It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.

The site posted what appeared to be emails from a private account belonging to John Podesta, a top advisor to Hillary Clinton. The emails, which have not been confirmed as authentic, contain what seem to be excerpts from paid speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.

"I mean, politics is like sausage being made," the purported excerpt of Clinton's speech reads, according to the CBS report. "It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position."

"What we have been building is this concept of what we call the Microsoft security graph. With these cloud services, there are signals or telemetry that comes back, that allows us to see what is working, what is not working, what is being used. We have taken all that signal and we call that the intelligent security graph".

"Rather than you approving which patches you want, we are saying let them all flow because the way organisations get the most secure, the most compliant, the most reliable and most performance devices is to stay updated with all of our updates,” says Anderson.

The latest victim? Would you believe it's the European Parliament itself? Marietje Schaake, a really wonderful Member of the European Parliament (and a Techdirt reader), tweeted that the video she had posted of a European Parliament debate on "anti-torture" was taken down for "violating community guidelines." Really.

And while it's likely that with enough attention, YouTube will magically reverse its ridiculous position on this video, not everyone is able to get that kind of attention. It makes you wonder what other content is getting blocked because some algorithm, or some clueless individual, can't be bothered to understand what's happening.

Verizon has told its field technicians in Pennsylvania that they can be fired if they try to fix broken copper phone lines. Instead, employees must try to replace copper lines with a device that connects to Verizon Wireless’s cell phone network.

The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said.

The news agency says that the software scanned for a string of characters within all incoming emails, but adds that it was unable to determine what information was handed over or if other internet companies had received a similar demand.

The whistleblower Edward Snowden, who previously revealed details about the US's cyber-spying efforts, has tweeted in response to the unverified allegations: "Use @Yahoo? They secretly scanned everything you ever wrote... close your account today."

Facebook Messenger Lite, announced Monday, takes up a much smaller amount of a phone's storage -- just 10 megabytes -- than the full-fat app that most users have installed on their phones, and it has been pared back so that it runs peppily over slower-than-average networks. It is the companion app to Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of the social network, also for old Android phones, launched in 2015.

Everything is terrible. Most software, even critical system software, is insecure Swiss cheese held together with duct tape, bubble wrap, and bobby pins. See eg this week’s darkly funny post “How to Crash Systemd in One Tweet.” But it’s not just systemd, not just Linux, not just software; the whole industry is at fault.

In principle, code can be proved correct with formal verification. This is a very difficult, time-consuming, and not-always-realistic thing to do; but when you’re talking about critical software, built for the long term, that conducts the operation of many millions of machines, or the investment of many millions of dollars, you should probably at least consider it.

Based on the languages the Tweets anguishing over the Netflix blackout were written in, it appeared the service was down across much of the globe, including South America, France, Italy, Portugal and Germany.

Others were able to get to the main Netflix entry page, but when they attempted to click on a show to watch, the message "Whoops, something went wrong..." came up, followed by "There was an unexpected error. Please reload the page and try again."

Back in May, Robinson Meyer reported that the Post publishes about 500 original pieces of content and 1,200 other things–wire stories, what-have-you. “That’s more than one story every two minutes,” Meyer marveled. The newspaper has now grown that figure by 20 percent.