An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC New York: Colin Kroll, the co-founder of HQ Trivia and Vine, died of an accidental overdose, the city's medical examiner announced Tuesday. According to the autopsy results, Kroll died of "acute intoxication due to the combined effects of fentanyl, fluoroisobutyryl fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine." Kroll, 34, was found dead in his SoHo, Manhattan, apartment on Dec. 16, 2018. Police responded to a 911 call for a welfare check at the Spring Street apartment where they found Kroll unconscious and unresponsive in a bedroom of the apartment, a New York Police Department spokesman previously told NBC News. Kroll was named the chief executive of HQ Trivia, a phone-based trivia platform, in September. Prior to that, Kroll co-founded Vine, the popular short-form video service acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Vine was discontinued four years later.

slack_justyb shares a report from Ars Technica: The House Commerce Committee is "reassuming its traditional role of oversight to ensure the agency is acting in the best interest of the public and consistent with its legislative authority," Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) said in an announcement yesterday. Pallone, Jr. and Doyle wrote a letter to Pai, saying that he has made the FCC too secretive and has repeatedly advanced the interests of corporations over consumers. They wrote: "Not only have you have failed on numerous occasions to provide Democratic members of this committee with responses to their inquiries, you have also repeatedly denied or delayed responding to legitimate information requests from the public about agency operations. These actions have denied the public of a full and fair understanding of how the FCC under your leadership has arrived at public policy decisions that impact Americans every day in communities across the country. Under your leadership, the FCC has failed repeatedly to act in the public interest and placed the interest of corporations over consumers. The FCC should be working to advance the goals of public safety, consumer protection, affordable access, and connectivity across the United States. To that end, it is incumbent upon the Committee's leadership and its members to oversee the activities of the FCC."

On Thursday this week, the Communications Subcommittee will hold a hearing about the impact of Pai's net neutrality repeal on consumers, small businesses, and free speech. Witnesses who have been invited to testify at the hearing include former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, cable industry chief lobbyist Michael Powell (who is also a former FCC chairman), and representatives of Mozilla, Free Press, and Eastern Oregon Telecom.

An anonymous reader writes: Back in December, Samsung took the stage at one of its Chinese product launches and announced it was partnering with "Supreme," the popular skateboard fashion brand. The announcement was made with all the usual tech launch pomp and circumstance, with the CEO of "Supreme" coming on Samsung's stage to talk about the collaboration. The only problem: this was a Supreme counterfeiter called "Supreme Italia." The announcement was met with widespread ridicule online, as "Samsung the Apple copycat" had teamed up with a Supreme copycat. Samsung initially defended the deal, but after seeing the online reaction, the company started "reconsidering" its counterfeit collaboration. Now, two months after announcing the deal, Samsung is walking away.

You have read about bots that fight parking tickets. But what about all those flights that get delayed, canceled or overbooked? Could a bot look into that? From a report: AirHelp, a Europe-based company that assists people in pursuing such claims, today announced two new bots to further automate its operations and sift through the monumental number of requests it receives. AirHelp provides a free website people can use to determine if they are eligible for a refund from their airline. Founded in 2013 as a Y Combinator-backed startup, AirHelp claims to have aided more than 7 million people in processing airline compensation worth almost $930 million in total. The company, which operates in 30 countries, including the U.S., only takes a cut when a customer has been successfully reimbursed by the airline.

Naturally, it receives a high volume of claims. To sift through these, in 2016 it began working on bots to automate parts of its screening and analysis. The company launched two bots -- Herman and Lara -- and today it is adding AgA and Docky to the mix. AgA (short for Agent's Assistant) and Docky will help the company with customer service and automatic assessment of claims. AirHelp says it has been testing these bots internally since last year and that they have already assessed 30 percent of claims it receives with 95 percent accuracy. [...] AirHelp's new bots would complement Herman, which mimics the work of a legal agent and looks after 100 percent of cases requiring legal actions, and Lara, which assesses 60 percent of all cases that get past Herman's virtual desk.

The United States sees the European Union as its top priority in a global effort to convince allies not to buy Huawei equipment for next-generation mobile networks, a U.S. State Department Official said on Tuesday. From a report: After meetings with the European Commission and the Belgian government in Brussels, U.S. officials are set to take a message to other European capitals that the world's biggest telecommunications gear maker poses a security risk, said the official, who declined to be named. "We are saying you need to be very, very cautious and we are urging folks not to rush ahead and sign contracts with untrusted suppliers from countries like China," the official said. The United States fears China could use the equipment for espionage -- a concern that Huawei Technologies says is unfounded. The push to sideline Huawei in Europe, one of its biggest markets, is likely to deepen trade frictions between Washington and Beijing.

Photo-sharing website Flickr is starting to delete users' photos after changing its terms and conditions. The firm announced in November that it would no longer be allowing its members one terabyte of free storage. From a report: Under the new rules, there is a limit of 1,000 photographs for those who do not subscribe to the service at a cost of $49.99 per year. One terabyte would store around 200,000 photos with an average size of 5MB. Flickr was acquired by another photo platform called SmugMug in April 2018. The price it paid to former owner Verizon was not disclosed. In a blog in November announcing the changes, Flickr said that "storing tens of billions of Flickr members' photos is staggeringly expensive". It also said by introducing the free storage in 2013, Flickr's original owner Yahoo had "lost sight of what made Flickr truly special" as new users were attracted by the storage rather than the photography.

Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. From a report: Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out "Remove for everyone" to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarrassing thoughts, or any other message. For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender can tap on it and they'll find the delete button has been replaced by "Remove for you", but there's now also a "Remove for everyone" option that pulls the message from recipients' inboxes. They'll see an alert that you removed a message in its place, and can still flag the message to Facebook who'll retain the content briefly to see if its reported.

The feature could make people more comfortable having honest conversations or using Messenger for flirting since they can second guess what they send, but it won't let people change ancient history. The company abused its power by altering the history of Zuckerberg's Facebook's messages in a way that email or other communication mediums wouldn't allow.

After 130 years, it can be hard to come up with new flavors, so the world's largest spice company is becoming the latest food producer to turn to artificial intelligence for help. From a report: McCormick -- the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments -- hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations. The Baltimore, Maryland-based company plans to bring its first batch of AI-assisted products to market later this year. The line of seasoning mixes, called One, for making one-dish meals, includes flavors such as Tuscan Chicken and Bourbon Pork Tenderloin. Hamed Faridi, McCormick's chief science officer, told CNN Business that using AI cuts down product development time, and that the company plans to use the technology to help develop all new products by the end of 2021.

There are no 5G iPhones, and there probably won't be 5G iPhones for a while. But that isn't stopping Apple and AT&T: they are reportedly rolling out AT&T's fake "5G E" branding with its upcoming iOS 12.2 update. From a report: Much like when the two companies pulled this scam with 4G and LTE back in 2012, if you can't beat them, you roll out a software update to make it look like you did even though the phones and network are still exactly the same. Multiple users on Twitter are now reporting that they're seeing the new 5G E icon on devices running the latest iOS 12.2 beta 2, which was released earlier today. The new icon isn't there for everyone, presumably because it will only appear in cities where AT&T's 5G Evolution network -- the company's intentionally misleading name for its LTE network that it seems to hope customers will confuse for actual, next-generation 5G networks -- is active.