla was ordered to designate a securities lawyer to monitor Musk’s and other high-level execs’ Twitter feeds.

Interesting timing, given that Tesla announced hours after the tweet that its general counsel, Dane Butswinkas, is leaving the company after just two months on the job.

For Tesla, this saga is another instance that shows retention isn't exactly its strong suit. Butswinkas’s exit makes him the 42nd exec to leave the company since 2016.

Like the standing taco shell, Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold smartphone has earned its spot in the annals of folded-things-history. After teasing techies with a sneak peek in November, Samsung took yesterday for a little chest thumping and phone folding.

How ’bout some specs

The Galaxy Fold—essentially a phone that expands into a tablet—starts at $1,980 (wut) and is set for an April 26th release.

• It boasts a 4.6-inch screen when sandwiched in half, but expands to 7.3 inches once opened. Oh, and don’t forget about its two (2) batteries and six (6) cameras.
• The phone is also adapted for triple-app multitasking, meaning you can text your date while also looking up the bar where you’re meeting on Google Maps while (most importantly) stalking their Facebook. Finally, the innovation we’ve been waiting for.

And for all you skeptics out there…

We know what you’re thinking: The smartphone market is saturated.

You might be right-ish, given that Apple is looking beyond the iPhone for revenue sources in the face of lower demand. Plus, estimates show that more than 5 billion people around the world have mobile devices (more than half of which are smartphones).

• But Samsung isn’t flinching. CEO DJ Koh said the Galaxy Fold “breaks new ground because it answers skeptics who say everything possible has been done, that the era of smartphone innovations is over, and that the smartphone is a mature technology in a saturated market.”

Zoom out, c/o Bloomberg: “It’s a leap that rivals the category shifts not seen since smartphones took off with a broad audience more than a decade ago.” 

+ While we’re here: If you’re scared away by the price or you've been burned one too many times by a fitted sheet, Samsung also released four new varieties of its flagship Galaxy S10 smartphone yesterday, doubling its launch roster from years past.

He is going to run again??? Even though there are still "Superdelegates"? Didn't he learn his lesson last time?

So sad. But thank you for sharing with us.

I tagged it 9/11 so that it appears with all the other related posts below.

Danke

Major New Features / Enhancements

Post Before Registering

Animated GIFs

AdminCP Notification Center

New Email Features:

Email Statistics

Email Advertisements

Unfollow Without Logging In

SEO Improvements:

Improved pagination with page number now in path (rather than query string) and unique page titles for paginated pages.

Improved use of canonical tags.

Improved handling of empty containers and profiles to reduce soft 404s.

Improved JSON-LD markup, adding @id tags and fixing URLs for comments.

Removed page output hidden by JavaScript.

Performance Improvements:

Added Lazy Loading for images, which will speed up page rendering.

Added HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload.

Added support for Brotli compression.

Improved default profile photos to use inline SVGs rather than generated images, which will speed up page rendering.

Improved browser caching of pages served by the guest page cache, which will reduce the number of requests reaching the server.

Improved handing of session data for guests to reduce database reads for guests.

Optimized images to reduce file size for faster page rendering.

Other minor performance improvements to reduce database queries and fix unnecessary code execution.

Commerce Store Filters allow customers to filter products by price, review, stock, or custom admin-defined filters.

Core

Added setting to display user group formatting in more areas (see 6 New Micro Features).

Added less intrusive browser notification prompt in Notifications menu (see 6 New Micro Features).

Added ability to show sidebar blocks to only certain types of devices (see 6 New Micro Features).

Added ability for club owners to reorder the navigation tabs (see 6 New Micro Features).

Added ability for announcements to be linked to an URL or be a title only (see 6 New Micro Features), improved consistency in how announcements are shown in different areas.

Improved UI for entering time intervals in AdminCP settings (see 6 New Micro Features).

Added a new Icons & Logos section in the AdminCP which allows providing logos for use when sharing links from the community, adding the community as a home screen app on a mobile device (along with additional settings for a PWA manifest to control certain aspects the community’s behaviour when used in this way), and in Safari’s favourites menus and pinned tabs on macOS.

Added a new UI for attachments, showing a box with some information about the file, rather than a plain line (see Turbo charging loading speeds).

Commerce

Braintree Gateway including support for PayPal (with recurring payments), Venmo, and cards. Deprecates some PayPal features.

Added ability to target bulk mails to members who have spent certain amounts.

Added sidebar widgets for best sellers, latest products, product reviews and a featured product.

New Server Requirements: PHP 7.1.0 or higher required (7.3.x now supported). MySQL 5.5.3 or higher requires (5.6.2 recommended).

Removed Features

Removed EmojiOne-style emojis due to licensing issues.

Removed Gravatar support due to privacy concerns and performance issues.

Removed password hashes when downloading a member list from the AdminCP. This is for security, to reduce the ease of obtaining sensitive data if the AdminCP is ever compromised.

Removed the name of the content (e.g. topic) from the “Next Unread” link which could consume significant server resources on large communities.

Maybe I should call this group.... the German Forum since it can cover such a wide variety of miscellaneous topics in German.

Similar to the main forum in English?

We fly the Cirrus Vision Jet to see how easy the transition from piston can be.

Fano Airfield in the Marche region of Italy offers optimum test conditions: Pilatus spent one week there in July 2018 testing the PC-24’s landing and take-off capabilities on the airfield’s unmade dirt/grass runway. From the outset, the PC-24 was designed for “off road” operations. Its outstanding performance on short unmade runways opens up an incredible degree of flexibility and new opportunities. The PC-24 provides access to almost twice as many airports worldwide compared to other jets currently available on the market. The outstanding flexibility of the PC-24 opens the door on an enviable spectrum of possibilities – whether as a business jet, ambulance aircraft or for other special missions. All this makes it a Super Versatile Jet, an aircraft designed to fulfil a wide variety of individual mission profiles. www.pilatus-aircraft.com

@Lindsey Krewson I think this lady is better than Tom Cruise in Cocktail.

• "Yosemite expands lodging accommodations with new log cabin high-rises"

• "Crystal meth is North Korea’s trendiest Lunar New Year’s gift"

FYI... I just bookmarked this page... it comes in handy sometimes when wanting to expand my Netflix searches.

The company said it will not be building a large headquarters in NYC as originally planned, adding the biggest twist of all to the marathon HQ2 search that began in 2017.

Still unclear: Whether Amazon’s 30-day return policy applies to $2.5 billion corporate campuses.

Why Bezos backed down

• “For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term.”
• “While polls show that 70% of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence...”

Let’s talk about the (now overjoyed) opposition

That Amazon (-1.06%), one of the largest public companies in the world, had been promised roughly $3 billion in government incentives didn’t sit too wellwith many activists and local leaders in NYC.

They criticized the lack of transparency in the search process and highlighted the potentially disruptive effects the massive new campus would have on the local community. In the end, Amazon didn't want to fight this battle.

This is a mess...

• ...for stakeholders (like prominent New York politicians and real estate professionals) eagerly anticipating the more than 25,000 high-paying jobs and $27.5 billion in tax revenue Amazon was expected to generate.
• ...and for Amazon, which thought it could bully any U.S. city into submission. Urban studies expert Richard Florida called it a “site selection disaster of epic proportions.”

Looking ahead: Amazon said it’s going to double down on its new locations in Northern Virginia (the big one) and Nashville (the smaller one), while growing its other existing locations around the country.

Zoom out: As Amazon became the target of an angry grassroots movement over the past year, fellow tech giants Google and Apple quietly announced their own (more modest) U.S. expansions to positive press. Amazon might want to take notes.

No, that's not your doctor playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on his lunch break...he's using equipment from Auris Health, a surgical robotics company Johnson & Johnson (+0.22%) will acquire for about $3.4 billion in cash.

The deal gives J&J (the world’s largest health care products manufacturer) a leg up in diagnostic and early-intervention tools for lung cancer—an area where Auris has developed high-tech surgical scopes that can quickly identify cancerous tumors.

• At this point, J&J can basically field a footbag net team of surgical robots. It already has a robot surgery company called Verb Surgical, which it formed with Google-owned Verily Life Sciences in 2015.

Zoom out: J&J’s deal shows there’s strong appetite among medical companies for developing tech to make surgery 1) less invasive and 2) much safer.

+ This is pretty funny: Auris Medical Holding AG, not to be confused with Auris Health, was...confused with Auris Health. Investors mistakenly bought its stock, which rose as much as 30% early in the day.

via Morning Brew

Meanwhile in the USA....

• RIP Opportunity. NASA’s Mars rover hasn’t returned any calls, and now its mission has been declared over after 15 years.

• Google (+0.09%) is spending $13 billion on data centers and offices across the U.S. throughout 2019.

• Apple will reportedly reveal its news subscription and streaming video services at a potentially star-studded March 25 event. Looking forward to receiving our invite in the mail.

The former lawyer “responsible for Apple’s compliance with securities laws” has been charged by the SEC for...insider trading.

Ex-Apple exec Gene Levoff was accused of exploiting his position at Apple (-0.42%) to trade stocks ahead of earnings, per CNBC. Translation: He’s accused of breaking the very rules he enforced.

Sounds juicy...more details, please. According to the SEC, he traded using insider knowledge on at least three occasions in 2015 and 2016 and had a history of insider trading before that.

• One sampling from 2015: Levoff allegedly caught wind that Apple would miss its Q3 iPhone sales estimates that year. Then...
• “Between July 17 and the public release of Apple’s quarterly earnings information on July 21, Levoff sold approximately $10 million of Apple stock,” avoiding about $345,000 in losses.

Levoff got the boot from Apple in 2018, but it’s still a bad look for a company that’s been roughed up by the press this week for its upcoming news subscription service and an app that allows Saudi men to track women.

El Chapo, CEO

The trial is over, and Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera faces life in prison. Now, we can take stock of just how astonishing the business operation—which prosecutors say netted him $14 billion in drug profits—really was.

The WSJ has the story, and we have the highlights.

• HR: “The cartel established a payroll for corrupt officials who escorted drug shipments and tipped off cartel members about law-enforcement operations. The salaries for corrupt officials exceeded $1 million a month, one witness testified.”
• Accounting: “The cartel used debit cards that could be loaded up with as much as $9,900 per card. Unlike cash, which is made of linen that can absorb drug residue and attract drug-sniffing dogs, debit cards can be easily cleaned."
• Logistics: “Workers installed train spurs inside warehouses in cities such as Chicago and New York, where they could park the trains and sledgehammer the drugs out of the metal walls without arousing law-enforcement suspicion.”

Bottom line: El Chapo’s empire “rivaled governments and multinational companies in its power and sophistication.”

It’s a remarkable sight, but it’s also somewhat scary. As camera technology reaches incredible milestones like this, it raises the question of when (not if) it will be used for mass surveillance. How long will it be before just walking out your front door means being observed by a camera from miles away? The likely answer is “sooner than we’d like.”

It’s reportedly faced backlash from publishers over proposed financial terms for a news subscription service—namely, that Apple (+0.86%) wants to keep about half the revenue, per the WSJ.

Let’s run through the details. Apple’s prospective service would let users read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee.

• It wants half of that subscription fee for itself...
• ...while the rest would get split among publishers based on how long users engage with their content.

But Apple could be jostled into dealmaking mode. This news subscription service is a part of its strategy to diversify revenue in the face of weakening iPhone sales (which fell 15% in Q4). Apple’s looking to increase its paid subscriptions across devices to 500 million by 2020 from today’s 360 million.

As for the publishers, striking a deal means tapping into millions of sophisticated news junkies—and the prospect of expanding their own subscription bases.