Amazon Alexa for Business Platform planned (CNBC)

Expected as part of today's re:Invent announcement deluge; also see Alexa for Business likely to win in smart office, leverage AWS, Echo, developers and consumers (ZDNet)

"The company intends to announce an Alexa for Business Platform, along with a set of initial partners that have developed specific "skills," or apps, for business customers.

The new technology could well come in handy for connecting into teleconferences or adding data to enterprise-focused sales programs, sources said. It would also add more personalized features, like an enterprise security layer that identifies and authenticates different people using the app at work, one person said.

Amazon is also likely to announce a new marketplace for the Alexa for Business apps, similar to the Alexa Skills page it already has for consumer apps, according to our source."

Amazon Alexa for Business Platform planned

Snapchat Seems Confused About Its Mission - Bloomberg Gadfly

Also see Here’s how to use the newly redesigned Snapchat (Hint: It’s not as hard) (Recode)

"CEO Evan Spiegel talked in an opinion piece on Wednesday about the damaging effects of digital hangouts -- Facebook, although he doesn't name the company -- that prioritize information feeds based on the predilections of friends and contacts. Fair point. We've seen from the garbage fires of Facebook and Twitter that social media can be a stifling place and a playground for trolls and misinformation campaigns.But Spiegel seems to have forgotten that his stated strategy is not to save the world from "filter bubbles" or "fake news" but to make his app more appealing to increase the number of people using Snapchat. Spiegel either lost track of his own mission or is articulating a high-minded goal for what is actually a self-interested strategy change."

Snapchat Seems Confused About Its Mission - Bloomberg Gadfly

Project Veritas effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dates back months - The Washington Post

Also see It's War, and the Washington Post Knows It (Bloomberg) and Project Veritas: how fake news prize went to rightwing group beloved by Trump (The Guardian), which notes "On 13 May 2015, a month before Trump launched his presidential campaign, his charitable foundation donated $10,000 to Project Veritas. This week ThinkProgress spotted that the foundation’s tax disclosure form for 2015 records a second payment of the same amount to the conservative group."

"The failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story about Senate candidate Roy Moore in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York, according to interviews, text messages and social media posts that have since been deleted."

Project Veritas effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dates back months - The Washington Post

We survived today's Amazon news avalanche to bring you this: Yes, a managed Kubernetes service will be a thing • The Register

Check the full article for a link index with details on some of the > 20 new services AWS introduced in its re:Invent keynote; some database-related highlights:

"There are some companies, Jassy said, that are expensive and try to lock customers in. "Oracle overnight doubled the price of their software to run on Microsoft and AWS," he said. "Who does that to their customers?"

That's why enterprise customers, he insisted, are trying to move as fast as possible to open services. He may have had one in mind, Amazon Aurora, AWS' cloud-based MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible relational database, which by Jassy's math is a 1/10th the price of an unspecified competitor.

But there are more to come. AWS rolled out database products to capture the hearts and minds of companies seeking respite from Oracle contracts. Beyond its existing kit – Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, and ElastiCache – Seattle-servers-for-hire announced: Amazon Neptune, a managed graph database service; Amazon Aurora Serverless, a preview version of its managed database targeting intermittent workloads with a pay-when-you-use-it model; and an expansion to its DynamoDB that supports replicating tables across regions and on-demand backup."

We survived today's Amazon news avalanche to bring you this: Yes, a managed Kubernetes service will be a thing • The Register

Bitcoin Recovers From Sudden Selloff as Large Swings Persist - Bloomberg

*coin business as usual...

"Bitcoin held onto most of its gains from late Wednesday, easing concern that an abrupt selloff hours earlier might spiral into something deeper.

The digital currency, after rallying as much as 20 percent from its low yesterday, was down 4.3 percent at $9,755.66 at 12:14 p.m. in London Thursday, according to prices compiled by Bloomberg. It set record highs during the past three sessions.

The relative calm in the European afternoon ensued after a 21 percent intraday slump on Wednesday coincided with intermittent outages at cryptocurrency exchanges that stopped fluid trading. That came just hours after bitcoin had soared to a record of more than $11,000, and on the same day that Coinbase Inc., one of the world’s largest virtual currency exchanges, lost a bid to block an Internal Revenue Service probe into whether some of the company’s customers haven’t reported their cryptocurrency gains."

Bitcoin Recovers From Sudden Selloff as Large Swings Persist - Bloomberg

Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say - The New York Times

Later in the article: "Customers often have little knowledge of where their data might end up, experts said, while D.J.I. and others give themselves considerable leeway in the fine print of their user agreements to transfer data across borders."

"D.J.I., the popular drone maker, stands as a symbol of China’s growing technology prowess. Its propeller-powered machines dominate global markets and buzz regularly over beaches, cityscapes at sunset and increasingly, power plants and government installations.

Now D.J.I. is fighting a claim by one United States government office that its commercial drones and software may be sending sensitive information about American infrastructure back to China, in the latest clash over the power of data in the growing technological rivalry between the two countries. It also shows how consumer technology companies have become increasingly central to debates about national security."

Drone Maker D.J.I. May Be Sending Data to China, U.S. Officials Say - The New York Times

Apple releases a macOS security update to fix huge login security flaw | TechCrunch

Apple might also want to update their apology for clearing open-at-login app lists; mine went away when I installed the security update (including Google Drive but not, weirdly, OneDrive)

"Update: Apple will automatically roll out the update later today for everyone who is affected. Apple has provided the following statement:

'Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS.

When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes the security hole. This morning, as of 8:00 a.m., the update is available for download, and starting later today it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra.

We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.'"

Apple releases a macOS security update to fix huge login security flaw | TechCrunch

NASDAQ plans to let investors bet on Bitcoin’s rise and fall - The Verge

Unlikely to end well

"NASDAQ is hardly the first player from the traditional finance world to jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon. At the start of this month, Chicago’s CME Group said it would begin providing futures contracts on bitcoin as well. As The Verge reported this morning, while many well-known bankers and investors continue to deride Bitcoin as a bubble or a Ponzi scheme, almost every major financial institution has been exploring how they might interact with Bitcoin and its underlying structure, the blockchain.

The introduction of various financial products around Bitcoin will amplify the amount of risk investors can take. Cantor Fitzgerald, a large broker which owns an exchange, announced today that it plans to launch Bitcoin derivatives in the first half of 2018. Futures and derivatives allow investors to place bets on bitcoin without owning any of the actual currency, amplifying the amount of financial leverage on the underlying asset. It was an explosion of derivatives pegged to real estate assets like mortgages that underpinned the financial collapse of 2008."

NASDAQ plans to let investors bet on Bitcoin’s rise and fall - The Verge

Bitcoin hits $11,000 - Daily chart (The Economist)

Not a bad *coin day so far... [update ~5 hours later: U.S. price back down to $9,652.00 and still dropping; see Bitcoin's price is collapsing and people can't trade because 2 big exchanges have crashed (Business Insider)]

"ALTHOUGH it may defy all reason, it should surprise no one that the price of bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, has just passed $11,000. Bitcoin’s ascent has been dizzying: four days ago it was worth less than $9,000 and a year ago it was worth less than $800. The cryptocurrency has plenty of doubters, including Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase, a bank. In September Mr Dimon declared that bitcoin was a “fraud”, and that he would fire any employee found trading the cryptocurrency for being “stupid”. Markets were initially rattled, but have regained their resolve. The price of bitcoin has since risen by around 160%.

Bitcoin’s boosters argue that the currency is valuable because its supply is limited to 21m, a number no central bank can change. But its rapid appreciation should still worry all who hold it. What has changed in the past ten days to suggest that bitcoin should be worth $11,000 rather than, say, $8,000? Bubbles also burst."

Bitcoin hits $11,000 - Daily chart

Snap CEO hits back at Facebook and its fake news problem - The Verge

See How Snapchat is separating social from media (Axios) for details

"Snap’s CEO even wants to separate Snapchat from being described as a social network altogether. “While many people view Snapchat as a social media service, it is primarily used to talk with friends – like visual texting,” says Spiegel. “Snapchat began as an escape from social media, where people could send photos and videos to their friends without the pressure of likes, comments, and permanence.”

Spiegel wants to focus Snapchat on personalizing stories creating by publishers in a different way to highlighting what your friends share. “The combination of social and media has yielded incredible business results, but has ultimately undermined our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media,” explains Spiegel. “We believe that the best path forward is disentangling the two by providing a personalized content feed based on what you want to watch, not what your friends post.”"

Snap CEO hits back at Facebook and its fake news problem - The Verge

Facebook Says 99% of IS, Al Qaeda Content Spotted by AI - Bloomberg

Also see Hard Questions: Are We Winning the War On Terrorism Online? (Facebook Newsroom). Later in the Bloomberg article: "[Peter Neumann, who runs the International Centre for the Study of Violent Extremism and Political Radicalisation at Kings College, London] said that terrorist groups were increasingly switching to smaller platforms, such as messaging service Telegram, which use end-to-end encryption and are more difficult to police."

"Facebook’s artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at keeping terrorist content off the social network, the company has said.

Today, 99 percent of Islamic State and Al Qaeda-related content Facebook removes is detected by the company’s AI before any user flags it, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, head of counter-terrorism policy, said Wednesday. They said in some cases the software was able to block the content from ever being posted in the first place.

The executives cautioned that Facebook’s automated solutions are still imperfect, however. “A system designed to find content from one terrorist group may not work for another because of language and stylistic differences in their propaganda,” they said."

Facebook Says 99% of IS, Al Qaeda Content Spotted by AI - Bloomberg

Bitcoin Blasts to Record $10,000 as Bubble Warnings Multiply - Bloomberg

What could possibly go wrong?... Also see What Bitcoin Watchers Are Saying After the Surge Past $10,000 (Bloomberg)

"Bitcoin surpassed $10,000 for the first time and continued higher, taking this year’s price surge to 11-fold even as warnings multiply that the largest digital currency is an asset bubble.

The euphoria is bringing to the mainstream what was once considered the provenance of computer developers, futurists and libertarians seeking to create an alternative to central bank-controlled monetary systems. While the actual volume of transactions conducted in cryptocurrencies is relatively small, the optimism surrounding the technology continues to drive it to new highs."

Bitcoin Blasts to Record $10,000 as Bubble Warnings Multiply - Bloomberg

FCC chairman Ajit Pai lambastes Twitter as net neutrality debate heats up - The Washington Post

Perhaps auditioning for his next job, as a conservative lobbyist? Also see FCC Chairman Ajit Pai blasted everyone from Twitter to Cher for opposing his efforts to repeal net neutrality rules (Recode)

"Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, blasted Twitter on Tuesday for what he said was a push to “discriminate” against conservatives, during an aggressive defense of his agency’s plan to repeal net neutrality rules.

Speaking during an event hosted by the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank, Pai accused Twitter of hypocrisy for its criticism of the FCC's plan to repeal the Obama-era regulation.

“When it comes to a free and open Internet, Twitter is part of the problem,” Pai said. “The company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate.”"

FCC chairman Ajit Pai lambastes Twitter as net neutrality debate heats up - The Washington Post

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times

Or, if you prefer the "don't worry, be happy" point of view, see Like Y2K, the Net neutrality crisis is way overhyped (Boston Globe -- also see the comments; it may be Hiawatha Bray's least popular article)

"But look, you might say: Despite the hand-wringing, the internet has kept on trucking. Start-ups are still getting funded and going public. Crazy new things still sometimes get invented and defy all expectations; Bitcoin, which is as Wild West as they come, just hit $10,000 on some exchanges.

Well, O.K. But a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.

It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen."

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death. - The New York Times

A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation. - The Washington Post

Putting a spotlight on Project Veritas and clarifying the rules of engagement for others thinking of similar scams

"After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”"

A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation. - The Washington Post

Breitbart, Kim Dotcom, Julian Assange, and Trump’s Right-Wing Base Reject Plan to Axe Net Neutrality (The Intercept)

Another great example of Trump as a "uniter"

"Internet freedom activists and progressive organizations immediately responded to the announcement with a wave of opposition, as was expected.

But more interestingly, in some of the most right-wing and Trump-supporting corners of the internet, there is a rebellion brewing.

Take, for instance, Breitbart News. The popular right-wing website has been a loyal ally to President Donald Trump, perhaps more devoted to his cause than any other."

Breitbart, Kim Dotcom, Julian Assange, and Trump’s Right-Wing Base Reject Plan to Axe Net Neutrality

Microsoft and SAP join forces to give customers a trusted path to digital transformation in the cloud | News Center

Classic Microsoft PR fodder on the eve of Amazon's re:Invent conference; since "SAP encourages its customers to run its products not only on Microsoft Azure but also on rival cloud platforms from Amazon (AMZN.O), Google (GOOGL.O), IBM (IBM.N) and SAP’s own in-house cloud services" (Reuters), one take-away from this announcement is that Microsoft doesn't believe it's cost-effective to migrate its own IT operations from legacy SAP to Microsoft Dynamics 365.

"Microsoft Corp. and SAP SE on Monday announced integrated offerings to provide enterprise customers with a clear road map to confidently drive more business innovation in the cloud. In a bold show of commitment, the two companies also announced they will be deploying each other’s cloud solutions internally. Through their unique partnership, the companies will co-engineer, go to market together with premier solutions and provide joint support services to ensure the best cloud experience for customers.
SAP HANA® Enterprise Cloud — SAP’s private managed cloud service — on Microsoft Azure will allow customers to run SAP S/4HANA in a secure, managed cloud. Additionally, Microsoft will deploy SAP S/4HANA® on Azure to help run its own internal finance processes, and SAP will move its key internal business critical systems to Azure. Finally, SAP Ariba is currently utilizing Azure and is exploring further use within its procurement applications. Together, SAP and Microsoft will help companies make the most of running SAP applications in the cloud."

Microsoft and SAP join forces to give customers a trusted path to digital transformation in the cloud | News Center

As Bitcoin Scrapes $10,000, an Investment Boom Like No Other - The New York Times

From a timely *coin reality check; in related news, Musk: I Am Not Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto (Bloomberg)

"Bitcoin has remained popular as a way to pay for illegal drugs online because of the ability to open a Bitcoin wallet without providing any personal information.

But Bitcoin has faced competition on this front from virtual currencies that provide more privacy. And the overall black market trade has diminished this year after the authorities took down some of the largest black market websites in the summer.

This has been welcome news for many Bitcoin backers who want to see it lose its shadowy associations."

As Bitcoin Scrapes $10,000, an Investment Boom Like No Other - The New York Times

A New Way for Machines to See, Taking Shape in Toronto - The New York Times

Making Canada great again

"Ms. Sabour is an Iranian researcher who wound up in Toronto after the United States government denied her a visa to study computer vision at the University of Washington.

Her task is to turn Mr. Hinton’s conceptual idea into a mathematical reality, and the project is bearing fruit. They recently published a paper showing that in certain situations their method can more accurately recognize objects when viewing them from unfamiliar angles.

“It can generalize much better than the traditional neural nets everyone is now using,” Ms. Sabour said."

A New Way for Machines to See, Taking Shape in Toronto - The New York Times

Tesla’s Newest Promises Break the Laws of Batteries (Bloomberg)

2020 vision

"These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery.
“I don’t think they’re lying,” Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work.”
Here are four of Tesla’s most provocative battery claims — and an attempt to puzzle out how they might be achieved."

Tesla’s Newest Promises Break the Laws of Batteries