Posts by aLinDev

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab, the country's leading particle physics research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent "The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Stuff That Will Blow Your Mind" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). You can follow him on Facebook. Lincoln contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Scientific discoveries come in many forms, like the surprise of radioactivity or the long search for the predicted Higgs boson. But some discoveries are mixed, with a hint in the data pointing to future measurements that can take years. A scientific study of the third kind is getting underway now, and the payoff for physics could be huge.

On Tuesday (Feb. 6), a collaboration of 190 scientists operating at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois began using an array of magnets arranged in a ring 50 feet (15 meters) in diameter to make one of the most precise measurements ever performed. In this research, called the g-2 experiment (pronounced "g minus 2"), or just g-2 for short, scientists will measure what is called the anomalous magnetic moment of the rare subatomic particle called a muon, which is a heavy cousin of the electron and spins sort of like a top. The muon, however, exists for only 2.2 millionths of a second when at rest. [Beyond Higgs: 5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe]

Microsoft Office may be the de facto productivity tool for millions of workers worldwide, but it's no monolith. Rather than a single, towering smooth-black Office, there's a whole Stonehenge of options: Office on the iPhone, on iPad, Office on Android smartphones, Office on personal computers, Windows and macOS, Office with a handful of applications, Office with fistfuls'.

But when you get down to it, there are really only two kinds of Office. One, which most label Office 2016, is the stand-alone suite that traces its roots back to the last century. (Its successor is Office 2019.) The other, Office 365, is the subscription service that debuted in 2011.

How they differ can be confusing, especially since each includes, more or less, the same applications. Here are three top ways to tell these tools apart, and a look at what's coming, based on Microsoft's recently announced new support policies for the upcoming Office 2019, as well as Office 365, down the road.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• How Office is paid for

• How each version of Office is serviced

• How Office hooks up with cloud services

• How Office will be supported in the future

How Office is paid for

Of the differences between Office 2016 and Office 365, purchase plans are among the most striking.

 
Office 2016, whether bought one copy at a time in retail or in lots of hundreds via volume licensing, has been dubbed a "one-time purchase" by Microsoft to spell out how it's paid for. (Labels like "perpetual," which has been widely used by Computerworld, technically note the type of license rather than payment methodology, but in Office's case, the kind of license is tied to whether it was bought outright or simply "rented.")

The Eclipse Foundation is running an online contest to rename enterprise Java, with participants able to choose from two names: Enterprise Profile and Jakarta EE.

You can vote via a Google Forms page. A Google account is required to participate. Voting closes on February 23, 2018.

[ The new Java versions are here! Learn everything you need to know about what’s new in Java SE 9 and what’s new in Java EE 8. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]
The chosen name also will be used for compatible, independent implementations. Enterprise Java has long been called Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) but is being renamed as part of Eclipse taking over the project. The renaming is necessary because Java EE remains a registered trademark of Oracle.

Eclipse warns that the name selected by this process has to pass legal and other trademark searches and may not become the chosen name. The final decision will be made by the Eclipse executive director, Mike Milinkovich, in consultation with the project management committee.

 
The two candidate names were selected after the foundation had taken nominations for a new name. (The Apache Software Foundation, which has its own Jakarta project for Java technologies, is OK with Eclipse using the name, the foundation said.)

Microsoft’s Visual Basic.Net and classic Visual Basic languages scored well in the Tiobe language popularity index this month, but that soon could change with the software giant’s plan to stop the co-evolution of C# and Visual Basic.

Visual Basic .Net, which uses Microsoft’s .Net Framework, placed sixth in this month’s index, with a rating of 4.072 percent, up 1.25 percentage points from February 2017, when the language placed eighth. The older Visual Basic language this month placed 12th with a rating of 2.177 percent, an increase of 0.3 percentage points from a year ago, when it was in 16th place.

Last year's blockchain pilot projects are rapidly becoming this year's live implementations in a variety of industries, and even sectors that have until now been vexed by the distributed ledger technology are following suit.

Case in point: Governments, which are moving to regulate blockchain technology and the cryptocurrencies it underpins.

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin that live in open networks, have so far inhabited a  regulatory gray area, because there's no way for a central authority to track users. The distributed ledgers, however, are useful because they can enable cross-border transactions over peer-to-peer networks in real time, anywhere in the world – without a central governing authority such as a bank or credit card company.

In recent months, however, the U.S., China and other countries have begun to adopt a more hands-on regulatory approach to cryptocurrencies.

 
One reason for regulating blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, also known as digital tokens, is the growing concern that the virtual money they represent could be used for nefarious activities, such as money laundering. Cryptocurrencies could also be a threat to the current financial system because they have at times encouraged unbridled speculation and unsecured borrowing by consumers looking for a piece of the crypot action.

"We have seen increasing evidence that people are borrowing to invest in cryptocurrencies, and in some cases borrowing on credit cards to invest in it," said Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. "That could lead to a credit collapse."

Last year, China outright banned initial coin offerings, a form of crowdfunding for cryptocurrencies, and later put the kibosh on trading in electronic currencies. More recently, the government began shutting off the power faucet for bitcoin mining pools, the large server farms that perform cryptocurrency processing.

In the U.S., various state agencies have also reacted to what they see as fraudulent activities by cryptocurrency companies by ordering them to cease sales of bitcoin. One Nebraska lawmaker filed three bills to amend the state's money-laundering laws to cover cryptocurrencies and, more broadly, blockchain applications.

 
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has ordered the suspensionof cryptocurrency trading by one company due to "unusual and unexplained market activity." More generally, SEC regulators around the country have regularly tweeted out warnings about cryptocurrencies.

"But I'm not guilty," said K., "there's been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We're all human beings here, one like the other."

"That is true," said the priest, "but that is how the guilty speak."

Sound Kafkaesque? That's because it's Kafka's The Trial, a nightmare story of an innocent man caught in an inscrutable bureaucracy, condemned to this or that fate, and with no way to challenge the decisions rendered against him. Machine learning has been compared to automated bureaucracy, and European regulators are clearly concerned that unfettered proliferation of machine learning could lead to a world in which we are all K.

[ Learn how to protect personally identifiable information (PII) under GDPR. | Get the latest from CSO by signing up for our newsletters. ]

But what does the GDPR, the sweeping overhaul of the 1995 European Data Protection Directive that affects any company that does business with Europeans, say about machine learning and artificial intelligence? Not a lot, it turns out, prompting legal scholars to debate what rights EU citizens have under the new law--and what GDPR compliance ought to look like for global companies operating in Europe.

 
The debate centers on the single occurrence of the phrase "right to explanation" that occurs in Recital 71, a companion document to the GDPR that is not itself legally enforceable. However, the GDPR states that data controllers must notify consumers how their data will be used, including "the existence of automated decision-making, and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject." [our emphasis]

A common-sense reading would mean that if a computer is making real-world decisions without a human in the loop, then there should be some accountability for how those decisions are made. For example, if a bank's machine learning model denies you credit, and does so without meaningful human intervention, then, some scholars argue, the bank owes you an explanation of how it arrived at that decision.

"People are selling what are essentially black box systems," Andrew Selbst, a researcher at Data & Society in New York, says. "When things go wrong, the programmers are hiding behind a lack of transparency, saying 'nobody can understand these systems.' Ultimately, that's not going to be an acceptable answer. It's an expression of human dignity, of human autonomy, not to have decisions made about us which have no reviewability," he adds.

Despite strong arguments that a right to explanation should exist, it remains less clear whether such a right does exist under European law--and if it does exist, it likely has loopholes an autonomous truck could drive through.

Is there a GDPR "right to explanation" for AI?

In a touchstone legal analysis published last year, Sandra Wachter, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK, criticized the notion, popular at the time, that AI would be heavily regulated by a "right to explanation" when the GDPR comes into force.

"From a legal perspective it's quite obvious what's going to be legally mandated as of May," Wachter says. "The phrase 'right to explanation' is mentioned once in a recital. Recitals are not legally binding, they are not separately enforceable."

Recitals, she explains, are meant to clarify any ambiguities in the law--but in this case, she says, there is no ambiguity. "I wrote that paper because I wanted to alarm people that we have problems that need to be fixed," she adds. "I'm very much in favor of a legally-binding right to explanation."

Wachter's opponents disagree with her interpretation of the GDPR, however. "The intent of the legislation is very clear," Julia Powles, a research fellow at NYU Law, and co-author, with Selbst, of a paper arguing for the existence of a right to explanation in the GDPR, says. "It's about giving meaningful rights to individuals about when [their data] is used and how it's accessed, how it affects life and life chances."

Two core principles of the GDPR are transparency and accountability for how data is processed. One can therefore infer a right to explanation in the GDPR, Powles and Selbst argue. However, the technical difficulty of implementing a "right to explanation" for increasingly complex AI systems has led some to question whether compliance with such a requirement would even be possible.

Is a "right to explanation" technically possible?

Nobody is quite sure. At present there are well-recognized trade-offs between accuracy and explainability when developing a machine learning model. The more accurate the model, the less obvious the model's decisions. This makes it difficult for humans to trust those decisions, though, especially when the stakes are high.

The stakes don't get much higher than the battlefield, and the Pentagon's skunkworks are investigating how to solve the problem. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same folks who brought you ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, launched an "Explainable AI" initiative in 2016, and gave a ton of money to researchers to spend four years banging away at this problem.

"[AI] systems offer tremendous benefits, but their effectiveness will be limited by the machine's inability to explain its decisions and actions to human users," DARPA's RFP says. "This issue is especially important for the Department of Defense...Explainable AI will be essential if users are to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage this incoming generation of artificially intelligent partners."

On GitHub, developers are spending more time on cross-platform development, deep learning, and acquring new coding skills, based on the popular code-sharig site’s analysis of activity on GiHub in 2017.

Google’s Angular JavaScript framework and TensorFlow machine learning library have experienced upticks in participation. Projects for learning, such as GitHub’s Coding Interview University, also have done well.

[ Get started with TensorFlow machine learning. • TensorFlow review: The best deep learning library gets better. • See what’s new in the latest version of TensorFlow. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]
For multiplatform and web development, the Angular CLI project, which provides a command-line interface for Angular applications, more than doubled its number of contributors from 2016 to 2017. Interest in the Angular framework itself also increased, as did participation in Facebook’s React JavaScript UI library and GitHub’s own Electron framework.

Github also took note of the growing profile of artificial intelligence across different industries. Projects that have seen increased interest include:

• TensorFlow, with 2.2 times more visitors than the year before. The companion TensorFlow Models project, for implementing models, had 5.5 times more visits.

• The Keras high-level neural networks API, written in Python.

• Mozilla’s Project DeepSearch, providing a speech-to-text engine leveraging machine learning.

Increasingly popular projects related to learning to code, coding best practices, and getting jobs included:

• Charengelo 30 Seconds of Code, providing snippets of JavaScript code.

• Norvig Pytudes, providing Python programs to hone or demonstrate skills.

• Jwasham Coding Interview University, with a study plan to become a software engineer.

• Yangshun Tech Interview Handbook, to help with coding interviews.

• iOnatan Node Best Practices, providing best practices for Node.js.

• Alibaba p3c, providing Java coding guidelines.

• Thedaviddias Front-End Checklist, providing a list of elements to test before launching a website or HTML page.

GitHub’s analysis looks at contributor, visitor and star activity to determine which projects are attracting interest.

Microsoft last year announced that there will be a successor to Office 2016, the non-subscription version of the application suite, and that the upgrade would ship in about a year.

The bundle, named "Office 2019," will be geared to customers, primarily corporate customers, "who aren't yet ready for the cloud," according to Microsoft.

But other than that description, Microsoft has been vague about the prospect of Office 2019 with a "perpetual" license, one that lets the customer run the suite as long as desired without further payments. So, we collected some of the pressing questions business may have about the suite.

What is a 'perpetual' Office?

Microsoft categorizes software by how it is paid for, discriminating between a license that was bought outright from one that is essentially "rented" because it's paid for over time, like a subscription.

 
Most of the time Microsoft uses the term "one-time purchase" to label a software license that is paid for with a "single, up-front cost to get Office applications for one computer." The purchase gives the buyer the right to use Office in perpetuity. In other words, the license has no expiration date, and users may run the suite as long as they want.

[ Related: What are the differences between Office 2016 and Office 365? ]
When will Microsoft release Office 2019?

The company pegged the launch of the suite during the second half of the year. "This release, scheduled for the second half of 2018, will include perpetual versions of the Office apps ... and servers," wrote Jared Spataro, general manager for Office, in a September post to a company blog.

Spataro called out "Office 2019" at the time as the nameplate for the application collection.

When will Microsoft release Office 2019?

No date yet, but there are hints enough to take a guess.

In late September 2015, Microsoft offered the Windows edition of Office 2016 to Office 365 customers first, then followed with retail versions. Office 2019 will likely appear around the same time of the year, in that same order.

Here's why.

Microsoft now issues two Office 365 ProPlus feature upgrades — ProPlus is the standard suite that provides rights to the locally installed applications, including Excel, Outlook and Word, for 365 subscribers — annually. Those feature upgrades begin reaching customers in September and March of each year. (Last Sept. 12, Microsoft issued a feature upgrade, designated 1708, to Office 365 ProPlus.)

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Because the perpetual licensed version of Office 2019 will be built from code already released as Office 365 ProPlus — and because a beta of Office 2019 will debut in mid-2018 — it's more likely that Microsoft will use the March feature upgrade for Office 365 ProPlus subscribers than the September 2018 feature upgrade as the basis for Office 2019.

The three months between the March 2018 appearance of the ProPlus feature upgrade and the July 2018 launch of the Office 2019 preview will give Microsoft time to digest feedback from customers and fix any bugs that surface. The change from Office 2016's beta release date (May 2015) to Office 2019's (mid-summer 2018) was probably necessary to accommodate the March feature upgrade timetable; Microsoft didn't adopt the Windows 10-esque feature release schedule for Office 365 until after the launch of Office 2016 in September 2015.

All Microsoft has to do to declare the applications delivered to ProPlus subscribers — Word, Outlook, and so on — as officially "Office 2019" versions is to rename them. It could do that on Sept. 11, 2018, the likely date it will release that year's second ProPlus feature upgrade.

What will be in Office 2019?

Microsoft's not saying.

The feature set may not be revealed until mid-2018, when Microsoft releases a preview of the suite. For his part, Spataro hinted at some of what will make it into Office 2019, calling out such features as Ink replay in Word and Morph in PowerPoint, which have been available to Office 365 subscribers for one and two years, respectively.

 
And that's important to remember.

There's little to no chance that Office 2019 will include any groundbreaking new features. Why? Because the perpetually-licensed version of the suite is built by taking the accumulated changes since the predecessor appeared — the changes issued to Office 365 subscribers over the past several years.

Microsoft will take the version of Office 2016 that Office 365 ProPlus users have in, say, the spring of 2018 — and that version of Office 2016 is different than the 2015 version of Office 2016 sold as a one-time purchase — freeze the code, and call it Office 2019.

In which forms and formats will Microsoft sell Office 2019?

Microsoft's not saying. One-time purchases of the current office range from Office Professional Plus 2016 (Windows) and Office Standard 2016 for Mac (macOS), the enterprise-grade SKUs available only via volume licensing, to retail packages such as Office Professional 2016 (Windows) and Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac (macOS).

It's certain that Microsoft will offer Office 2019 to commercial customers via volume licensing, but it may be questionable to assume that it will sell single-copy versions at retail.

Microsoft will, at some point, discontinue sales of Office perpetual licenses, analysts have agreed. (Microsoft has made no secret that it prefers subscriptions – Office 365 in this case – for the recurring revenue they generate.) Dumping single-copy one-time purchases would be the logical place to start reducing the perpetual option.

Spataro did not say so, but Office 2019 will come in versions for both Windows and macOS. There would be little reason to cull the latter, for instance, since Microsoft dominates that OS's productivity space, too.

Why is it important that Microsoft ship Office 2019 this year?

Another great question.

In 2017, Microsoft slashed the rights of users running non-subscription Office when it announced that perpetual-licensed versions of Office 2016 will be barred from connecting to Microsoft's cloud-based services, including hosted email (Exchange) and online storage (OneDrive for Business) after Oct. 13, 2020.

Under the new rules, owners of a perpetual license for Office 2016 can use those services only during the first half of their 10-year support lifecycle, the portion Microsoft dubs "mainstream." Office 2016's mainstream support ends Oct. 13, 2020.

By releasing Office 2019 this year, Microsoft will give enterprises a year or so to migrate from Office 2016 (or an earlier edition) before the cloud service cutoff.

Will Microsoft sell a one-time purchase version of Office after Office 2019?

We don't think so.

Why? Simple: Microsoft is slashing support for Office 2019 by 30%.

Rather than the usual decade of support – the first five in what Microsoft dubs "Mainstream," the second five as "Extended," which provides security-only updates – Office 2019 will get only seven years.

"Office 2019 will provide 5 years of mainstream support and approximately 2 years of extended support," said Spataro in the Feb. 1 announcement. "This is ... to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025."

That's the same day Office 2016's support expires.

The simultaneous retirement of the two perpetually-licensed suites is the strongest signal yet that Microsoft plans to shut down the one-time purchase option after Office 2019. By shortening 2019's support lifespan – something Microsoft has <i>never</i> done to Office for Windows – it will be able to wash its hands of both suites at the same time, ending the decades-old purchasing option and making the subscription-based Office 365 the onlyway to license the applications.

The late-2025 deadline will let Microsoft sell Office 2019 for years – during the Mainstream stretch, most likely – while hedging about a successor throughout. But it can still give enterprise customers a multi-year heads-up that it's the last of its kind (and that those customers need to move to subscriptions).

Is it true that Office 2019 won't work on Windows 7? Or even Windows 8.1?

Yes, that's true. Or maybe, no, it's not.

Along with its announcement that Office 2019's support will run out after seven years, Microsoft also painted the system requirements with a broad brush. The requirements are substantially more restrictive than Office 2016's.

According to Spataro's Feb. 1 post, Office 2019 will be supported  only on Windows 10. No love for Windows 7 (which retires in January 2020, or a year-and-change after Office 2019's debut) or Windows 8.1 (January 2023, four years and more). Those two older OSes will have to be satisfied with Office 2016 (which, again, doesn't fall off support until October 2025).

Spataro did not offer an explanation for the support limitation. Previously, like when Microsoft said that Office 2016 could not be used to connect to the company's own cloud services after Oct. 13, 2020, it's rationalized the decision by claiming that tying new (Office 2019 in this case) technologies to old (Windows 7 or Windows 8.1) resulted in substandard security and unimpressive features.

From Microsoft's perspective, the same reasoning could be applied to this ruling. The cynical among us would instead see it as another push to move everyone onto Windows 10 ASAP by limiting the functionality of prior editions of Windows.

But although Microsoft was crystal clear that it would not support Office 2019 on Windows 7 or 8.1, there's no guarantee that the suite won't necessarily runon devices powered by those operating systems. For all we know, Office 2019 may work, perhaps not perfectly, on the older OSes. Even if that were the case, however, Microsoft can easily bar Office security updates from reaching Windows 7 or 8.1 PCs. Historically, it has done exactly that, such as when it blocked Windows 7 systems from receiving Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) security updates after January 2016.

Okay, so we'll just move our Windows 8.1 systems to Office 365 to get an upgraded Office. Right?

Uh, no.

When Microsoft means it won't support Office 2019, it really means it. Along with the no-Office-2019-support-on-Windows-8.1 rule, Microsoft also put the kibosh on Office 365 ProPlus for 8.1.

"Effective January 14, 2020, ProPlus will no longer be supported on ... [Windows 8.1 and older]," said Microsoft's Spataro. "This will ensure that both Office and Windows receive regular, coordinated updates to provide the most secure environment with the latest capabilities."

In other words, three years before Windows 8.1's official retirement date, Microsoft will limit Windows 8.1 to running the perpetual versions of Office 2016 or Office 2013. (The latter's support runs out in April 2023, three months after Windows 8.1's expires.)

Blocking updates to Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 8.1 likely didn't make Microsoft blink; the operating system accounts for such a small slice of the overall Windows pie. In January, analytics vendor Net Applications pegged Windows 8's and 8.1's combined user share as about 7.6% of all Windows editions.

And by the time January 2020 rolls around, Windows 8/8.1 should be under 5%, if the decline trend remains close to that of the last 12 months.

This story, "FAQ: Office 2019 is coming; here's what you need to know" was originally published by Computerworld.

A few weeks ago I released django-registration 2.4.1. The 2.4 series is the last in the django-registration 2.x line, and from here on out it’ll only get bugfixes. The master branch is now prepping for 3.0, which will remove a lot of the deprecated cruft that’s accumulated over the past decade of maintaining it, and try to focus on best practices for modern Django applications.

I’ll write more about that sometime soon, but right now I want to spend a little bit of time talking about a deceptively hard problem django-registration has to deal with: usernames. And while I could write this as one of those “falsehoods programmers believe about X” articles, my personal preference is to actually explain why this is trickier than people think, and offer some advice on how to deal with it, rather than just provide mockery with no useful context.

These savvy, time-saving Google Docs tips will help you get more done when working with documents.

The browser isn't as glamorous as it used to be, but it's still among the most powerful and reliable tools of the Information Age. On the 25th anniversary of Mosaic – remember that? – take our quiz on the history and technology of browsers and see how much you really know.

Facebook is expanding its roster of original video content. The social media site has ordered a dramedy series starring Avengers: Infinity War star Elizabeth Olsen, according to Deadline. The 10-episode series is the latest in a string of acquisitions for the social media site, which has been working to develop its own content for its Watch platform.

The half-hour show is reportedly about a young widow (Olsen) who is dealing with the loss of her spouse, while at the same time reconnecting with people from her past. The series was created and written by Z: The Beginning of Everything writer Kit Steinkellner, while Switched at Birth’s Lizzy Weiss will serve as showrunner.

Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook was willing to spend upwards of $1 billion on original content in 2018, to develop its own original streaming content for its recently updated video tab, Watch. By doing so, Facebook is joining a plethora of competitors like Netflix and Amazon, each of which aims to develop their own content to entice consumers and users to their respective platforms. This new project adds to the shows that Facebook has already ordered, such as a remake of the Norwegian webseriesSkam, and a fairy-tale horror series called Sacred Lies.

It’s no secret that Apple is cooking up some type of augmented reality hardware at its Cupertino headquarters. CEO Tim Cook has broadly hinted at the company’s ambitions to deliver a head-mounted display or smart glasses device at some point in the future. More recently, Cook said that the “the technology itself doesn’t exist” to make augmented reality goggles at the level of quality Apple desires, suggesting the company may at hard at work rethinking conventional approaches to try and come up with a unique way to tackle the hurdles involved.

A new patent application, published today with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and detailed by Slashgear, sheds new light on Apple’s intended milestones for such a device — even if the finished product is years away from seeing the light of day. One the primary goals, it seems, is to create a headset or glasses that are much more comfortable and light than modern-day AR and VR devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Facebook-owned Oculus VR’s Rift headset.

While the patent application obviously doesn’t describe competing devices by name, Apple does lay out in its summary how “if care is not taken, a head-mounted display may be cumbersome and tiring to wear.” Apple describes the optical systems for these displays as “bulky and heavy,” and that “extended use of a head-mounted display with this type of optical system may be uncomfortable.”

Today, Getty Images and Google announced the forming of a multiyear global licensing partnership, nearly two years after Getty filed a competition law complaint against Google with the European Commission. As part of the partnership, Google will be modifying its image search to improve attribution of contributors’ work. The changes will also include making copyright disclaimers more prominent and removing view image links to the image URL.

The April 2016 complaint, which Getty has since formally withdrawn, accused Google of creating galleries of “high-resolution, copyrighted content,” and of “promoting piracy resulting in widespread copyright infringement.” Getty also accused Google of distorting search results in favor of its own services. Today’s partnership deal means Google will be able to use Getty Images’ content in its products and services, principally the image search portion of Google search with which Getty took issue.

“We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and thereby growing the ecosystem,” said Dawn Airey, CEO of Getty Images in a statement. The partnership is the result of conversations between Google, photographers, and publishers about how the search engine could better provide attribution in image search.

Last June, Google was hit with a record-breaking €2.42 billion fine by the European Union for manipulating search results to favor its own shopping services over those offered by competitors. The company is now facing increased scrutiny from European regulators over its search engine, which has led Google to make structural changes to some of its services overseas.

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent Alphabet, proposed a settlement of $500 million to Uber earlier this week, but the ride-hailing company’s board of directors rejected the deal, according to a report from Reuters, which was confirmed by sources familiar with the case. On Friday, the two companies settled their acrimonious lawsuit over stolen self-driving car secrets. The price tag: a much more reasonable $245 million in Uber stock, and a promise not to use Waymo’s trade secrets in any of Uber’s autonomous technology.

The proposed settlement earlier this week also would have included much harsher conditions on Uber, most likely related to its research and development on autonomous vehicle hardware, according to a source familiar with the case. As part of today’s agreement, Uber cannot incorporate Waymo’s confidential information in the hardware and software produced by its Advanced Technologies Group.

According to another source, Uber came to Waymo last week with a $500 million offer, but no promises about hardware and software use, in the hopes of heading off the trial before it began. Waymo insisted on including provisions to prevent Uber from using any of its self-driving trade secrets. The negotiations proceeded from there, with the two sides ultimately reaching a conclusion today.

This wasn’t the first time Uber turned up its nose at a proposed settlement from Waymo. The Google spinoff had originally sought at least a $1 billion and a public apology from Uber last year before the trial got underway. Uber, which was still under Travis Kalanick’s leadership at the time, rejected the deal.

Updated February 9th, 3:47pm ET to include additional information about the settlement negotiations.

It was less than a week after Logan Paul’s post-scandal return to regular vlogging that YouTube ”temporarily” suspended ads on his channel. The company’s decision reflects its promise to investigate further consequences for Paul specifically, as well as policies that would punish creators who do harm to the YouTube community. In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson said the decision was not made lightly: “We believe he has exhibited a pattern of behavior in his videos that makes his channel not only unsuitable for advertisers but also potentially damaging to the broader creator community.”

It’s no surprise that YouTube would give Paul’s channel extra scrutiny following the blowup, and yet his inability to amend his behavior to prevent further sanctions is sheer stupidity. The worst of the Aokigahara forest controversy is over, and Logan Paul didn’t learn a damn thing. “Even though I fucked up, like I’m an idiot, it doesn’t feel good to have millions of people to tell you to go die,” Paul says in his first vlog this week. But he promptly switches from that rare moment of reflection to talking about “getting yoked” at the gym and the engagement his Instagram photos have been getting. “I am probably like the most soundbiteable motherfucker on planet Earth,” he boasts. “I am a walking soundbite.”

And Paul’s subsequent vlogs feature him kicking up trouble again. His February 4th comeback is a 12-minute video that opens with a Cast Away-like spoof, where he sits on a beach, sporting a giant beard, and says “I’m not disgraced!… What other YouTuber you know can take a three-week break and still get a million subscribers?” His self-aggrandizing return vlog runs the gamut from a hard push to buy his merch to a diatribe about how the media twists things. Paul apologizes for being “annoying” in foreign countries, but promptly proposes he and his brother Jake get sent to North Korea, “find Kim Jong Un, we poke him in his little chubby tummy until he giggles like a teddy bear, and agrees to disarm all of his nuclear warheads.”

Paul kicked off his week with a now-deleted joke about swallowing Tide Pods on Twitter. It’s an especially tone-deaf move, given that his viewers are mostly teenagers, the demographic who can apparently be peer-pressured into eating Tide Pods in the first place. In a video posted on February 5th, Paul discovers that one of his koi fish is sick. He pulls the gasping animal out of the water, pretends to give it CPR-style chest-pumps, then swishes it around in the water like a toy boat to “get oxygen circulating through his lungs.” Later, he tasers a dead rat. “No rat comes into my house without getting tased,” he says, while his on-screen companions scream. In another video, Paul puts on a different fake beard, makes jokes about looking like a pedophile, and briefly pretends to have a seizure, before running around and asking college kids for their opinions on Logan Paul. Again, this is week one of his return.View image on Twitter

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Paul has been met with widespread criticism, petitions to remove his YouTube channel, and even death threats over his Aokigahara forest video. But he has his defenders, even outside of his fan base. Professional commentator Dr. Phil offered a reasonable argument as to why people shouldn’t “bury” Paul over a bad choice: “This is a 22-year-old young man, and this is one thing, one time, one bad decision,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “Let’s not judge this young man’s whole life, his whole body of work, everything that he’s done, over one bad decision,” Dr. Phil said. “It was a terrible decision… but that doesn’t mean he’s a horrible person.” (Though it isn’t entirely true that Paul only made one bad decision — none of his other videos blew up in the same way, but his trip to Japan was full of racially and culturally problematic moments.)

Briefly, this appeared to be a teaching moment for Paul. He delivered several apologies, took a break from social media, and went on Good Morning America to tell the world how sorry he was. The first video he posted after the blowup focused on the seriousness of suicide, and he promised to donate $1 million to suicide-prevention organizations. He seemed genuinely remorseful for his actions, and said he could learn to use his platform in a more thoughtful way. But he’s instantly returned to the outlandish pranks and attitude that landed him in hot water in the first place.

THE APOLOGY TOUR IS OVER

This is a strange time for social media. It’s possible to do more than just earn a living by being popular online; young people with no real work experience can make millions of dollars. But it’s an entirely new field, the rules are ill-defined and constantly changing, and the systems reward provocateurs over creators who carefully consider and moderate their impact. The term “influencer” still prompts sneers; there’s a stigma associated with vloggers and social-media stars, a perception that they’re freeloaders with no work ethic, who tweet all day and have no real skills. But that stereotype doesn’t reflect how much time online celebrities spend creating or editing videos, building up their own brands, or making partnerships and ad deals that will help them pull in money. Some have used platforms like YouTube to score acting gigs, like Grace Helbig. Michelle Phan built a beauty empire. Even Justin Bieber was once just a kid singing on YouTube.

Being an influencer is a modern form of celebrity that’s no more vapid than any other kind. In some cases, it even exemplifies the old-school American dream of working hard and reaching for the stars. Influencer careers are creeping toward general acceptance, but there’s a double edge to their growing prominence: social media stars are being taken more seriously than ever, but they aren’t taught how to not screw up. It’s still a wild, uncharted career path, with little education for how to chase this life, and even less guidance for how to do so without hurting people, sometimes irreparably.

There’s nothing wrong with influencers gaining fame and followers as they demand more of the spotlight than ever before. Logan Paul currently has more than 16 million subscribers on his vlogging channel alone; he, like many other influencers, wants to be a celebrity. But as his fanbase grows, so does his social responsibility. If, as Paul put it, being “hated by the whole world” isn’t a hard lesson in how to behave, what else is there? The teary-eyed, remorseful Paul who pledged to do better is already failing. The apology tour is over. Logan Paul is back to being Logan Paul, his own worst enemy. YouTubers everywhere will be worse off for it.

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On Valentine’s Day in 2012, Xiao Meili walked through a Beijing commercial district in a wedding dress, its shimmering white folds splattered with red. She and two other Chinese activists had decided to march through the busy shopping area in gowns covered in fake blood to raise awareness about domestic abuse, which affects 1 in 4 women in China,according to 2017 government estimates. As they carried signs with slogans like “Love is not an excuse for violence,” Xiao says passersby expressed their curiosity and support.

Activists have been advocating for equal rights for women in China for years, but because of the government’s strict rule, they face different struggles than their counterparts in the West — including online censorship, arrests, and forced evictions. “In a country where the government still exerts tight control over ideology, those inside the system rarely find the courage to speak up,” Xiao wrote in a 2015 op-ed. “Strong public pressure is necessary. We cannot afford to go about our campaign quietly.”

Earlier this week, a portion of iOS source code was posted online to GitHub, and in an interesting twist, a new report from Motherboard reveals that the code was originally leaked by a former Apple intern.

According to Motherboard, the intern who stole the code took it and distributed it to a small group of five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their ongoing efforts to circumvent Apple’s locked down mobile operating system. The former employee apparently took “all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot,” according to one of the individuals who had originally received the code, including additional source code that was apparently not included in the initial leak.

The plan was originally to make sure that the code never left the initial circle of five friends, but apparently the code spread beyond the original group sometime last year. Eventually, the code was then posted in a Discord chat group, and was shared to Reddit roughly four months ago (although that post was apparently removed by a moderation bot automatically).

But then, it was posted again to GitHub this week, which is when things snowballed to where they are now, with Apple ordering GitHub to remove the code. According to Motherboard, a source at Apple claims that the company was already aware of the leak before it made it to GitHub, which would make sense, since it seems to have been passed around the jailbreaking community for some time already. Apple itself seems unconcerned about the potential security issues, with the company noting in a statement that the code is already three years old and that “the security of our products doesn’t depend on the secrecy of our source code.”

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Waymo and Uber have reached a settlement in their self-driving car case. The announcement came as a big shock, even though I wrote yesterday that Waymo’s case was looking oddly weak. Parties are free to settle in the middle of trial (heck, they can settle while the jury is considering a verdict, and they can settle even after the verdict is out) but it’s pretty rare.

For one thing, it’s hard to think about negotiating when you’re busy prepping for trial the next day. For another thing, if you were going to settle, you probably should have done it before. It’s pretty messy to call off the boxing match in the middle of the third round.

Taking any case to trial — let alone such a high-profile case — is messy and exorbitantly expensive, and on top of that, jury verdicts are unpredictable. Sure, by settling now, Uber and Waymo manage to avoid rolling the dice with the jury. But they still spent what was likely millions and millions of dollars on their top-billing lawyers and expensive expert witnesses, and what not. This settlement avoided a jury verdict, but it didn’t save either party much money.

Why the settlement makes sense for Uber

My suspicion has always been that Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been eager to settle this lawsuit: it’s a lawsuit he’s saddled with because of the foibles of his predecessor, Travis Kalanick. It’s been a constant PR nightmare ever since it was filed in January 2017. It seemed like every few weeks there’d be a new public filing in the case that would blare out more juicy tidbits about Uber’s horrible corporate culture. The guy at the very center of this — Anthony Levandowski — was expected to take the 5th Amendment when called to the witness stand. Uber wanted no part in this shitshow.

UBER WANTED NO PART IN THIS SHITSHOW.

Khosrowshahi’s official statement in the wake of the settlement reads as genuinely contrite and shows a company ready to move on. Travis Kalanick was the type to find “cheat codes” and “use them,” Khosrowshahi is a grown-up who wants to run a company of grown-ups. Settling this case makes sense for a more mature, stable Uber.

There was a report last October that Alphabet (Waymo’s parent company) demanded $1 billion from Uber in settlement negotiations — a cash sum that just wasn’t workable. The settlement announced today is for equity: Alphabet gets approximately 0.3 percent of Uber. Uber is valuated at $72 billion, so that’s about $245 million in stock. No cash is changing hands, Uber isn’t going to have to dip into their coffers for this one.

The two parties have also agreed that Uber will work with Alphabet to make sure no Google confidential information is incorporated into their technology (both hardware and software).

That was the sticking point all along, apparently. Uber has always strenuously argued that there’s no Google confidential information incorporated in their tech, but when Waymo tried to reach a settlement for $500 million in equity and promises of non-use, Uber rejected the offer on Tuesday.

Keep in mind that $500 million is nothing for Uber or Alphabet — the Ottomotto acquisition was $680 million. It sounds like there is something about Uber’s self-driving tech that maybe Uber’s board wasn’t so sure of. Even if they were sure that Levandowski’s documents had never made it to Uber proper and that Uber technology wasn’t tainted by actual misappropriation, they might have thought there was still a certain resemblance to Alphabet’s intellectual property that they didn’t want to give up under a settlement.

So why agree to non-use now? It’s thought that Anthony Levandowski was going to invoke the Fifth Amendment when called to the witness stand. Levandowski’s name finally appeared on Waymo’s witness list on Wednesday night. And as that day drew nearer, maybe the Uber board finally lost its nerve, leading to its capitulation on Thursday night.

But how about on the Waymo side? If Waymo thought they were going to win, and get themselves an injunction against Uber, why not just take it all the way to the end and utterly humiliate their rival once and for all? And why keep dropping the amount of equity they were asking for?

Why would Waymo settle?

Once again, it’s really weird to settle in the middle of a trial. Before the revelation that Waymo had proffered that earlier $500 million settlement, I thought it was possible that it was Waymo’s plan all along to put Travis Kalanick on the stand, question him for two days about his terrible text messages, play the Michael Douglas “Greed is Good” speech in open court for the jury, and then blow this popsicle stand before a jury verdict could come in. Another possibility was that as the week progressed, Waymo realized its case was too weak to go to the jury.

And well, both possibilities only made sense if Waymo’s lawsuit — despite all of the hilariously suspicious circumstances around the alleged document theft — was actually a nothing burger all along.

After the report of Waymo’s settlement offer earlier this week, I think this all points to Waymo knowing it had a dud on its hands. Once Uber, for whatever reason, decided to capitulate to non-use terms, the settlement was in.

THIS POINTS TO WAYMO KNOWING IT HAD A DUD ON ITS HANDS

Look, it’s not that Waymo had no case. In trial, Uber did not try to dispute that Anthony Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents onto his work laptop, moved them onto his personal laptop, and then moved them onto other disks. Uber also did not try to dispute that Levandowski was getting cozy with Travis Kalanick before he left Google and that the two of them were unbearable bros who sent each other the most idiotic text messages you could possibly imagine.

But Uber fought back hard on the idea that Kalanick and Levandowski formed some kind of conspiracy in December 2015 where Levandowski would take 14,000 documents and bring them over to Uber. And even the most damning of documents — the Stroz Friedberg due diligence report, which records second- and third-hand information about a suspicious meeting at Uber — suggests that Travis Kalanick didn’t know about the documents until late in the game, that he never saw them, and that he told Levandowski to get rid of them as soon as he found out that they existed.

Of course, there’s plenty of stuff that Waymo was never able to get its hands on, simply because it was destroyed. Kalanick had 30-day auto-delete set on iMessage. His texts were still forensically recovered, but he also used Telegram and if he sent any ephemeral messages through that, Waymo never got ahold of them. Then there’s the missing “NEWCO” hard drive that was connected to Levandowski’s laptop back in January — NEWCO was Uber’s code name for the startup that would become Ottomotto. And of course, Levandowski was expected to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the stand, which, you know, makes you kind of think something’s up!

But just because things smell bad doesn’t mean that Waymo was going to win their case. It was Waymo’s case to prove, and they had over a year to comb through a mountain of phones, laptops, and servers. They tore Uber apart looking for the smoking gun and came up so short on evidence of a conspiracy that one of the exhibits they showed in court was a picture of a whiteboard at Uber where Levandowski had written “1) Pittsburgh -- I know some shit.” (Further down this truly genius list, he had also written, “3) West coast rap (Tupac).”)

Based on testimony, it does sound like something was weird about the circuit boards at Uber, but Anthony Levandowski’s general experience with LIDAR doesn’t count as a trade secret that Google gets to keep forever. Of course, if the circuit board infringed something Google had patented, they could sue Uber, even if Uber had come up with the idea independently and even if Levandowski was listed as an inventor on the patent.

The original lawsuit asserted patent claims as well as trade secrets. Eventually the lawsuit narrowed all the way down to eight specific trade secrets. A lot of this case has been under seal and the public hasn’t gotten a real look at the technology involved — because trade secrets lose their legal protection the moment they’re no longer secrets.

Yesterday I noted that I found it suspicious that Waymo had spent so little time under seal in the courtroom. Here’s the other thing: if the circuit boards were so similar, why did the patent claims drop out of this case? Isn’t that…. Weird?

WHY DIDN’T WAYMO SETTLE SOONER?

So it’s starting to look like the better question is, “Why didn’t Waymo settle sooner?” There’s a bunch of possible answers to that. For one thing, with a nothing burger case, maybe a non-use clause in a settlement agreement was the best they could hope for. And you can’t discount the possibility that it was mostly a grudge match between bros all along. Larry Page is reportedly extremely, extremely angry — or, in Kalanick’s words, very “unpumped.” Sometimes lawsuits aren’t driven by rational actors, they’re driven by people who are very mad at each other.

But the most important part is that even if Waymo wasn’t going to win the lawsuit, they’ve won a different war.

Alphabet still wins

Even with this abortive trial, the megacorporation-formerly-known-as-Google bought itself a year of negative PR for Uber. The parties wound up in front of Judge William Alsup in the northern district of California, who resisted lawyers’ attempts to keep things under seal. Because so much confidential information was at issue, a fair amount of the case is under seal and will probably remain so forever. But where no confidential information was at issue, Alsup would scornfully unveil transcripts and documents left and right that made both sides look bad.

Uber came out looking way worse, but that was entirely its own fault. The unsealed Stroz Friedberg report revealed an irresponsible corporate culture that played fast-and-loose; the unsealed Jacobs letter alleged that Uber spied on its competitorsand used ephemeral communications within the corporation. The very submission of this latter document into the case — by a federal prosecutor! — suggested that Uber was under investigation by the Department of Justice.

Sure, Waymo v. Uber wasn’t the only thing making Uber look bad in 2017. The lawsuit dropped during an onslaught of bad press for the ridesharing company: from Susan Fowler’s blogpost to the New York Times greyballing story to the revelation that Uber executives acquired the medical records of a rape victim in India. And then there was #DeleteUber, which actually got a significant number (200,000!) of people to delete their account.

WAYMO V. UBER WASN’T THE ONLY THING MAKING UBER LOOK BAD IN 2017

Waymo v. Uber wasn’t the one thing that ousted Travis Kalanick from the helm of the company he founded, but it probably helped. And at the very least, it led to Anthony Levandowski getting fired. This lawsuit ensured that Uber lost its genius LIDAR expert. (Although given the revelation that Ottomotto failed to meet most of its benchmarks post-acquisition suggests that Levandowski was not all he was cracked up to be).

Alphabet was likely looking to get a competitive advantage over Uber by dragging its name through the mud (which, to be fair, was mud of Uber’s own making). Beyond that, it’s also possible that Alphabet executives — specifically, Larry Page, who often communicated with Levandowski directly and was, according to Kalanick, absolutely enraged about losing him to Uber — were looking to send a message to Google engineers thinking about spinning off startups to sell to competitors. Once in the Google family, always in the Google family.

If that was one of Alphabet’s aims, they’ve likely failed, simply because Levandowski was such an extreme case. Very few technologists see themselves accidentally downloading 14,000 Google documents and moving them onto their personal laptops, right before quitting their jobs. And very few technologists see themselves personally sending Travis Kalanick ominous text messages that include links to a YouTube clip of the Michael Douglas “Greed is Good” speech. Nobody can imagine themselves as Anthony Levandowski, therefore nobody fears becoming Anthony Levandowski.

Still, with Kalanick’s departure, Uber is a very different company. While Dara Khosrowshahi cannot magically change the rank-and-file culture of his company overnight, the departure of scandal-ridden high-profile executives like Emil Michael is significant. In the wake of Waymo v. Uber, Alphabet is now looking at a very different self-driving car market, simply because one of its competitors is now very different.

And on top of that, Uber is not entirely a competitor anymore — with the additional 0.3 percent equity to Alphabet’s already existing stake in Uber, it’s adding a bet on Uber’s success as well.

Alphabet is a clear winner, but in a way, Uber is a winner too. There was a possibility that Waymo v. Uber was going to destroy Uber as a competitor in the self-driving car market. Sure, under the terms of the settlement, Uber is giving Alphabet equity and Alphabet is giving Uber nothing. But that’s not the full picture — Uber wins because it’s walking away from this lawsuit with a chance for a future.

IN THIS STORYSTREAM

The Uber-Waymo trial: greed, ambition, and robot cars

• Who blinked first in Waymo v. Uber?

• Uber rejected a $500 million settlement from Waymo earlier this week: report

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YouTube this afternoon detailed new policy changes going into effect after the latest controversy featuring YouTube creator Logan Paul, who had advertising temporarily suspended on his account today over videos featuring the abuse of dead animals. YouTube has been reportedly working on these policy guidelines since the start of the year, as CEO Susan Wojcicki said earlier this month that one of her company’s goals in 2018 was to create clear policies to punish creators who do “something egregious that causes significant harm” to the community at large.

The changes are straightforward: YouTube says it reserves the right to strip a channel of its ability to serve ads and its access to premium monetization programs like Google Preferred and its YouTube Partner Program, as well as the right to cease recommending a channel’s videos across its network, if that channel proves harmful to the broader YouTube community. YouTube describes its community as including “advertisers, the media industry, and most importantly, the general public.” It’s not clear what exactly fits the definition of harmful in these cases, but it seems as if YouTube will take cues from both the greater YouTube community and the general public. More bluntly, YouTube

YOUTUBE NEEDED A “BROADER SET OF TOOLS” FOR RARE INSTANCES OF HARMFUL BEHAVIOR

The Google-owned video site has always held these powers over channel owners as a platform-owning tech company. However, YouTube has been relatively hands off over the years as it’s ballooned into one of the largest media destinations on the internet, largely in part thanks to the symbiotic relationship it has with creators, who share in YouTube’s ad revenues. The company’s longstanding approach — combined with recent sea changes in public sentiment toward Silicon Valley and its responsibility to police its platforms — has resulted in a reckoning.

Offensive and immature creators like Paul, and to a lesser extent YouTuber Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg, are now forcing the company to make tough decisions on what types of content and off-site and on-video behaviors it deems unacceptable. These new changes introduced today more transparently codify YouTube’s newer, more strict approach against behavior the company feels harms its reputation and makes all of YouTube look lazily unregulated.

“We’ve long had a set of community guidelines that act as rules of the road for what creators can share on our platform and a set of ad-friendly guidelines for what they can monetize. We also have a system of strikes we use to enforce those guidelines which can ultimately result in a channel’s termination,” writes Ariel Bardin, YouTube’s vice president of product management, in a blog post. “But in very rare instances, we need a broader set of tools at our disposal that can be used more quickly and effectively than the current system of guidelines and strikes.”

In no uncertain terms, Bardin describes — without ever naming Paul — the damage that can be dealt by having large, immensely popular channels acting without any regard for the consequences. “When one creator does something particularly blatant — like conducts a heinous prank where people are traumatized, promotes violence or hate toward a group, demonstrates cruelty, or sensationalizes the pain of others in an attempt to gain views or subscribers — it can cause lasting damage to the community, including viewers, creators and the outside world,” Bardin writes, referencing how channel-owners like Paul have millions of fans, many of whom are impressionable young children.

“That damage can have real-world consequences not only to users, but also to other creators, leading to missed creative opportunities, lost revenue and serious harm to your livelihoods,” she adds. “That’s why it’s critical to ensure that the actions of a few don’t impact the 99.9 percent of you who use your channels to connect with your fans or build thriving businesses.”

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It’s not just Logan Paul and YouTube — the moral compass of social media is broken

Paul only recently returned to the platform in late January after a brief pause on his daily vlogging after a separate controversy involving his filming of a suicide victim in Japan’s Aokigahara forest, which sparked international outrage. Paul, it seems, did not learn much from the controversy, despite a suicide awareness video he made to reassure critics he understood the gravity of his actions, as his return has resulted in nothing but bad headlines and a continued pattern of behavior YouTube this morning called “potentially damaging” to the broader community and “unsuitable” for advertisers.” His latest mistake was to film himself tasering a dead rat repeatedly seemingly only for shock value.

“In the past, we felt our responses to some of these situations were slow and didn’t always address our broader community’s concerns. Our ultimate goal here is to streamline our response so we can make better, faster decisions and communicate them clearly,” Bardin concludes. “We believe strongly in the freedom of expression and we know that the overwhelming majority of you follow the guidelines and understand that you’re part of a large, influential, and interconnected community. But we also know that we have a responsibility to protect the entire community of creators, viewers, and advertisers from these rare but often damaging situations. We expect to issue these new consequences only in a rare handful of egregious cases, but hope they will help us prevent the actions of a few from harming the broader community.”

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