A US intelligence report has found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. BBC: The declassified report released by the Biden administration says the prince approved a plan to either capture or kill the US-based Saudi exile. It is the first time America has publicly named the crown prince, who denies ordering the death. Khashoggi was murdered while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He had been known for his criticism of the Saudi authorities. "We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi," the report by the office of the US director of national intelligence says. From our earlier coverage of Khashoggi:
Silicon Valley's Saudi Arabia Problem (2018)
Uber CEO Calls Saudi Murder of Khashoggi 'a Mistake', Scrambles To Backtrack (2019)
Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos' Phone 'Hacked By Saudi Crown Prince' (2020)
UN Calls For Investigation Into Saudi Crown Prince's Alleged Involvement in Bezos Phone Hack (2020).

James Gilboy, writing at The Drive: Over the week spanning Jan. 4-10, 1998, a trio of massive ice storms wracked the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Knocking over transmission towers, the storms deprived up to 1.35 million people of electricity, in some cases for weeks (sound familiar?). Rather than leave town, though, one Canadian mayor stepped up to bring in the biggest mobile power generators they could get their hands on: Diesel-electric freight train locomotives. This unusual solution to a power problem unfolded in Boucherville, a Montreal suburb just northeast of famed Formula 1 racetrack Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. Having reportedly heard of locomotives being used to generate electricity during another emergency years prior, Boucherville's Mayor Francine Gadbois asked the Canadian National Railway to lend the city a couple of units. CN obliged, sending over two Montreal Locomotive Works M-420s per the 1998 issue of Trains, as recounted by members of its forum.

Both locomotives were powered by Alco 251C prime movers; 131.4-liter, single-turbo diesel V12s making some 1,950 horsepower according to the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences. Rather than power the wheels through hydraulic or mechanical transmissions, these massive motors turned traction generators that could send juice to motors connected to the wheels. In a pinch, however, that power can be routed outside the locomotive for whatever purpose one desires, like keeping municipal buildings operating in times of crisis. And that's exactly what these locomotives did for Boucherville. According to yet another account from a train forum, officials craned M-240 number 3502 off the line down the street from city hall before moving it some 1,000 feet down the street, carving deep ruts in the asphalt. Once at its destination and hooked in, its V12 had to be run at a specific, constant rpm' to generate AC current at 60 hertz, the frequency used by most North American utilities.

Despite America's vast population of nearly 330 million people, 43.6 million Americans have already received one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Axios writes: The U.S. has carried out more vaccinations than any country in the world, and given a first dose to a higher percentage of its population (12%) than all but five countries: Israel, the Seychelles, the UAE, the U.K. and Bahrain. In fact, the U.S. is distributing doses three times as quickly as the EU, adjusted for population, and nearly five times as quickly as Canada.

The U.S. has some major advantages over most of the world. Not only does America have the money to reserve more doses than it could possibly use, it also has the capacity to manufacture them domestically. Canada's slow rollout and the recent dispute over doses between the EU and U.K. have underlined the difficulties of relying on imports...

It also helps that the two most effective vaccines on the market were developed entirely (Moderna) or partially (Pfizer/BioNTech) in the U.S.
Their article concludes that "Despite crumbling infrastructure and chaotic politics, the U.S. remains a scientific, technological and manufacturing powerhouse."

The Associated Press reports that America's daily inoculation average "climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week," adding "but as many as double that number of doses are soon expected to be available on average each day."

Long-time Slashdot reader b0s0z0ku quotes Ars Technica: A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, which are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves.

Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware's ultimate goal unknown. The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met.

Also curious, the malware comes with a mechanism to completely remove itself, a capability that's typically reserved for high-stealth operations. So far, though, there are no signs the self-destruct feature has been used, raising the question why the mechanism exists. Besides those questions, the malware is notable for a version that runs natively on the M1 chip that Apple introduced in November, making it only the second known piece of macOS malware to do so...

The malware has been found in 153 countries with detections concentrated in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany.
Red Canary, the security firm that discovered the malware, has named it "Silver Sparrow." Long-time Slashdot reader Nihilist_CE writes: First detected in August of 2020, the Silver Sparrow malware is interesting in several unsettling ways. It uses the macOS Installer Javascript API to launch a bash process to gain a foothold into the user's system, a hitherto-unobserved method for bypassing malware detection. This bash shell is then used to invoke macOS's built-in PlistBuddy tool to create a LaunchAgent which executes a bash script every hour. This is the command and control process, which downloads a JSON file containing (potentially) new instructions.

Besides the novel installation method, Silver Sparrow is also mysterious in its payload: a single, tiny binary that does nothing but open a window reading "Hello, World!" (in v1, which targets Intel Macs) or "You did it!" (in v2, which is an M1-compatible fat binary). These "bystander binaries" are never executed and appear to be proofs-of-concept or placeholders for future functionality.

Content from abroad is boosting its share of the American entertainment diet, thanks in large part to streaming, the pandemic and the creator economy. From a report: "As 'American exceptionalism' has become less of a truth geopolitically, the same goes for entertainment," says Brad Grossman, founder and CEO of ZEITGUIDE. The U.S. demand share for non-U.S. content was higher each quarter in 2020 than in the previous two years, according to data provided to Axios from Parrot Analytics, which measures demand for entertainment content "This trend started in mid 2019, so it pre-dates COVID-19, but the strong upward trend has continued into 2020," says Wade Payson-Denney, an insights analyst at Parrot. In Q3 2020, non-U.S. shows accounted for nearly 30% of demand in the U.S. The data shows that U.S. audiences are discovering content from previously unfamiliar markets, like India, Spain and Turkey. The top 5 international markets in the U.S. by Q4 2020 were the U.K. (8.3%), Japan (5.7%), Canada (3.2%), Korea (1.9%), and India (1.5%), per Parrot.

Canada's main securities regulator has cleared the launch of the world's first bitcoin exchange traded fund, an investment manager said on Friday, providing investors greater access to the cryptocurrency that has sparked an explosion in trading interest. Reuters reports: The Ontario Securities Commission has approved the launch of Purpose Bitcoin ETF, Toronto-based asset management company Purpose Investments Inc. said in a statement. The OSC confirmed the approval in a separate statement to Reuters. "The ETF will be the first in the world to invest directly in physically settled Bitcoin, not derivatives, allowing investors easy and efficient access to the emerging asset class of cryptocurrency," Purpose Investments said.

Investors have been able to trade bitcoin using futures contracts on the CME derivatives exchange. They can also buy closed-end investment funds, such as the Bitcoin Fund on the Toronto Stock Exchange. [...] In the United States, eight firms have tried without success since 2013 to create a bitcoin ETF, according to Todd Rosenbluth, director of ETF and mutual fund research at New York based CFRA. Among issues the Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be focused on are the potential for market manipulation and the process of custody audits that verify that a fund holds its purported assets.

As grizzly bears expand their range in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming into places where they haven't been seen in a century or more, they're increasingly encountering humans. From a report: Things intensified last summer as trails and campgrounds across the region flooded with inexperienced tourists seeking refuge in the outdoors during the coronavirus pandemic. Grizzly attacks spiked. Bear managers were inundated with calls about grizzlies getting into garbage, chickens, and other draws. Dispersing grizzlies even came unexpectedly close to neighboring states -- a remote camera in Wyoming captured a grizzly only 20 miles from the Utah border and a radio collared bear in Idaho nearly roamed into Oregon and Washington. Ultimately, 2020 offered a nerve-jangling look at the challenges and complex future of grizzly bears in America.

Grizzly bears occupy a conflicted, toothy corner of the American psyche -- we revere them even as they haunt our nightmares. You can buy food at Grizzly Grocery before climbing Grizzly Peak or hiking Grizzly Gulch. You can have your furnace serviced by Grizzly Plumbing and Heating. Here in the Northern Rockies, and everywhere grizzlies are found, people erect statues of them, frame pictures on their walls, and, if they see a grizzly in the wild, tell breathless stories around campfires and dinner tables for the rest of their lives. Ask the tourists from around the world that flood into Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks what they most hope to see, and their answer is often the same: a grizzly bear. The western half of the U.S. teemed with grizzlies at the time of European contact, with an estimated 50,000 or more living alongside Native Americans, from the Pacific to the midwestern prairies and into the mountains of Mexico. By the early 1970s, after centuries of relentless shooting, trapping, and poisoning by settlers, 600 to 800 grizzlies remained on a mere 2 percent of their former range in the alpine fastness of the Northern Rockies. Their slide into oblivion was stemmed in 1975 with their listing under the Endangered Species Act and the legal protections it afforded.

Today, in a testament to the power of wildlife populations to rebound when given room to do so, there are an estimated 2,000 or more grizzly bears in the contiguous U.S. (and approximately 25,000 in Canada and 30,000 in Alaska). Their recovery has been so successful that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has twice in the past 13 years attempted to de-list the species, most recently in 2017, which would loosen legal protections and allow them to be hunted. Both efforts were overturned in federal court due to lawsuits from conservation groups. For now, grizzlies remain listed. In the lower 48, grizzlies are anchored by two populations in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks and surrounding ecosystems. Glacier bears represent the southern edge of the great, uninterrupted mass of grizzlies that inhabit wildlands from Montana to Alaska.

Facebook will start reducing the amount of political content users see while scrolling their primary feeds. From a report: The social media platform will "temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people" in Brazil, Indonesia and Canada this week, it said in a blog post on Wednesday. The changes will be applied to a limited number of US users in the coming weeks. "During these initial tests we'll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we'll use going forward," Aastha Gupta, product management director at Facebook, wrote in the blog post. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the changes during the company's earnings call last week. "One of the top pieces of feedback that we're hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," he said.

The company, which has come under fire for its shortcomings in combating election misinformation and its political ad policies, claims that political content makes up only 6% of what people see on Facebook in the United States. When asked how it defines political content, Facebook said it will use artificial intelligence known as machine learning trained "to look for signals of political content and predict whether a post is related to politics." The test will include news stories about politics as well as political posts by family and friends.

sinij shares a report from CBC.ca: American technology firm Clearview AI violated Canadian privacy laws by collecting photos of Canadians without their knowledge or consent, an investigation by four of Canada's privacy commissioners has found. The report found that Clearview's technology created a significant risk to individuals by allowing law enforcement and companies to match photos against its database of more than three billion images, including Canadians and children.

The commissioners called for Clearview to stop offering its technology in Canada, stop collecting images of Canadians and to delete the photos of Canadians it had already collected in its database. If the company refuses to follow the recommendations, the four privacy commissioners will "pursue other actions available under their respective acts to bring Clearview into compliance with Canadian laws," the statement said. However, the four acknowledged that under current laws, and even under proposed changes to federal privacy laws, their ability to penalize the company or force it to comply with Canadian orders is limited. "What Clearview does, is mass surveillance and it is illegal," federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien told reporters Wednesday. "It is an affront to individuals' privacy rights and inflicts broad based harm on all members of society who find themselves continually in a police lineup." "This is completely unacceptable."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This week a security researcher discovered a bot on Telegram that sold the phone numbers of Facebook users for $20 apiece. "The security researcher who found this vulnerability, Alon Gal, says that the person who runs the bot claims to have the information of 533 million users, which came from a Facebook vulnerability that was patched in 2019," reported the Verge. Motherboard reported the bot was also offering "bulk" pricing, selling 10,000 phone numbers for $5,000.

Telegram told the New York Post that they'd blocked the bot Tuesday morning, while Facebook downplayed the incident, reminding the Post "This is old data." But the Post notes that Facebook already had more than 1.6 billion daily active users in September 2019, and security researcher Alon Gal posted a count of the millions of affected users in each country, finding 32,315,282 in America, 11,522,328 in the United Kingdom, 7,320,478 in Australia, and 3,494,385 in Canada.

But the Verge points out the most ominous message of the breach: that ""the data is still out there on the web" — and that it's already resurfaced, more than once, in the days since it was initially scraped.

Android users in the U.S. will soon gain access to betting and gambling apps through the Play Store, Google announced Thursday. CNET reports: As of March 1, online casino games, sports betting, lotteries and daily fantasy sports apps will be allowed in certain states. You can see a complete list of what types of gambling apps are allowed in each state on Google's support website.

To be eligible, app makers must complete a gambling application form, comply with state and country laws where the app is being used and have a valid gambling license for each state or country it wants to operate in. These apps must be rated adult only and display information about responsible gambling. Apps must also ensure they prevent minors from being able to use the app, and the app cannot be a paid app on Google Play or use Google Play in-app billing. Other countries gaining access to betting and gambling apps include: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide. Reuters reports: Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as "Emotet," authorities said in a statement. "Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally," Germany's BKA federal police agency said in a statement. "The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organized Internet crime."

German police said infections with Emotet had caused at least 14.5 million euros ($17.56 million) of damage in their country. Globally, Emotet-linked damages cost about $2.5 billion, Ukrainian authorities said. Ukraine's General Prosecutor said police had carried out raids in the eastern city of Kharkiv to seize computers used by the hackers. Authorities released photos showing piles of bank cards, cash and a room festooned with tangled computer equipment, but did not say if any arrests were made.

If the folks who are responsible for beaming content to your eyeballs are to be believed, streamers are thirsty for more ads of all things. From a report: A survey of 4,526 adults in the U.S. and Canada published by TiVo today claims that a whopping 79% of the survey's respondents reported wanting to use a free and ad-supported service rather than pay for another one. While 81% said they wished Prime Video and Netflix offered free tiers with ads, 80% of respondents reported a difference in the quality of the content on many free, ad-supported platforms -- more specifically, that it's worse. That is, for the most part, true, an exception maybe being Peacock (if you really like NBC). On services like IMDb TV and Vudu, for example, you typically have to comb through a lot of so-so content to find something recent and decent to watch. A bunch of premium services like Hulu and CBS All Access do offer cheaper, ad-supported versions of their products, but those still both cost a few bucks a month for access.

An American real estate investor, a Canadian investor, and a former Israeli Air Force pilot are paying $55 million each to be part of the first fully private astronaut crew to journey to the International Space Station. The Verge reports: The trio will hitch a ride on SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule early next year, with a veteran NASA astronaut as the commander. The Ax-1 mission, arranged by Houston, Texas-based space tourism company Axiom Space, is a watershed moment for the space industry as companies race to make space travel more accessible to private customers instead of governments. Private citizens have trekked to the space station in the past, but the Ax-1 mission marks the first to use a commercially built astronaut capsule: SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which flew its first two crews to the ISS last year.

Larry Connor, an entrepreneur and nonprofit activist investor; Mark Pathy, the Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Eytan Stibbe, the former Israeli fighter pilot and an impact investor, were revealed by Axiom on Tuesday morning as the company's inaugural crew. Connor, 71, is president of The Connor Group, a luxury real estate investment firm based in Ohio. He'd become the second-oldest person to fly to space after John Glenn, who flew the US space shuttle Discovery at 77 years old.

The crew's flight to the space station, an orbital laboratory some 250 miles above Earth, will take two days. They'll then spend about eight days aboard the station's US segment, where they'll take part "in research and philanthropic projects," Axiom said in a statement. Living alongside working astronauts from the US, Russia, and likely Germany, the private crew members will roll out sleeping bags somewhere on the station. [...] The Ax-1 mission will have to be approved by the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, the space station's managing body of partner countries that includes the US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and others. That approval process kicked off today...

A Vancouver seaplane company says its retro-fitted all electric airplane is set to take to the skies for more test flights this year, as it pushes forward with its plans to make commercial air travel cheaper and greener. CBC.ca reports: "There's no wavering in our confidence and determination and interest in getting this done," said Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall. Founded by McDougall in 1982, Harbour Air uses small propeller planes to fly commercial flights between the Lower Mainland, Seattle, Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and Whistler.

In the last few years it has turned its attention to becoming a leader in green urban mobility, which would do away with the need to burn fossil fuels for air travel. In December 2019, McDougall flew one of Harbour Air's planes, a more than 60-year-old DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver float plane, which had been outfitted with a Seattle-based company's electric propulsion system, for three minutes over Richmond B.C.

Harbour Air joined with Seattle-based company MagniX in early 2019 to design the e-plane's engine, which was powered by NASA-approved lithium-ion batteries that were also used on the International Space Station. At the time, based on the success of that inaugural flight, McDougall had hoped to be using the plane to fly passengers on its routes, such as between downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria, by the end of this year. Now, that timeline has been pushed back at least one year due to the pandemic.

This week New York Magazine featured a new article by journalist David Wallace-Wells about the state of the fight against global warming.

He warns that "Already, the planet is warmer, at just 1.2 degrees, than it has ever been..." But there's also some good news: Just a half-decade ago, it was widely believed that a "business as usual" emissions path would bring the planet four or five degrees of warming — enough to make large parts of Earth effectively uninhabitable. Now, thanks to the rapid death of coal, the revolution in the price of renewable energy, and a global climate politics forged by a generational awakening, the expectation is for about three degrees. Recent pledges could bring us closer to two. All of these projections sketch a hazardous and unequal future, and all are clouded with uncertainties — about the climate system, about technology, about the dexterity and intensity of human response, about how inequitably the most punishing impacts will be distributed. Yet if each half-degree of warming marks an entirely different level of suffering, we appear to have shaved a few of them off our likeliest end stage in not much time at all.

The next half-degrees will be harder to shave off, and the most crucial increment — getting from two degrees to 1.5 — perhaps impossible, dashing the dream of avoiding what was long described as "catastrophic" change. But for a climate alarmist like me, seeing clearly the state of the planet's future now requires a conspicuous kind of double vision, in which a guarded optimism seems perhaps as reasonable as panic. Given how long we've waited to move, what counts now as a best-case outcome remains grim. It also appears, miraculously, within reach....

The price of solar energy has fallen ninefold over the past decade, as has the price of lithium batteries, critical to the growth of electric cars. The costs of utility-scale batteries, which could solve the "intermittency" (i.e., cloudy day) problem of renewables and help power whole cities in relatively short order, have fallen 70 percent since just 2015. Wind power is 40 percent cheaper than it was a decade ago, with offshore wind experiencing an even steeper decline. Overall, renewable energy is less expensive than dirty energy almost everywhere on the planet, and in many places it is simply cheaper to build new renewable capacity than to continue running the old fossil-fuel infrastructure. Oil demand and carbon emissions may both have peaked this year. Eighty percent of coal plants planned in Asia's developing countries have been shelved... [I]n the fall, the U.K. pledged to ban nonelectrics by 2030 — a once-unthinkable law coming both too slow and much more quickly than seemed possible not very long ago. Similar plans are now in place in 16 other countries, plus Massachusetts and California. Canada recently raised its tax on carbon sixfold. Italy cut its power-sector emissions 65 percent between 2012 and 2019, and Denmark is now aiming to reduce its overall emissions 70 percent by 2030...

[F]or all their momentum, renewables still only make up 10 percent of global electricity production. But alarmists have to take the good news where they find it....
The author also spoke to Pulitzer Prize-winner environmentalist author Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book Under a White Sky: In her book, Kolbert sketches a spectrum of interventions, from electrifying rivers to using CRISPR to save endangered species to solar geoengineering, often called "solar-radiation management," by which aerosol particles are suspended in the stratosphere to deflect some sunlight back into outer space and artificially cool the planet. "There is a slippery slope here, you know?" she says. "And where does that end?

"But there are not a lot of great choices. We're not returning to a preindustrial climate — not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime."

During his first moments in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Biden returned the United States to the Paris climate accord and directed federal agencies to begin unraveling Donald Trump's environmental policies. The Washington Post reports: Biden's executive order recommitting the United States to the international struggle to slow global warming fulfilled a campaign promise and represented a stark repudiation of the "America First" approach of Trump, who officially withdrew the nation from the Paris agreement Nov. 4 after years of disparaging it. Biden also ordered federal agencies to review scores of climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, to quickly reverse them. Nearly half of the regulations the new administration is targeting come from the Environmental Protection Agency, on issues as varied as drinking water, dangerous chemicals and gas-mileage standards.

Biden is expected to take even more sweeping action next Wednesday, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post. He plans to sign an executive order elevating climate in domestic and national security policy; direct "science and evidence based decision-making" in federal agencies; reestablish the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and announce that U.S. data that will help underpin the Climate Leadership Summit that Biden will host in Washington in late April. "While many of Biden's actions Wednesday will take effect over time -- the country will again formally become a party to the Paris agreement 30 days from now," the report adds. He's also planning to rescind the presidential permit Trump granted the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada across the border into the United States, and is instructing the EPA and Transportation Department to strengthen fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, which Trump weakened.

Furthermore, the report says Biden "plans to impose a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to caribou, polar bears and Indigenous people."

"American automakers are asking the U.S. government to help solve a debilitating shortage of computer chips that is closing auto factories worldwide and could restrict production until the fall," reports Bloomberg: The American Automotive Policy Council — a lobbying organization for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and the U.S. operations of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV — is agitating with the U.S. Commerce Department and the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden to press Asian semiconductor makers to reallocate output away from consumer electronics and build essential chips for cars.

"We have requested that the U.S. government help us find a solution to the problem because it will diminish our production and have a negative impact on the U.S. economy until it's resolved," Matt Blunt, president of the AAPC, said in an interview Friday. "We are not primarily concerned with where blame may lie for this global shortage, if it lies anywhere, but we just want a solution. And the solution is more automobile-sector semiconductors."

The shortage forced Ford to shut a sport-utility vehicle factory in Kentucky this week, and it is closing a small-car plant in Germany for a month. Fiat Chrysler has had to temporarily stop output at plants in Mexico and Canada. More production is expected to be idled in the coming weeks.

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire.

The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences.

Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.