An error in Facebook's automated system rejected a user's picture of onions for being "overtly sexual." The BBC reports: The Seed Company by EW Gaze, in St John's, Newfoundland, had wanted to post a seemingly innocent advert for Walla Walla onion seeds on Facebook. But to their surprise, it was rejected for being "overtly sexual." In a statement on Wednesday, the social media company apologized for the error made by its automated technology. It took store manager Jackson McLean a moment to realize what the issue was with the posting, he said. Then he figured out that "something about the round shapes" could be suggestive of breasts or buttocks.

He knew his customers would find the ad rejection funny, and posted the photo, along with the automated Facebook message warning "listings may not position products or services in a sexually suggestive manner," to the company page. Mr McLean said some clients have been posting images of potentially suggestive carrots and pumpkins in reply. He also appealed the decision to Facebook.

The Walla Walla onions, "an older onion variety," had recently brought back in stock by customer request, and are now selling fast due to their newfound notoriety, he said. "We've sold more in the last three days than in the last five years," said Mr McLean, adding they are also now listed under "sexy onions" on the company website.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Gluck, one of America's most celebrated poets, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm. From a report: Gluck, who was born in New York in 1943, has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older. They include "The Wild Iris," for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and "Faithful and Virtuous Night," about mortality and grief, from 2014. She was named the United States' poet laureate in 2003. At the Nobel announcement, Anders Olsson, the chair of the prize-giving committee, praised her minimalist voice and especially poems that get to the heart of family life. "Louise Gluck's voice is unmistakable," he said. "It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals this poet wants to be understood." But he also said her voice was also "full of humor and biting wit."

According to the Subway Ireland website, the chain's six-inch and footlong subs are available on six different kinds of bread, including nine-grain multi-seed, Italian white bread, Italian herbs and cheese, nine-grain wheat, hearty Italian, and honey oat. And, according to the country's Supreme Court, all six varieties are too sugary to legally be called "bread" at all. From a report: The court case itself is a slightly confusing one unless you're well versed in Irish tax policies, but it started when a Subway franchise owner challenged the tax authorities' decision not to issue a refund for value-added tax (VAT) on some takeout foods. Galway-based Bookfinders LTD said that it shouldn't have to pay VAT on hot coffee and tea, or on the hot sandwiches that weren't eaten inside the restaurant.

Its argument was that since the sandwiches contain bread, they should be considered a "staple food" and shouldn't be taxed. But the five Supreme Court judges countered by suggesting that those sandwiches aren't served on "bread" at all, at least not under the "statutory definition of bread." According to the Irish Independent, the judges ruled that Subway's bread is not a staple food because its sugar content is 10 percent of the weight of the flour in the dough; the Value-Added Tax Act 1972 stipulates that sugar, fat, and "bread improver" cannot add up to more than 2 percent of the weight of the flour. (Those limits are in place to prevent things like pastries and other sweet baked goods from being labeled as "staple foods" and exempt from being taxed.)

Kelerei writes: Microsoft Flight Simulator players spotted a giant mountain-high obelisk in Australia last month. While Flight Simulator has done a great job at recreating the real world, this unusually huge structure doesn't exist in real life. Players have now discovered that its existence stems from a simple typo. University student Nathan Wright made an edit to OpenStreetMap data for part of his degree work last year, adding more than two hundred stories to a building that's actually just two stories. Wright meant to type 2, but instead he typed 212 in the data section for floors. "I think it's so funny as it was the first time I was using OpenStreetMap," says Wright in an email to The Verge. "I was using it for a university task and had to add data for class. I didn't think I would have to see it again." His university work is now internet famous, especially with the Microsoft Flight Simulator community. The typo made its way into Microsoft's Bing Maps data, which Asobo Studio, the developers behind Microsoft Flight Simulator, uses to map out the world in the game. Flight Simulator uses Azure-powered procedural generation technology, combined with Bing Maps data, to recreate virtual buildings like this 212-story obelisk.

Gary Larson has released new comics for the The Far Side, the first strips since January 1995. Larson does however caution that this is "not a resurrection of The Far Side daily cartoons." He adds: "I'm just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff." The Verge reports: The first of the new comics features bears, aliens, and taxidermy (all staples of The Far Side). The style is comfortably familiar, with two large exceptions: instead of watercolor, the new comics are done in digital brushstrokes that make the images feel more volumetric and vibrant than the original full-color cartoons. Also, the penned outlines, which exist in both the watercolor and black-and-white original comics, are almost entirely gone. The end result is images that evoke the feel of the old comics but are somehow a little less cartoony. The characters and elements all feel unified in the scene together.

Both the style changes and the comic's return are due to the fact that Larson is now using a digital tablet. After years of frustration dealing with clogged pens and dried-up markers, Larson decided to give going digital a chance. "I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved," Larson writes in an opening letter for New Stuff, the title for his new works. "Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman."

hcs_$reboot writes: President Donald Trump said Monday that he has been taking anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for over a week to prevent coronavirus infection even though it is not yet a proven treatment. Hydroxychloroquine, which is available as a generic drug and is also produced under the brand name Plaquenil by French drugmaker Sanofi, can have serious side effects, including muscle weakness and heart arrhythmia. A small study in Brazil was halted for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking chloroquine, which hydroxychloroquine is derived from, developed arrhythmia, including some who died. Even Fox News agrees that this drug is harmful, adds hcs_$reboot. "I cannot stress this enough, this will kill you," Fox News host Neil Cavuto said.

Trump said Monday he asked his White House physician about the drug. "I asked him, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Well, if you'd like it.' I said, 'Yeah, I'd like it. I'd like to take it.'" Trump said Monday that if the drug wasn't good he'd "tell you." He said he's gotten "a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy, and I say hey -- you know the expression I've used, John? What do you have to lose?"

"I'm not gonna get hurt by it. It's been around for 40 years," he said. "For malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it -- excuse me, a lot of doctors take it. I take it."

The Washington Post describes it as "the next internet." Wikipedia defines it as "a collective virtual shared space...including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet." But it was Neal Stephenson who named it "the metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

Are we closer to seeing it happen? The Washington Post reports: In the past month, office culture has coalesced around video chat platforms like Zoom, while personal cultural milestones like weddings and graduations are being conducted in Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The Metaverse not only seems realistic — it would probably be pretty useful right about now. The Metaverse reality is still years, possibly decades, away. But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been publicly pushing for its creation, and he isn't alone in his desire to push for the Metaverse, where the online world echoes and fulfills real-world needs and activities. Constructing the virtual Internet space is Silicon Valley's macro goal, many of whom are obsessed with Neal Stephenson's 1992 book, "Snow Crash," which defined the term.

In recent years, Facebook, Google and Samsung have all made heavy investments in cloud computing and virtual reality companies in anticipation of a Metaverse... But it's Epic Games, with Fortnite, that has the most viable path forward in terms of creating the Metaverse, according to an essay by venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball... [The article also notes other "traits" of the metaverse in Minecraft and Roblox.] The most widely agreed core attributes of a Metaverse include always being live and persistent — with both planned and spontaneous events always occurring — while at the same time providing an experience that spans and operates across platforms and the real world. A Metaverse must also have no real cap on audience, and have its own fully functioning economy... Fortnite hasn't reached Metaverse status yet. But Fortnite as a social network and impossible-to-ignore cultural phenomenon, Ball says, provides Epic Games a key advantage for leading in the Metaverse race. Fortnite draws a massive, willing and excited audience online to engage with chaotically clashing intellectual properties... "This organic evolution can't be overemphasized," Ball writes in his essay. "If you 'declared' your intent to start a Metaverse, these parties would never embrace interoperability or entrust their IP. But Fortnite has become so popular and so unique that most counterparties have no choice but to participate... Fortnite is too valuable a platform...."

The current swarm to an online-only social and capitalist economy has only highlighted the current Internet's failings, and what the Metaverse needs to do, Ball said. Big sites like Facebook, Google and Amazon continue to dominate online activity, as do larger streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. But each location requires its own membership and has separate ecosystems. "Right now, the digital world basically operates as though every restaurant and bar you go to requires a different ID card, has a different currency, requires their own dress codes and has their own units [of service and measurement]," Ball said. "It is clear that this really advantages the biggest services. People are just sticking to the big games, really. However there's a clear argument that reducing network lock-in can really raise all boats here."

Sweeney said as much in his DICE Summit keynote speech February. If the game industry wants to reshape the Internet and move away from Silicon Valley's walled gardens, Sweeney stressed that publishers need to rethink economies in the same way email was standardized... "We need to give up our attempts to each create our own private walled gardens and private monopoly and agree to work together and recognize we're all far better off if we connect our systems and grow our social graphs together.
Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004.

The popular early internet meme machine YTMND.com is back online after shutting down last May due to declining ad revenue and the site creator's ill health. Motherboard reports: Launched in 2001, YTMND was one of the early internet's first sources of viral content. Users could attach a gif, often animated but not always, to a piece of looping sound. Users could vote on these animations, share, or remix them. Its death was sad, a piece of early internet, gone forever. But over the last year, [the site's creator Max Goldberg] said fans helped him test the new site, find bugs, and pushed him for regular updates.

Goldberg said he rebuilt the site from the ground up, which is why it took the better part of a year. One of the biggest challenges was converting everything away from Flash, which Adobe is finally retiring this year. "That means YTMNDs play more reliably (and work on mobile phones!) and will also be future-compatible," Goldberg said. "The new player was written in a way that makes archiving a YTMND significantly easier, which opens up a lot of possibilities. I've also removed all social media and advertising from the site." He also replaced all the hardware that was running the site.

Google won't be participating in April Fools' Day this year due to the serious threat of the coronavirus that continues to impact the entire world. The Verge reports: According to an internal email obtained by Business Insider, Google will "take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let's save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one."

"We've already stopped any centralized April Fool's efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don't know about," the email from Google's head of marketing Lorraine Twohill continues. "Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned -- internally or externally." Hopefully other companies will take note of Google's lead here and adjust their own April Fools' plans accordingly. There's a time and a place for a good joke -- but this probably isn't it.

Drive down any U.S. interstate and there's a good chance you will see a pun or a funny reference on the next electronic message board you spot. From a report: Such messages have become ubiquitous across the country lately. But besides getting a snicker, what's behind these roadside bits, and are they making drivers behave any differently? They are known as Dynamic Message Signs, and they usually remind drivers about speed limits or traffic delays. Though the technology has been around for decades, in recent years states across the country have been taking a different tack with their messaging in a bid for more eyeballs.

A recent message that was flashing out across Illinois expressways is a perfect example of this. It read, "Got The Munchies? Get Food Delivered. Don't Drive High!" Since Illinois legalized marijuana this year, transportation officials have been trying to get people to avoid driving stoned, so why not appeal to a stoner's love for snacking? Elmo Bruggink, an Illinois tourist from the Netherlands, weighed in on the message. His home country is a place that has long been dealing with drivers who smoke weed, but Bruggink said officials haven't tried humor yet.

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTube commenter calls it "a revolution in the history of chess."

Slate documents the antics in an article titled "DrDrunkenstein's Reign of Terror." "DrDrunkenstein" is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great.

Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community... Carlsen appeared incognito as "DannyTheDonkey" and won, donating his small prize money back to the website. Carlsen's first showing as DrDrunkenstein was in Lichess' second Titled Arena the following month... Carlsen streamed the games on Twitch, where he lived up to his username, pounding Coronas while bantering in Norwegian with his friends. Chess fans were astonished. There's something hypnotizing about watching a guy known as "the Mozart of chess" — a player who is quantifiably better than Bobby Fischer — taking a big gulp of beer, announcing his position as "completely winning," then singing along to Dr. Dre saying "motherfuck the police" while coasting into another quick checkmate...

In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper in October, Carlsen admits he quit drinking for his health. "I wouldn't say I was an alcoholic exactly," he said, "but I found out this year, if I'm going to travel and play a lot... I need to prioritize differently...." On the eve of his world championship defense, Carlsen appeared in the next tournament as "manwithavan," playing a large chunk of his games on a phone from a minivan, where the touch screen presented a massive handicap. He again earned the adoration of spectators, this time for riskily walking his king into the center of the board against one of the most dangerous players in the tournament. He came in third... As DrNykterstein, he alternated between two ways of wasting his early, important opening moves. Sometimes, he'd take his queen on a four-move tour of the board before swapping her home square with the king's, letting his opponent develop their pieces while he showboated... Other times, he'd fidget his knights back and forth from their starting squares, offering his challenger a six-move time advantage. In this tournament he filled with gags, he came in first again...

One of the sweetest benefits of watching these matches is enjoying Carlsen's dry, self-deprecating sense of humor — something no chess prodigy has any right to have.
In December, Magnus also reached the #1 spot, beating seven million other players, on a fantasy football table.

"Kids can play with Alexa in their very own $300 pretend kitchen and grocery store," CNET reports, "with the Amazon voice assistant dishing out cooking advice, shopping help and plenty of goofy toddler humor." The Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market, from toymaker KidKraft, is making its debut at this weekend's New York Toy Fair... It uses a mix of RFID sensors and Bluetooth to tell Alexa which pretend food items kids are buying and cooking... Alexa speaks only when a sensor on the play set is activated. Put a toy hot dog into the pot on the stove, and Alexa knows you're cooking hot dogs. Kids hear the splash sound effect, and Alexa alerts when the hot dogs are done cooking and to hurry up and get the buns. "If they get cold, they will be chili dogs," she says...

The accessories that come with the kitchen and market, which include fake food, cookware and a credit card, are fitted with RFID chips, and sensors can tell which items are at the register, stovetop or cutting board. The play set then relays that info to the smart speaker via Bluetooth. So, if a kid places lettuce on the market scanner, it could prompt Alexa to say, "Lettuce! Are we making a salad?" And if a kid says, "Yes," Alexa will say, "Great! I love salad. Maybe get some avocado, too."
Engadget reports that once you install an Echo dot, "it will play games with your children and instruct them on how to make the best fake hot dog ever." And there's inevitably a game where Alexa tells your kids what to do: There's plenty of freeform play to be had, but to take advantage of Alexa's real capabilities a kid has to make use of the included "recipe cards." They're not real recipes with ingredients and instructions. Instead it's just a picture of the food the child wants to make, and they insert the card into a special reader on the counter to start the process of preparing it with Alexa's help. Alexa will instruct the child on whether to grab a pot or a pan, if it needs to be filled with water, and whether any ingredients need to be cut on the tiny chopping board. If the requested food isn't in the pantry, never fear: There's a store on the other side...

Unsurprisingly, the KidKraft 2-in-1 Alexa Kitchen and Market will be an Amazon exclusive when it launches some time this year. And the price? A hefty $300.
Tom's Guide calls the playset "clever --and also really creepy."

"On one hand, it's a screen-free, interactive experience... But there are a few concerns that a toy of this budding breed creates. I can't help but question the social implications of making Alexa a child's on-demand playmate."

Mogster shares a report from the BBC: Monty Python stars have led the tributes to their co-star Terry Jones, who has died at the age of 77. The Welsh actor and writer played a variety of characters in the iconic comedy group's Flying Circus TV series, and directed several of their films. He died on Tuesday, four years after contracting a rare form of dementia known as Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Here are some of Jones' best lines:

"Now, you listen here! He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!" -- as Brian's mother in Monty Python's Life of Brian

"I'm alive, I'm alive!" -- as the naked hermit who gives away the location of a hiding Brian in Life of Brian

"I shall use my largest scales" - as Sir Belvedere, who oversees a witch trial in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"What, the curtains?" -- as Prince Herbert, who is told "One day, lad, all this will be yours" in Holy Grail

"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam" -- as the greasy spoon waitress in a Monty Python sketch

This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with "some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years" in the computer programming world. Some excerpts: - Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, tail recursion, lazily evaluated collections, pattern matching, first class functions and looking down upon anyone who don't use them...

- 3 billion devices run Java. That number hasn't changed in the last 10 years though...

- A package management ecosystem is essential for programming languages now. People simply don't want to go through the hassle of finding, downloading and installing libraries anymore. 20 years ago we used to visit web sites, downloaded zip files, copied them to correct locations, added them to the paths in the build configuration and prayed that they worked.

- Being a software development team now involves all team members performing a mysterious ritual of standing up together for 15 minutes in the morning and drawing occult symbols with post-its....

- Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago...

- Even programming languages took a side on the debate on Tabs vs Spaces....

- Code must run behind at least three levels of virtualization now. Code that runs on bare metal is unnecessarily performant....

- A tutorial isn't really helpful if it's not a video recording that takes orders of magnitude longer to understand than its text.

- There is StackOverflow which simply didn't exist back then. Asking a programming question involved talking to your colleagues.

- People develop software on Macs.
In our new world where internet connectivity is the norm and being offline the exception, "Security is something we have to think about now... Because of side-channel attacks we can't even trust the physical processor anymore."

And of course, "We don't use IRC for communication anymore. We prefer a bloated version called Slack because we just didn't want to type in a server address...."

The social media team for a Minnesota football team playing against San Francisco's 49ers just incorporated "big tech" into its online trash talk, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate site. They call the resulting video "incredibly weird." The video in question depicts a time-lapse of [San Francisco's] Levi's stadium with two cartoon characters in the foreground that are basically team helmets with arms and legs. The 49ers character says "Welcome... to Silicon Valley" and we're then suddenly in the Matrix (?). The 49ers character pulls out a space gun that says "Big Tech" on it and starts shooting tech company logos at the Vikings character.

After slow-motion dodging Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google Chrome, Instagram, What's App, and Uber logos a la Neo, the Viking character jump kicks the 49ers character.

The whole thing is as odd as it sounds, and even users on Reddit struggled to understand it.
The Reddit post attracted over 2,100 upvotes and 253 comments (including "Unsportsmanlike conduct, kicking opponent in the head. 15 yards penalty.")

The video has now been viewed 117,162 times over the last 18 hours -- and attracted 27,827 likes.

The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner -- despite it being a fictional country. From a report: A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test. The department's online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows. In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther. The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war.

A non-standard and somewhat weird password reset operation is currently underway at a German university, where more than 38,000 students and staff were asked this week to stand in line with their ID card and a piece of paper to receive new passwords for their email accounts. From a report: All of this is going on at the Justus Liebig University (JLU) in Gieben, a town north of Frankfurt, Germany. The university suffered a malware infection last week. While the name or the nature of the malware strain was not disclosed, the university's IT staff considered the infection severe enough to take down its entire IT and server infrastructure. The university's network has been down since December 8, and all computers have been isolated and disconnected from each other. For the past days, IT staff have used antivirus scanners loaded on more than 1,200 USB flash drives to scan each JLU computer for malware.

Mark Hurd, who was co-chief of Oracle, one of the world's top business-software firms, until he stepped aside last month for health reasons, died Friday. He was 62. From a report: "Oracle has lost a brilliant and beloved leader who personally touched the lives of so many of us during his decade at Oracle," Oracle chairman Larry Ellison wrote. "All of us will miss Mark's keen mind and rare ability to analyze, simplify, and solve problems quickly. Some of us will miss his friendship and mentorship. I will miss his kindness and sense of humor." Hurd announced a leave of absence from Oracle in September due to unspecified health reasons. Oracle stock had gone up about 37% since he and Safra Catz were appointed as CEOs in September 2014.

"Where's the best place to hide a body? The second page of a Google search." The gallows humor shows that people rarely look beyond the first few results of a search, but Lee Griffin isn't laughing. From a report: In the 13 years since he co-founded British price comparison website GoCompare, the 41-year-old has tried to keep his company at the top of search results, doing everything from using a "For Dummies" guide in the early days to later hiring a team of engineers, marketers and mathematicians. That's put him on the front lines of a battle challenging the dominance of Alphabet's Google in the search market -- with regulators in the U.S. and across Europe taking a closer look. Most of the sales at GoCompare, which helps customers find deals on everything from car and travel insurance to energy plans, come from Google searches, making its appearance at the top critical. With Google -- whose search market share is more than 80% -- frequently changing its algorithms, buying ads has become the only way to ensure a top spot on a page. Companies like GoCompare have to outbid competitors for paid spots even when customers search for their brand name.

"Google's brought on as this thing that wanted to serve information to the world," Griffin said in an interview from the company's offices in Newport, Wales. "But actually what it's doing is to show you information that people have paid it to show you." GoCompare is far from the only one to suffer from Google's search dominance. John Lewis, a high-end British retailer, last month alluded to the rising cost of climbing up in Google search results. In the U.S., IAC/InterActive, which owns internet services like Tinder, and ride-hailing company Lyft have signaled Google's stranglehold on the market.

The Monty Python character known as the Gumby would often be found saying "My brain hurts". Now Reuters reports: In what is billed as an "extremely silly" event, hordes of Monty Python fans will gather in full Gumby attire in London on Saturday to celebrate the British comedy troupe's 50th anniversary. Kitted out in rubber boots, sleeveless sweaters, rolled-up trousers and with knotted handkerchiefs on their heads, they will attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Gumbys. "It's all so excitingly pointless," said Python Terry Gilliam, who will host the event.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on recently-rediscovered documents from the BBC's archives about the show's launch in 1969: The BBC response, the archives make clear, was far less positive. At the weekly meeting where senior managers discussed the output, the head of factual had found Python "disgusting", arts had thought it "nihilistic and cruel", while religion objected to a Gilliam animation in which "Jesus... had swung his arm". The BBC One controller sensed the makers "continually going over the edge of what is acceptable".
The Guardian also tracked down 69-year-old Doug Holman who remembers John Cleese giving him tickets to watch a filming of the show when he was 19. ("Doug, boldly, writes back, saying he is part of a large group of friends who want to go. Cleese contacts the BBC to request a further 14 tickets...")

50 years later, Holman seems to remember the filming as being wonderfully chaotic. "There was a restaurant scene but I think the producer abandoned it when Cleese -- seemingly unhappy about having no lines -- disrupted each take by performing random Tourette-like impressions of a mouse being strangled by a psychotic cat. I remember it being total anarchy yet excruciatingly funny, in the literal sense. We all experienced genuine pain from extended bouts of uncontrollable laughter."