Not only was the following story totally predictable, but many of us directly warned the EU of what would happen if they instituted a "link" or "snippet" tax as part of the EU Copyright Directive.

Google has told publishers in France that in order to respect the new Copyright Directive link tax, it is removing all snippets unless the publishers opt-in via the tools mentioned above, to voluntarily choose to add back the snippets.

What's incredible is that these same politicians will now whine and complain and lie, saying that Google is evading the tax when it's actually complying with the law as written -- and complying in the same way they complied with similar laws in the past.

The proposed change was supposed to make the ID check more rigorous and help weed out impersonators.

Instead, the change was seen as stripping established YouTubers of their standing and hobbling their chances to prosper on the video site.

The threatened removal prompted widespread protests by established YouTubers, many of whom said the verification mark helped them establish their authority and longevity on the site.

Systemd inventor Lennart Poettering told the crowds at the All Systems Go Linux user-space event in Berlin he intends to reinvent home directories to fix issues with the current model that are otherwise insoluble.

He is also much concerned with a security issue, which is that even when full-disk encryption is in use, when the system is suspended the decryption key is held in memory, so that if a laptop is stolen while suspended it would be possible to access the data.

A person at the session asked what should be done by a university student, for example, who wanted to log in to a Linux machine that was rebooted overnight from 200 miles away. The answer: "If you really want that this system can come up on its own, don't use this stuff. This is about security."

A Canadian team found that steeping a plastic tea bag at a brewing temperature of 95°C releases around 11.6 billion microplastics – tiny pieces of plastic between 100 nanometres and 5 millimetres in size – into a single cup. That is several orders of magnitude higher than other foods and drinks.

“Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup.”

Eisenberg played Nog, the first Ferengi to join Starfleet, and appeared in 40 episodes from across all seven seasons. The show ran from 1993 to 1999. His character was the son of Rom, the nephew of Quark, and the best friend of Jake Sisko, who was the son of commanding officer Benjamin Sisko.

"I have lost a great friend and the world has lost a great heart," Armin Shimerman, the actor who played Quark, wrote in a tweet. "He was a man of conviction and enormous sensitivity and the best of humanity."

The company came under huge pressure in 2018 after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had accessed many users' data without permission.

"Our review helps us to better understand patterns of abuse in order to root out bad actors among developers," the company's vice-president for product partnerships, Ime Archibong, said in a statement on Friday.

Modern TV, coming to you over the Internet instead of through cable or over the air, has a modern problem: all of your Internet-connected streaming devices are watching you back and feeding your data to advertisers.

The most prevalent tracker, Google's doubleclick.net, showed up in 975 of the top 1,000 Roku channels, with Google analytics trackers showing up in 360, the researchers found. Over on the Amazon side of things, perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon trackers were the most prevalent, showing up in 687 of 1,000 channels. Doubleclick trackers were found on 307 channels, and Facebook trackers were on 196.

Tracking not only includes sending information about video titles, which you might expect, but also permanent device identifiers and wireless SSID information, the researchers found.

In an official statement, the Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer states that “in order to ensure our digital sovereignty, we want to reduce dependencies on individual IT providers. We are also considering alternative programs to replace certain software. This will be done in close coordination with other EU countries.”

The analyst identifies several pain points ("Schmerzpunkten"). The first is data security. Telemetry transfers data to Microsoft, the user has limited insight and control over this, and it may contain personal data and therefore risk of breaching GDPR, the report suggests.

The agreement is controversial because DeepMind was handed 1.6 million patient health records by the Royal Free Hospital despite no patient having given their consent for their data to be shared or used in this way.

One of Google's first actions on borging DeepMind was to shut its independent ethics review panel.

"Handing 1.5m patients' records to Google was justified in 2015 as the only option – has the NHS under Matt Hancock made no progress on NHS tech?"

The sites had previously been found to be engaging in practices which included misleading discount claims, pressure-selling and hidden charges.

"We found clear evidence that Booking.com has not yet sufficiently cleaned up its act and is flouting the rules on pressure-selling, which could lead to millions of consumers being rushed into making a booking," she said.

A hotelier in Cornwall told BBC News: "I have a small B&B, which I have owned for three years, and have not yet made a profit, due to Booking.com.