Category: Science & Technology

Robocalls are at an all-time high. On average, Americans received more than 2,000 robocalls every second in October, up 25% from the previous month. With 49 billion robocalls so far this year, all four major U.S. phone carriers now offer some form of blocking or screening service, such as T-Mobile’s well known “Scam Likely” label. Congress and state officials passed new robocall regulations in recent months and have seen an uptick in successful cases against the scammers. Meanwhile, hundreds of tech start-ups are developing new ways to tackle the problem.

Content creators everywhere are starting to panic about an upcoming policy change over at YouTube that threatens to eliminate all accounts and channels on the Google-owned video platform that are deemed to no longer be “commercially viable.”

Facebook shares hit session lows after the company’s antitrust woes exploded with now 47 states and territories joining New York’s push to investigate the company’s advertising practices. 

Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Dr. Mann lost his case when, to the astonishment of legal experts, he refused to comply with the court direction to hand over and show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph. Mann’s iconic hockey stick has been relied upon by the UN’s IPCC and western governments as crucial evidence for the science of ‘man-made global warming.’

On Wednesday morning Facebook agreed to pay a record $5 billion fine to resolve a long-running federal investigation that has damaged the company’s standing with consumers and clouded its future, and agreed to better police its data-privacy practices.