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Facebook pledges $130 million for its content oversight board
Over the past year, Facebook has been working to put together a content oversight board. We've heard Mark Zuckerberg's vision, and Facebook shared a charter outlining its rules. Now, Facebook is committing $130 million to the effort.
Amazon reportedly lists some toys before confirming they're safe
Some toys may appear on Amazon without being vetted for safety. According to a CNBC report, multiple third-party sellers say they were only asked for proof of safety compliance weeks after their products were listed for sale. While the practice might help speed up the listing process, it could also lead to unsafe products being sold on Amazon.
How GDPR is affecting the games you love
The tech world has been bracing for a new set of European privacy rules that go into effect: the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR. Companies will have either changed how they handle their EU users' personal data or face serious fines. The regulations are intentionally broad, which has led them to affect industries that aren't typically thought of as trafficking in user information -- like gaming. That means gamers are protected by GDPR while playing online or posting in forums. But in complying with the EU regulations, gaming companies are nervous that they'll inadvertently run afoul of the new law's vaguely written rules.
US government says Theranos lab jeopardizes patients' health
Federal regulators have sent a letter to troubled Theranos Labs and the news is not promising. The (CMS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services states in a letter that it conducted a CLIA recertification survey of the lab and found it that it was not in compliance. In the letter signed by Karen Fuller, manager of state oversight for CMS, the agency noted that in regard to the hematology portion of the lab "it was determined that that the deficient practices of the laboratory pose immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety."
Discover Mac desktops in Microsoft SCCM with Parallels Management
Along with its presence here at Macworld/iWorld and MacIT this week, virtualization heavyweight Parallels has a new offering to help big businesses and other large-scale enterprises wrangle their growing (and sometimes unpredictable) Mac populations in the context of the Windows-centric management tools they already have in place. Launching today, Parallels Management is a suite of plugins and agents that allow OS X machines to be audited and managed inside Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) console. The Parallels plugin delivers visibility of Macs on corporate networks, while also giving administrators the controls they are accustomed to on the Windows deployments in their environments. For OS X machines with Parallels Desktop's enterprise edition installed, those virtual machines can be controlled and locked down in compliance with the organization's overall security and IT policies, just like the hardware PCs are. If your organization already has an investment and internal expertise on SCCM, an approach like the Parallels Management setup makes a lot of sense. Of course, if there's not an installed management platform and you have a heterogeneous OS profile or a BYOD plan for your users, platform-agnostic options like Absolute Manage (formerly LANrev) might be more fluid. Even if you prefer to manage the Mac deployments with a platform-specific tool like JAMF's Casper Suite, that doesn't mean that SCCM admins in corporate IT must remain forever ignorant of what's going on in Mac-land. The SCCM plugin for Casper provides real-time audit data to the SCCM database from JAMF's inventory of installed Macs on the network. Parallels Management is offered as a US$30/year/Mac subscription license, providing all the audit and management access to SCCM. The enterprise edition of Parallels Desktop, which provides single license key installs and mass deployment of VMs (and which you can deploy using JAMF's tools, if you like), is $100/year/Mac.
Sony suspends PlayStation Store for PS3 in Korea, blames new law about selling to minors
Sony has been caught unawares by a legal change in South Korea, which prevents under-18s from being asked for their names or ages for the purpose of account authentication. No sooner had the company announced a half-price sale at its PS Store and then it was forced to pull the whole thing down in order re-work the interface and make it compliant. It's expecting to reopen it sometime "this year," but in the meantime the Store is strangely still accessible to PSP and Vita users of any age, while multiplayer and other PSN functions will continue to run on PS3. There must be a lawyer somewhere for whom this all makes complete sense, and hopefully they work for Facebook.
W3C tests HTML5 browser compatibility, crowns IE9 the champ
The World Wide Web Consortium -- you know, the team responsible for certifying and standardizing HTML5 -- has put together its first table of official conformance test results, giving us an idea of how well prepared each of the most popular browsers is for the oncoming web standards revolution. The data show Internet Explorer 9 as the most adroit performer (again), though Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari don't seem to be too far behind in their HTML5 compliance, either. Of course, these checks don't cover the entire spec, which in itself isn't even finalized yet, but they provide us with a glimpse into a brave new world where Microsoft actually cares about coders keen on maximizing interoperability by adhering to web-wide standards. Good stuff. Check out the full results at the source link below. [Thanks, Mehran]
UAE says BlackBerry is now compliant with regulations, free to rock on
The latest thrilling installment in BlackBerry's Middle East saga has turned out not to be so thrilling after all. Having set an October 11 deadline for RIM to comply with its "telecommunications regulatory framework," the United Arab Emirates is today reporting that the BlackBerry maker has managed to make the necessary changes with plenty of time to spare. Consequently, there'll be no state-ordained curtailing of email, web, or BBM services within the UAE, which mirrors similar agreements that BlackBerry has managed to finagle with India and Saudi Arabia. Of course, the grand purpose of the UAE's ultimatum was for RIM to allow the state access to encrypted messaging communications, and while the current announcement is pointedly missing details on what's been done to appease the Abu Dhabi decision makers, we can't imagine them giving up the fight without RIM making some type of concession. And the shady, undisclosed concessions happen to be our least favorite kind.
Apple supplier audit reveals sub-minimum wage pay and records of underage labor
Apple's famous desire for total control over its operations seems to have extended to its manufacturing facilities as we've come across Cupertino's Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report, which details audits the American company has done of its overseas suppliers and the failures identified therein. The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple's already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit). Apple is, predictably, not jazzed about the situation, and has taken action through train-the-trainer schemes, threats of business termination with recidivist plants, and -- most notably -- the recovery of $2.2 million in recruitment fees that international contract workers should not have had to pay. It should come as no shock to learn that cheaper overseas factories are cutting illegal corners, but it's disappointing to hear Apple's note that most of the 102 audited manufacturers said Cupertino was the only vendor to perform such rigorous compliance checks. Still, we'll take what we can get and the very existence of this report -- which can be savagely skewed to defame Apple's efforts (as demonstrated expertly by The Daily Telegraph below) -- is an encouraging sign that corporate responsibility is being taken seriously. We hope, wherever your geek loyalties and fervor may lie, that you'll agree Apple's leading in the right direction and that its competitors should at the very least have matching monitoring schemes. They may have to swallow some bad PR at first, but sweeping up the dirty details of where gadgets come from is juvenile and has no place in a civilized world. Hit the source link for the full report.
HDMI issues at GDC? Or simply no cable?
The PS3 dev kits on display at GDC apparently skipped the HDMI connection for some of their demos, casting doubt on how far along Sony's come with its hardware and digital standards compliance.During GDC, Sony brought along a few PS3 demo units to show off audio and video, which TG Daily spied from a distance. As you can see above, the PS3 graphics demo unit used a standard AV Multi-Out connector while the "two HDMI ports right below the AV Multi-Out port were unused." TGD apparently offered to lend Sony officials an HDMI cable of their own to connect to the system, but they were turned down.Of course, there's also a conflicting pic which Chris Grant took for us on Joystiq Central that seems to show that very HDMI connection being used, probably with another unit. (Scroll down to the second pic here to see it.) So what's the real story? Was Sony lacking enough updated HDMI 1.3 hardware and/or 1.3-compatible TVs to show off the HD goods, or were they simply short on cables? Maybe their budget was a bit tight for GDC (what with Phil's focused keynote and abundance of GDC sessions from Sony), so hopefully we'll see everything hooked up nice and tidy for E3.[Thanks, Michael, Racky, pheen, and DocEvil; via TechSpot and CD Freaks]
