Mohamed Nasser

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And lots more goodies are coming to the Your Phone app in this fresh preview build Windows 10 has got a new preview build for the update due in the first half of next year (20H1) which introduces some smart features for the Your Phone app, as well as bringing in a Windows Hello PIN login for Safe Mode. With the new build 18995, Your Phone is being considerably bolstered (again) with a new battery indicator being presented within the app that shows you the current level of charge in your phone. So if your mobile happens to be elsewhere, you don’t need to get up and look at the device to know when it’s finished charging. Windows 10 problems are ruining Microsoft’s reputation Buy Windows 10: the cheapest prices in October 2019 How to stop a Windows 10 update Microsoft has also extended the Link to Windows feature which hooks up your phone to your PC, and is now available on more Samsung devices, namely the Galaxy S10, S10+, S10e, S10 5G, and Fold devices (in certain regions). If you’ve not come across it before, Link to Windows allows you to send messages and manage phone notifications direct on your PC, as well as syncing photos, and mirroring your handset to the Windows 10 computer. Furthermore, Your Phone is broadening support for Phone Screen, which lets you use your handset’s Android apps right there on your PC with the keyboard and mouse (or touchscreen). This is coming to the same aforementioned Samsung devices (again in certain regions globally). Finally, there’s a further touch of personalization in that the icon for your smartphone within the app will actually show the home screen wallpaper you’re using on the handset. Note that all these fresh bits of functionality for Your Phone are rolling out gradually, so you may not see them just yet. Safer Mode The other major change for Windows 10 in this preview build is that you can now enable passwordless login for when you boot the PC into Safe Mode (when troubleshooting an issue with the machine). So now, when you elect to boot into Safe Mode, rather than having to enter a password, you can use Windows Hello PIN sign-in (and yes, a PIN is more secure than a password for various reasons). Microsoft goes over the instructions for setting up your PIN login in its blog post detailing the changes for build 18995. And naturally, this is all part of the company’s broader drive for a passwordless future. In this fresh preview, Microsoft also did some further work improving Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with various bug fixes and crash prevention measures. Some of the best laptops of 2019 run Windows 10

"We continue working to improve the supply-demand balance for our PC customers. We invested an added $1 billion in capital to achieve more capacity and flexible supply. As a result, we increased our 14nm capacity by 25% while also ramping 10nm production. We’ve improved our supply every quarter. However, in the first half of 2019 we saw PC customer demand that exceeded our expectations and surpassed third-party forecasts. We are actively working to address the supply-demand challenge, and we expect supply in the second half will be up compared to the first half. We continue to prioritize available output toward the newest generation Intel Core products that support our customers’ high-growth segments, and we plan to further increase our output capacity in 2020." Intel in April said its CPU shortage would end in the second half of 2019, but that doesn't appear to be the case, because reports indicate that neither PC manufacturers nor server makers can buy enough 14nm processors to keep up with demand. The Register reported this morning that HP and Lenovo executives openly discussed the ongoing shortage at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona. HP Personal Systems Business president Alex Cho reportedly said that it's "no surprise that it's been a hard year" because the processor shortage "makes life more complex." He also said the shortage affects Intel's entire product portfolio, not specific processors, and that people can "expect it to continue for another quarter or two." Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci was said to have blamed the continued scarcity of Intel's processors for inhibiting the PC market's growth over the last quarter. The market grew around 4%, but Lanci said it could've grown 7-8%. Lanci also said the shortage resulted either from production issues that Intel should've resolved by now or from an underlying problem with the company's processor architecture that "is unpredictable." Either way, Lenovo's clearly not happy about the situation. Server makers are said to be faring better. It's no secret that Intel has focused much of its 14nm production on its Xeon line chips meant for its enterprise customers rather than lower-end CPUs destined for PCs. DigiTimes reported yesterday that server makers have "seen the supply of Intel's 14nm CPUs become tight," although it's still "sufficient to support their shipments in the fourth quarter." Even the companies on which Intel's focusing are worried about getting enough CPUs. Perhaps the most frustrating thing for manufacturers is that Intel has reportedly stayed tight-lipped about what's causing this shortage. Canalys CEO Steve Brazier told The Register that Intel is "not telling anybody, so nobody completely knows why" the company's processors are so hard to come by over a year after the shortage began. "The interesting thing is the PC vendors do not know," he said, which means "they have no better information than we have. There is no sign of a short-term fix." Intel CEO Robert Swan said in July that he apologized to manufacturers earlier this year and "committed never again to be a constraint" on their businesses. Yet, the comments from HP and Lenovo indicate that Intel has in fact remained the constraining factor on their growth. We doubt the blame lies solely with the processor shortage--consumers have also purchased fewer smartphones and other devices over the last year--but it's clear that Intel's supply issues remain a factor.

Dodge is rumored to be working on a 50th-anniversary Challenger that would wear the ACE badge. version of the Challenger, although the company has not confirmed that. An ACR-badged Challenger would commemorate Dodge's 50th anniversary. We'll let you know as soon as there's any official news of a street-legal track Challenger. Dodge offers plenty of great new cars, but ever since the Viper ACR disappeared, its lineup has been lacking a hard-core track-oriented machine. What Dodge should do is build an ACR model out of its Challenger, complete with lightweight parts, lots of aero, and big power. And if this Mopar Insiders report is to be believed, we might just get our wish. Citing unnamed sources, Mopar Insiders claims Dodge is planning a range-topping track-oriented Challenger to celebrate the nameplate's 50th anniversary, and it could wear the ACR badge. Mopar Insiders suggests the car, like the Viper ACR before it, will get an adjustable wing and a removable splitter. The outlet also says the ACR will come from the factory without a passenger seat, though as on the Challenger SRT Demon, it could be added back for $1. Sounds like fun. Of course, none of this is confirmed. Plus, the Challenger is a big, heavy car, so it would take a lot of work to make it worthy of the ACR name. But, how cool would a street-legal Challenger track car be? We certainly hope it becomes reality.

One man found work for an agency while looking online to find clothes that would fit him At 6ft tall with a 49in chest and 44in waist, Raul Samuel had always struggled to find stylish clothes that fitted him. In May 2017, he was looking online to try to find someone who looked like him and “wore clothes well”, so he could find out where they shopped. “I couldn’t find anyone, so I Googled ‘plus-size’ males and came across an article about an agency looking for models,” he said. Samuels went for a meeting at Bridge – which describes itself as a “curve” agency – and within two weeks he was featured in an advertising campaign for the brand BoohooMAN. “It just took off,” he said. “My face was all over the [London] Underground.” Samuels, 27, is just one of an increasing number of men who don’t have chiseled abs and a six-pack to find themselves in demand by fashion brands wanting a share of the growing plus-size men’s market. Modelling agencies are reporting a rise in interest in bigger male models, as more brands, from Asos and Boohoo to River Island have started to cater to men in larger sizes. “The women’s curve market has become really well established in recent years,” said a spokesperson for the major international agency IMG. “We feel the men’s market will follow suit.” The agency is looking for more men to join its “Brawn” division, which currently has seven models. Charlotte Griffiths set up the Bridge modelling agency in 2014 with the aim of representing models who promoted “diversity and healthy, positive role models”. “We were talking a lot about how important it was to have women of a range of shapes and sizes and of different ethnicities, and I remember some people saying it was hypocrisy just to focus on diversity for women,” she said. Bridge started representing plus-size men in 2016 and it now takes up as much of the business as the women’s market. In May the agency opened its first office in New York which focuses exclusively on male models. “[The men’s market] has been around about three years and the women’s market has been around for 30 years. It’s really interesting to see that the demand is now 50/50 for us as an agency,” she said. The definition of “plus-size” is often determined by brands, says Griffiths, but they generally look for a chest measurement of 45 inches and above. “Our priority was to find models who were big and tall and broad who would be large, XL and above, but who were still representing a healthy body and lifestyle,” she said. “The idea is to have a variety of healthy shapes and sizes and show that these male models could look good without being ripped with a six-pack.” The demoralising effect of having one, often unattainable, body-type held up as the ideal is not just felt by women, said Griffiths. “The more we looked into it the more we found that men were suffering from the same feelings of insecurities and misrepresentation and they weren’t looking that certain way with a six-pack.” Writing for the Chubstr, a fashion website for big and tall men, Zach Miko – the first model to sign with IMG’s Brawn division – said in May: “I model because I know that doing this makes a difference. Even if it’s just for the kid who goes by themselves to the middle school dance. I model for the boy who cried into his pillow after his first boy/girl pool party.” Samuels says it certainly had an effect on him. “You start feeling bad about yourself and you start feeling like maybe the answer is to lose weight. To starve yourself or go on a low-carb diet or something like that, but that’s not the solution. I did lose some weight but it still didn’t make me happy and – because of my natural body shape – the clothes still didn’t fit how I wanted them to.” Nemar Parchment, a 6ft 2in man with a 40in waist and a 50in chest, was working as a buyer for Asos when he was first approached about modelling. The brand was launching its Big and Tall range and was struggling to find models, he said. “When they stopped me and approached me I kind of thought it was a prank. I never in a million years thought it was a possibility, because I’d never seen anyone out there look like me.” Parchment joined IMG last year. “Oh my gosh, I love it,” he said of modelling. “Firstly, the travelling – this year alone I’ve been to LA, San Francisco, Palm Springs. I also love the feeling that I’m breaking down barriers.”

US president says media and Democrats forced him to scrap plan to award himself the opportunity to host summit Donald Trump has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over plans to host the G7 meeting at his own luxury resort following a political outcry. The US president announced in a Saturday night tweet that he had reversed his decision and would seek an alternative venue to host world leaders next June. The move represented a rare admission of defeat by Trump, who typically digs in and fights to defend every controversial statement and policy. Even in his concession, the president complained bitterly that he thought he was “doing something very good for our country” by choosing the Trump National Doral, near Miami, to host G7 leaders. “It is big, grand, on hundreds of acres, next to Miami international airport, has tremendous ballrooms & meeting rooms, and each delegation would have ... its own 50 to 70 unit building,” he tweeted. Trump added that he had announced he would do it at no profit and at no cost to the US but, he claimed, both the media and Democrats had reacted unreasonably. “... Therefore, based on both media & Democrat crazed and irrational hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the host site for the G-7 in 2020,” the president continued. “We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately. Thank you!” The choice of the Trump National Doral was widely condemned as the most egregious example yet of the president abusing his position to enrich himself and his business. The resort was in need of a boost: in May the Washington Post reported that Doral’s operating income had fallen 69% since 2015. Trump’s u-turn was welcomed by ethics watchdogs. Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said: “President Trump’s decision to award the G7 Conference to his own property was outrageous, corrupt and a constitutional violation. “It was stunningly corrupt even for a stunningly corrupt administration. His reversal of that decision is a bow to reality, but does not change how astonishing it was that a president ever thought this was appropriate, or that it was something he could get away with.” The outcome shows that pressure works, even on Trump, Bookbinder added. “The president deserves no plaudits for doing the right thing only after public outcry forced him not to do the wrong thing. This was one corrupt conflict of interest. He’s racked up well over 2,000 of them. So we’ll keep fighting. Even late on a Saturday night.” Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tweeted: “Blam! Never doubt that the public’s efforts to hold this corrupt administration accountable is worth all the effort!! Remember this, my friends, as we continue to fight for the integrity of our government and for democracy.” When the venue announcement was made on Thursday by White House acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who claimed that Doral “was millions of dollars cheaper” than other facilities, Democrats immediately vowed to investigate. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “The constitution is clear: the president cannot accept gifts or payments from foreign governments. No one is above the law.” House judiciary committee chairman Jerrold Nadler described the move as “among the most brazen examples yet of the president’s corruption”. The backlash came with Trump already facing an impeachment inquiry in the Democratic-led House of Representatives and a backlash from Republicans over his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria, abandoning Kurdish allies. A number of congressional investigations are also scrutinising Trump’s finances and potential conflicts of interest stemming from his property business. The US constitution’s emoluments clause prohibits government officials from receiving salaries, fees or profits from foreign and domestic governments without congressional approval.

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Roughly a quarter of a billion mostly obsessed gamers are battling it out in "Fortnite." There's a darn decent chance kids you know are among them. A Montreal-based law firm launched a proposed class action in Canada on behalf of two Quebec parents who claim that "Fortnite" publisher Epic Games needs to pay the price for a third-person shooter they allege is as addictive, and potentially harmful, as cocaine. The firm, Calex Légal, represents plaintiffs who are identified only by their initials, FN and JZ. They are the parents of a 10- and 15-year-old, respectively. Written in French, the legal action alleges that when a person is engaged in "Fortnite" for a long period, the player's brain releases the "pleasure hormone, dopamine" and that "Fortnite" was developed by psychologists, statisticians and others over four years "to develop the most addictive game possible," all so Epic could reap lucrative profits. An Epic spokesperson said the company does not comment on ongoing litigation. Though "Fortnite" is free to play, kids spend gobs of real money purchasing the in-game currency, V-Bucks, used for dances (which are called "emotes"), skins and custom outfits for their virtual alter-egos. "The defendants used the same tactics as the creators of slot machines, or variable reward programs, (to ensure) the dependence of its users, (and) the brain being mani[CENSORED]ted to always want more," the suit alleges in a rough translation. "Children are particularly vulnerable to this mani[CENSORED]tion since their self-control system in the brain is not developed enough." Epic has 30 days to respond to the legal action. The case could take up to a year or so. Alessandra Esposito Chartrand, an attorney with Calex Légal, told the CBC in Canada that the suit is based on the same legal basis as a Quebec Superior Court ruling in 2015 that determined that tobacco companies didn't warn the public about the dangers of smoking. Chartrand said it was Epic's duty to issues similar warnings around the addictive nature of "Fortnite." Last year, the World Health Organization classified "gaming disorder" as a diagnosable condition, giving mental health professionals a basis for setting up treatment and identifying risks for addictive behavior. In a Common Sense/Survey Monkey poll released last December, about one in five parents found it at least moderately difficult to get kids off "Fortnite," and about a quarter said they were concerned about how much time their kid played. The Canadian suit isn't the first time Epic Games has faced a potential class action. In June, a federal case was brought in the northern district of California that alleged in part that "Fortnite" lacks built-in "parental controls that would allow parents or guardians of minors to make informed decisions regarding in-app purchases" and that minors who change their mind after making a purchase, even minutes after doing so, are not allowed a refund.

We've been hearing rumors about an updated NVIDIA SHIELD TV 4K media streamer coming to the market, and those reports have all been confirmed thanks to someone that had an itchy trigger finger over at Amazon. The online retail giant "accidentally" posted a listing for the upcoming SHIELD TV Pro complete with images of the revised device and its all-new remote. The SHIELD TV has long been the enthusiast's choice for 4K media streamers due to its Android TV compatibility, wide support for streaming services, Android gaming, and GeForce NOW support. The SHIELD TV Pro extends that leadership with a new Tegra X1+ processor. We don't have anything with regards to specs on the processors, or if it's related to the new Tegra X1 chip in the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch Lite, but NVIDIA says that it makes the SHIELD TV Pro is 25 percent faster than its predecessor. The Tegra X1+ is paired with 3GB of RAM, and there's 16GB of internal storage as well. As before, you can still expand storage if you wish thanks to dual USB 3.0 ports on the back of the device. And if you don't have stable enough Wi-Fi in your bonus room, there's a GbE port for wired network access. In addition to the new Tegra X1+ SoC, the SHIELD TV Pro expands the HDR support of the SHIELD TV with the inclusion of Dolby Vision HDR support along with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Digital Plus. There's also a brand new remote, which looks vastly improved over the previous lump of plastic. There are dedicated volume/mute buttons, playback controls, Menu button, and a dedicated shortcut to Netflix. The remote has motion controls which can activate the backlit buttons when you pick up the remote. If that wasn't enough, there's also a built-in IR blaster for controlling your TV (which would explain its expanded button scheme). All of these enhancements come with an uptick in price to $199 according to Amazon. According to the [now removed] Amazon listing, the NVIDIA SHIELD TV Pro will go on sale October 28th.

At the massive complex, Tesla's first outside the U.S., the plan is to build at least 1000 Model 3s each week starting as soon as several weeks from now. Tesla's Gigafactory 3 in China has been in the EV maker's plans since 2018, and the groundbreaking ceremony was held in January 2019, but today is the first official word that the electric automaker has the go-ahead from China to begin production. As C/D reported back in May, the company started taking orders for cars from the factory well before that. Reuters reports that Tesla could start building vehicles at the factory, located outside Shanghai, any time now. In June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company plans to make 3000 Model 3 electric vehicles a week there, and according to a BBC report today, authorities in Shanghai have offered Tesla assistance to speed up that timetable, meaning production could start as soon as the next few weeks. The state power company hooked up Gigafactory 3 to the electric power grid today, Bloomberg reported, allowing production to start on at least a limited basis. Gigafactory 3 will be China’s first fully foreign-owned car factory, which appears to indicate that China is opening up to the idea of expanding the car market there. The factory will also be Tesla’s first fully operating manufacturing plant outside of the U.S. The factory has cost about $2 billion but having it should help the electric-car manufacturer avoid higher import tariffs that are imposed on cars built and exported to Asia from the U.S.A

Agony aunts are having a renaissance, but this generation of advisers look nothing like their forebears his week it was a man objecting to his wife cooking herself a comfort meal. “Am I the asshole?” he asked the internet. She was sick, he explained, in the grip of an endometriosis flare up, and made bolognese to cheer herself up. The problem is he’s vegetarian and would either have to cook for himself or go hungry for one whole night. “I argued calmly I felt like I was being cheated out of a nice meal,” the most un-self-aware man on the planet wrote on Reddit’s AITA (Am I the Asshole?) forum, a modern crowd-sourced advice column where people seek arbitration on their behaviour. “She burst into tears and asked why I was being so [CENSORED] difficult about this. Now I feel like a dick. So, Reddit, AITA?” It was screenshot, reposted and discussed in a frenzy of can-you-believe-this. Before him it was a father wondering if it was so wrong he and his wife let their “active” four-year-old “explore” a “medium-nice” restaurant while they ate. He was upset when a waitress juggling a tray of food reprimanded their precious child. “I felt it was completely uncalled for,” the second most un-self-aware man on the planet wrote to Slate’s parenting advice column, Care and Feeding. Flash back further and you’ll find a woman with a potentially fatal allergy to mushrooms grappling with parents-in-law who were sneaking mushrooms – even mushroom powder – into almost every meal. “Short of taking them a doctor’s note, telling them my allergy is real, I’m not sure what to do,” she lamented to New York Magazine’s Ask Polly. Each of these viral problems achieved something seemingly impossible in our divided, hyper-partisan online world. They provided rare moments of unity and moral clarity. “In these difficult times, I’m glad we can all come together and agree that this man objectively sucks,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti tweeted about the first problem. We are living in a new golden age of advice columns. They’re everywhere – thanks to readers like me who can’t get enough – and they’re better than ever. They range from the pithy (Reddit) and the utilitarian (Ask a Manager) to the genuinely philosophical. When I can’t sleep at night, sometimes I turn on the Dear Sugar podcast – the smooth voices, wisdom and empathy of hosts Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond is a weighted blanket for the soul. The first golden age of agony aunts, as they were once known, began in the mid 19th century and was powered by technological and cultural change: mass media and mass literacy converging with shifting social mores. Cheap to produce and compulsive to read, these columns proliferated in newspapers and magazines, instructing anonymous readers – frequently concerned women – how to behave properly and, often, be good wives. The new boom is similarly made possible by technological shifts. Asking for, sharing and bingeing on advice is ever more accessible. The irresistible allure of other people’s problems remains a big drawcard. “They’re even more assuring these days because they’re an antidote to the angst of observing everyone’s polished social media,” one friend and fellow addict observed. “They’re a reminder that everyone doesn’t have their shit together.” They’re also an affirmation of the indignities and frustrations we all endure. It’s little surprise the genre of AITA problems that often strike a chord with women are those that highlight the cluelessness of some men about the imbalance of labour, both domestic and emotional, in heterosexual relationships (like the aforementioned vegetarian left to fend for himself for one meal). Many women share these questions as if to say “see what we have to put up with out here?” But there’s more to the new gilded age than that. In a world where traditional moral structures and authorities have crumbled and real-world communities have fractured, these corners of the internet offer rare, ordered space to collectively process who we are today, and what an ethical, satisfying life might look like. From the most irritating minutiae of modern life (Help! My Sister’s Fiancée Has a Fake Service Dog) to the biggest questions (I’m Paralysed by Anxiety About Climate Change), someone has asked – and someone has answered. For me, it’s the answers more than the questions that keep me coming back. Advice columns are no longer just a place to ask questions we can’t broach with family or friends for fear of embarrassment. Many now serve to answer questions that would be wholly foreign to our parents. The unimpeachable, all knowing (and usually straight, white and prim) agony aunt has given way to a more diverse generation of writers who openly discuss their own faults and lives, or crowds coming together in comment threads and forums. There’s less moral absolutism and more let’s figure this out. Since coming out as trans, Dear Prudence’s Daniel Mallory Ortberg frequently helps his readers navigate coming out to their families or how to be a good ally. Consent in the age of #MeToo was explored across three moving episodes of Dear Sugar, where the hosts reckoned with their sexual histories alongside their listeners. Ask Polly has become something of a beacon to listless, anxious and broke millennials seeking reassurance that they’re doing OK. “Learn to treat yourself the way a loving older parent would,” she told one questioner. “Tell yourself: this reckoning serves a purpose.” Maybe it’s because we live in such uncertain times – an era marked by the absence, indeed the refusal, to commit to solutions to the big problems threatening our very existence. Reading about climate change, inequality and rising extremism can make us feel hopeless and adrift. Is it any wonder that a place where problems, however small, are earnestly shared and thoughtfully resolved is so alluring, and can maybe even help us sleep at night?

Rikers is scheduled to shutter by 2026 after a decades long run as one of the world’s largest jails New York City lawmakers voted to close the notorious Rikers Island jail complex, which has become synonymous with violence and neglect. Rikers is scheduled to shutter by 2026, ending a decades long run as one of the world’s largest jails. It will be replaced with four smaller and more modern jails located closer to the city’s main courthouses in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. “Rikers Island is a symbol of brutality and inhumanity and it is time for us to once and for all close Rikers Island,” said the city council speaker Corey Johnson, a Democrat who shepherded the plan through the council. “As a city we must do everything we can to move away from the failed policies of mass incarceration.” The New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, and other Democrats support the plan, which has a price tag of more than $8bn. “This is one of those moments where a cycle gets broken. There’s been a cycle of incarceration,” de Blasio said at a news conference after the vote. “That cycle ends now” he added. The Rikers complex counts 10 jails on an island between Queens and the Bronx that mainly houses inmates awaiting trial. The complex has housed jail inmates since the 1930s and has long been known for brutality. It saw hundreds of stabbings each year during the 1980s and early 1990s. It has been nicknamed Gladiator School, Torture Island, the Guantánamo of New York and, in summertime, the Oven. More recently, a 2014 Associated Press investigation detailed dozens of inmate deaths including that of a homeless ex-marine who essentially baked to death in a hot cell. Daniel Dromm, a councilman, invoked the names of former inmates who have died at the facility, including Kalief Browder. The most notorious case in the jail’s recent history involved the 16-year-old Browder, who spent three years at Rikers Island after being accused of stealing a small backpack. The charge was eventually dismissed. Browder was beaten by officers and inmates, as shown in disturbing footage from surveillance cameras, obtained by the New Yorker. He took his own life at age 22. Dromm also recalled Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who was found dead in her cell last June. With falling crime rates, the number of people incarcerated in the city on a daily basis has declined from a high of nearly 22,000 in 1991 to about 7,000 today. City officials announced this week that they believe they can shrink the jail po[CENSORED]tion even further by 2026, to just 3,300 prisoners. Backers of the jail overhaul say they expect the city’s jail po[CENSORED]tion will keep dropping because of criminal justice reforms. Some critics of the plan say fewer cells may mean more violent criminals on city streets. Others say building new jails will inevitably lead to incarceration. Anti-jail activists chanted during the vote: “If you build it they will fill it.” “The idea is to begin actually decarcerating New York City instead of building new jails” said Marlene Nava Ramos, a member of the advocacy group No New Jails NYC.

And our test data proves that it's not just a perception. We were hoping that one of the many benefits of having a Chevrolet Corvette with its engine relocated behind the occupants was a much improved view forward. However, our test data shows that not only is it not great among the mid-engine crowd, the C8's forward view over the hood is actually worse than the previous-generation Corvette's. It's a missed opportunity on an otherwise revolutionary new Corvette. Among the many promises of the mid-engine configuration is an unobstructed view forward, where the pavement appears to be whizzing by immediately ahead of your toes. So, among many other attributes we anticipated, we were understandably excited to see what the visual experience of a mid-engine Corvette had in store. And then, during our recent chance for some extended seat time the view over the now engineless hood seemed . . . not great. So, as we do on every new car, we took visibility measurements to see precisely how it measures up. Even though the driver is sitting more than two inches higher than in a McLaren 720S, the Corvette's hood blocks four feet more road. That certainly must be a sacrifice made in the name of cargo space, right? Nope, the McLaren has more front stowage space. The Acura NSX and Porsche 718 Cayman also have a better forward view, but get this: so did the front-engine C7. Not helping with the perception from the driver's seat is an extraordinarily long dash with much distracting topography. Perhaps this is the result of having appropriated the space for an eventual all-wheel-drive model with an electric motor packaged up front? However, in an unexpected twist, the C8's downward view out the back is dramatically improved, shrinking by more than 60 percent compared with the impossible line of sight over the previous Corvette's extremely large and flat cargo area that blocked the better part of a football field of road behind it. Also unusual is that, in a world of ever thicker pillars, the C8's A-pillars are two degrees slimmer, although these weren't enough to improve the overall negative perception created by the hoodline and long dash. But we just kept shaking our heads at the fact that a Volkswagen GTI has a more panoramic forward view than a Corvette with an engine no longer in the way. It's a rare miss in an otherwise revolutionary new Corvette.

remember a woman who screamed like a feral animal. She was leather tan and sinewy. Spiked bleached blonde hair, sculpted biceps, low-slung cargo pants with Doc Martens, veins bursting from her neck, eyes bugging from her drawn face. She stood on the sidewalks of New York City with a folding table covered with poster-size images from hardcore pornography: women wearing dog collars, women on leashes, women leaned over and viewed from behind, their backs crosshatched with scars. Much of the time she displayed a blowup of the famous Hustler magazine cover showing a naked woman being fed upside down into a meat grinder. “This is what your husbands are masturbating to,” she shouted in a barking monotone. “Wake up, women! Don’t be passive! Sign the petition!” Today, the angry, ranting woman with the folding table is gone from the sidewalk. In her place are millions of angry women marching in the streets and, even more so, ranting online. We are tiny pixels coalescing into a giant portrait of rage in all its definitions. Twenty years after the redheaded man shoved me on Columbus Avenue, men were going down like bowling pins against the unstoppable forces of #MeToo. What could you call the fall of 2017 other than the Fall of the Fall of Man. It was a season of hurricanes and rapid soil erosion, namely the mudslide that began with Harvey Weinstein and quickly pulled more men down with it than anyone could reasonably keep up with. Or maybe that’s the wrong metaphor. Maybe it wasn’t a mudslide as much as a giant oil spill from the tanker on which contemporary western society had been carrying its assumptions about male behavior. Like fossil fuels themselves, this behavior had long been construed as a necessary evil, one for which any purported cure seemed as futile and flimsy as a reusable shopping bag. (Hit him with your stiletto if he gets handsy! Make him get in touch with his feelings! Pry his eyes open and force him to read the Scum Manifesto!) I’m not going to even try to summarize the events of that fall or list the men who went down in the spill of #MeToo. Entire books will be written about that movement, the best of which probably can’t be embarked upon until enough years have passed to allow authors even a modicum of perspective. What I can tell you about the fall of 2017 is that it coincided with a downward slope of my youth that was far steeper than I had any grasp of at the time. The autumn of 2017 marked my second year back in New York City after being away for the better part of two decades, most of it in California. Though I’d left California in 2015 in the wake of irremediable, if mercifully amicable, marital separation, it had taken nearly two years to officially get divorced, and this new status carried a sting whose effects sometimes proved paralytic. How could I have imagined that replacing the license plates on your car could feel like a death? (Somehow I’d managed to keep my car registered in California until the last possible minute.) Who knew that shopping for a new health insurance policy could make you feel like you’re on a plastic pool raft floating aimlessly in the Dead Sea? (OK, I guess everyone knows that.) I’d left New York when I was nearly 30. I was now 47. Whereas my chief experience of the city was that of a young woman, I was now faced with re-entering it as a middle-aged one. It wasn’t just that I had been young in New York; New York was my youth. It was the place where I’d spent my entire 20s. It was the place where I figured out what kind of person I wanted to be. That’s a different thing from actually figuring out how to be that person, and it took leaving New York to accomplish that task, but as they like to say in California, setting your intention is the most important phase of the journey. New York was the backdrop for my earliest triumphs and stupidities. It was the first and last place I ever lived where on any given night you could step outside and feel like absolutely anything could happen, that the course of your life could shift like a subway train switching from the local track to the express. It was the place where I had my first real job, my first grown-up boyfriend, my first martini, my first call from a debt collector, my first call from a hospital pay phone telling me someone was in serious trouble. It was the site of my earliest rough drafts and rough treatments, the ones visited upon me as well as the ones I inflicted on others. Now that I had returned, it was as if my 20s were being handed back to me in used condition. What a strange remnant to hold in your hand; what a bittersweet walk down memory’s plank. Here I was again, a girl alone and on the town. I was my most primordial self, a girl who was rabidly ambitious in some ways but inexplicably lazy in others. I was a girl who technically hadn’t been a girl for the better part of 30 years but who nonetheless felt a strange remove from the word “woman”, which seemed to convey a poise and seriousness I hadn’t yet attained. I may have been in my mid-40s, but I was still all jokes and hammy self-deprecation, still unable to accept compliments, still flirting with men by defaulting to my best Diane Keaton in Manhattan impression, even though it had been decades since I was attracted to the kind of men who were attracted to that. I was all the things I’d been when I was young except for the young part. I had a nicer apartment, a little more money, and a little more professional recognition. I had a dog (this I’d longed for in my 20s the way some women long for babies) and a car that I had to move for alternate-side street cleaning. But my days were more or less the same. I sat at my desk and drank coffee. I did my work when I could, but more often I stared into space and wondered what would become of my life. I surfed the internet at a connection speed that would have been unimaginable in 1995. In part because of that connection speed, the space I stared into most of the time wasn’t my own physical space but some unholy rotation of social media, news media and floating junk courtesy of cyberspace. By the time Donald Trump entered office, I probably spent at least three-quarters of my waking hours with my head in this space. By the time #MeToo reached full force, my brain no longer felt connected to my body. At times, my brain no longer felt associated with my brain as I’d once known it. There were moments in which I couldn’t remember the names of people I’d been acquainted with for years. In intense, animated conversations with friends and colleagues, I’d find myself revving up to some sort of grand insight and then suddenly sputtering out mid-sentence, like a rollercoaster propelled halfway up a loop but unable to make it all the way around. Bunched up in my desk chair, I would stare at the computer screen for hours, hunting for words as though tracking lions on safari and practically sweating from the exertion. More than a few times I wondered if I was experiencing some form of dementia. I once read that there’s scientific proof of a correlation between increased nostalgia and creeping senility. And since returning to New York, I’d been soaking in nostalgia. Everywhere I went, my 20s played in my head like a song stuck there permanently. Every neighborhood, every subway station, in some areas every street corner, echoed with some memory from that time. There was John’s pizzeria on Bleecker, where, at 21 and playing hooky from college upstate, I sat with a man – a boy, really – who both was and wasn’t my boyfriend and listened to him reminisce about his old girlfriend, who, he said, was “sexy without being pretty, if that makes any sense”. There, among the slabs of buildings of Midtown Sixth Avenue, were the offices of more temp jobs than I could count: banks, law firms, insurance companies, each with its own mini kitchen and passcode-protected employee restrooms. There, at 57th and Broadway is a Duane Reade pharmacy that was once Coliseum Books, a place where the feral woman had often stood and yelled: “Sign the petition!” I remember being dumped on Delancey Street, kissed on Charles Street, having a strange and short-lived personal assistant job in a musty apartment on Sutton Place. I remember standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 49th Street as hail rained down like shellfire one summer night following a long, somewhat drunken dinner with an older man in a powerful position whose meal invitations I dreaded but nonetheless felt obliged to accept. Those meals had started out as business lunches but then migrated into semi-business dinners. During these dinners, the man would tell me certain details about his personal life, which was in a state of acute crisis. I didn’t particularly want to be there but I accepted the invitations because there was in this transaction the implicit notion that he could help my career, albeit in a rather vague, abstract way. I accepted them so because not doing so felt like a kind of professional self-sabotage, as foolish and irresponsible as missing deadlines. At no time did the man make an ultimatum or proposition me directly. I never felt like I was being sexually harassed and obviously no one was kidnapping me from my apartment and forcibly escorting me to the Oyster Bar, where the man would sit waiting for me, smoking probably the fourth of 15 cigarettes he’d smoke that night. I’ll cop to a certain psychological gamesmanship on my part as well. I’d occasionally bum a cigarette from him, an act that gave me a sense of distance and control but that surely read to him as an intimate gesture. At least a few times, after I probably had one too many glasses of wine, I became rather suggestive and flirtatious, inquiring into his personal life, seeing how much I could get him to disclose as he got drunker. I did this in part as a defense mechanism. The more we talked about him, the less we talked about me. But I also did it because I wanted to mess with his head, and I was young enough then to think that doing so would serve as some kind of tacit punishment for his behavior. The truth, of course (which anyone but a young twerp would have the wisdom to realize), was that messing with his head was its own reward for him. I wasn’t censuring his behavior as much as reinforcing it. As for my own, I’ve been cringing about it ever since. Looking back, it would be easy to say I behaved like this out of some instinctive subordination to the man’s power. There’s an element of truth to that, but there’s also an angle at which the situation could be viewed as quite the opposite. From this angle, I behaved the way I did because in some ways the power imbalance between the two of us was tipped in my favor. I was young and the man was twice my age. He may have had professional power over me, but it was limited and in no way unilateral. In fact, thanks to the personal details I’d siphoned out of him, I probably could have placed one phone call and made his life very difficult. And so I carried on with my coquettishness until somehow the meals became fewer and farther between and then finally ended, probably because he took up with someone else. I carried on this way because my life was an open horizon and his was an overstuffed attic. I behaved this way because I must have known on some unconscious level that, at 25, I had more of a certain kind of power than I was ever going to have in my life and that I might as well use it, even if the accompanying rush was laced with shame. This was the summer of 1995. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill had come out that June, and I listened to it pretty much on constant repeat through August. One night, after doing my silly routine with this man and riding the subway home in self-disgust, I sat in my room and played Jagged Little Pill and then wandered into the kitchen to talk to my roommate. I remember grumbling to her about my dinner companion, complaining about his lechery while conveniently omitting the parts when I’d dramatically exhaled on my cigarette, looked him straight in the eye, and said something devastatingly witty and possibly a tiny bit dirty. (I’d like to add that I winked, but that wouldn’t past the truth test, since I’m physically unable to wink.) Instead I said: “God, what a perv.” “Sounds annoying,” my roommate said. “But hey, you keep showing up. You must be getting something out of it.” During the Fall of the Fall of Man, I thought a lot about the showing up I’d done over the years. Every woman seemed to be taking this kind of inventory. It was like a novel everyone was reading, one with a plot that seemed easy enough to follow but whose underlying themes and messages amount to an abstruse thicket of personal projection and postmodern obfuscation. Like any sentient being, I’d been shocked and disgusted by the Weinstein revelations and saw no reason to equivocate about the reliability of his accusers or the severity of his punishment. But as the list of perpetrators piled up and the public censure piled on, the conversation around #MeToo (lacking a specific category, each new scandal was not a story or an issue but a “conversation”) began to split down generational lines. The first incident to put this divide in notably sharp relief involved a secret Google spreadsheet called the Shitty Media Men list. This was an anonymously sourced, living document meant to warn women about certain men in the media business, mostly publishing, who were known for inappropriate sexual or sexually charged behavior. It included all kinds of men, from powerful editors to freelance writers, and described alleged misdeeds that ranged from “weird lunch dates” to inappropriate flirting to stalking to physical violence and all-out rape. And though the list was never officially published and disappeared from Google Docs almost as quickly as it emerged, enough screenshots were taken that the perpetrators became common knowledge almost immediately. Within hours of the list’s discovery, the chief line of inquiry around it, even more so than “Who started it?”, was whether infractions like “weird lunches” should be lumped in with crimes like rape. Unsurprisingly, I found myself on the side of the oldsters who were deeply troubled not just by this “lumping” (again, there seemed to be only one operative word, and in this case it was “lump”) but by the idea that anonymously sourced accusations could be made against publicly named people without warning or any sort of due process. “This is so wrong!” my same-age friends and I ranted. “You can’t just do this! These millennials don’t get it!” We said this as we forwarded the screenshots among each other, gawking at the names we recognized. “Weird lunch!” I said to more than one person. “Welcome to publishing! I’m going to write a memoir about my early days in New York and call it Weird Lunch.” And as the “conversation” lurched along and the narrative of the “generational divide” became the default narrative, I found myself reminded of this passage of time on a daily, even hourly, basis. When a scandal broke involving the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari, I felt that my membership on Team Older Feminist was so official that I might as well take out a charge card at Eileen Fisher and call it a day (though has anyone under 40 ever used a “charge card”?) And so the ground began to shake around the fault line. The older feminists scolded the younger ones for not being tough enough to take care of themselves. If the construction worker whistles at you, give him the finger! If the drunk guy sitting next to you at the wedding reception gets fresh, kick him in the shins! In turn, the youngsters chastised the oldsters for enabling the oppressive status quo with cool-girl posturing. We shouldn’t have to suppress our humanity by letting insults roll off us! We shouldn’t have to risk our safety with physical violence because patriarchal norms have taught the drunk wedding guest he can act like that! Neither side was entirely wrong, of course. But both sides were talking past each other in ways that suggested there was no meeting in the middle. In the New York Times, Daphne Merkin identified a gulf between what women said publicly about #MeToo and the eye-rolling that went on in private. “Publicly, they say the right things, expressing approval and joining in the chorus of voices that applaud the takedown of maleficent characters who prey on vulnerable women in the workplace,” she wrote. “In private it’s a different story. ‘Grow up, this is real life,’ I hear these same feminist friends say.” In the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan, whose tendency toward a certain impish prudery has never made her po[CENSORED]r among young feminists, wrote that the Ansari fracas, at least the version of it chronicled on Babe.net, constituted “3,000 words of revenge porn”. She decried the helplessness of “a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab”. On cable news, the HLN anchor Ashleigh Banfield looked straight into the camera and addressed “Grace” directly. “What you have done in my opinion is appalling,” said Banfield, calling the allegations “reckless and hollow” and charging Grace with having “chiseled away at a movement that I along with all of my sisters in the workplace have been dreaming of for decades”. This being cable news, Banfield’s producers invited Katie Way to appear on the show. And this being the digital era, Way declined the offer not with a “no thanks” but by popping off an email that called Banfield a “burgundy lipstick bad highlights second wave feminist has-been” and noted that “no woman my age would ever watch your network”. As I watched all of this whiz past me on my computer screen, sharpened by the reading glasses I’d lately been forced to wear, I wondered if my real problem with young feminists was how little they seemed to need us older ones. As far as I could see, they didn’t even want to know us. At 25, I not only wanted to know people like Daphne Merkin and Ashleigh Banfield, I wanted to be them. There were hundreds of women in my imaginative orbit – some of them over 50 or possibly even 60 – whom I felt this way about. I knew none of them, but I wanted to be all of them. Together, they formed a great phalanx of wise elders whose only duty to me was to be themselves. My duty, in turn, was to watch and learn. By which I mean that was my duty to myself. But something was different back then. I shared a planet with those elders. We occupied the same universe. We breathed the same air. The same cannot be said for the relationship between my generation and those that are coming up behind us. The world has changed so much between my time and theirs that someone just 10 years younger might as well belong to a different geological epoch. To a young person, someone like me is not so much an elder as an extinction. Is it any wonder, then, that older generations’ contributions to the conversation are, at best, a kind of verbal meteor shower, the flickering, nattering remains of planets that haven’t existed for eons? So this is where I find myself. Amid my exasperation and confusion, I have wandered into a devastating but oddly beautiful revelation: my generation will be the last to have known the world in its analog form. As a result, we’ve grown old before actually getting old. We’ve become dinosaurs before we’re even 50. And it’s here, from this primitive-creature vantage point, that I find myself pressed up against yet another revelation: the questions we face now when it comes to men and women are questions that arose a split second ago. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Civilization as we know it has been churning away for perhaps 6,000 years. Until the birth control pill came along in 1960, we were all essentially prisoners of nature, with women’s conditions being markedly worse, sometimes obscenely so. Until 1960, the idea that women could compete with men in the job market, that men should do housework, that women had any purpose in life higher than having babies and men had any purpose higher than financially supporting those babies or going to war to protect them, was something close to unthinkable. That we have come so far in so little time is a marvel. That we should expect all the kinks to have been worked out by now is insane. In the scheme of things, the 59 years that have elapsed between 1960 and today is a nanosecond, a flash of time so imperceptible that it has passed in increments of billions by the time you have read this sentence. It was already nearly 30 years ago that the feral woman was out there with her folding table yelling: “Sign the petition.” It was already nearly 30 years ago that, as far as I was concerned, I owned the world. It feels like yesterday. Then again, every day feels like yesterday. Every day becomes yesterday before you know it.

President launches Twitter tirade after Democratic leaders exited meeting they say devolved into insults Donald Trump’s clash with Democratic lawmakers reached new heights when top Democrats walked out of a White House meeting and House speaker Nancy Pelosi pitied the president for having a “meltdown”. Pelosi and other top Democrats say they walked out of the contentious White House briefing on Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria after it devolved into an insult-fest and it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potentially revival of Isis in the Middle East. The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, told reporters Trump had called Pelosi a “third-rate politician”. He said the meeting “was not a dialogue, this was sort of a diatribe, a nasty diatribe not focused on the facts”. Pelosi said: “I pray for the president all the time … I think now we have to pray for his health – this was a very serious meltdown on the part of the president.” She added Democrats “couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it”. Republicans pushed back, arguing it was Pelosi who’d been the problem. “She storms out of another meeting, trying to make it unproductive,” said the House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy. The White House spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, called Pelosi’s action “baffling but not surprising”. Trump himself pushed back in a series of tweets, calling Pelosi “Nervous Nancy” and the Democrats the “Do Nothing Democrats”. The move came on the same day the US House, which is bitterly divided over the impeachment inquiry, nonetheless banded together to overwhelmingly support a resolution condemning the president’s Syria policy by a vote of 354-60. Turkey launched an offensive against Kurdish forces in northern Syria two days after Trump suddenly announced he was withdrawing forces from the area. Trump declared on Wednesday that the US had no stake in defending the Kurdish fighters, who died by the thousands as America’s partners against Isis extremists. Condemnation of Trump’s stance on Turkey, Syria and the Kurds was quick and severe during the day, and Pelosi said Trump appeared visibly “shaken up” after nearly two-thirds of the House GOP caucus voted in support of the resolution. The non-binding resolution states Congress’s opposition to the troop pullback and says Turkey should cease its military action in Syria. The measure also says the White House should present a plan for an “enduring defeat” of the Islamic State; many worry that Isis will resurge as Turkish forces attack Syrian Kurds who are holding the extremists. The Syria briefing marked the first face-to-face interaction between Trump and Pelosi since the House speaker formally launched an impeachment inquiry against the president last month. Trump himself has stalked out of his White House meetings in the past, including with congressional leaders in May, when he said he would no longer work with Democrats unless they dropped all Russia investigations, and last January during the partial government shutdown. Advertisement In public appearances on Wednesday, Trump said he was fulfilling a campaign pledge to bring US troops home from “endless wars” in the Middle East – casting aside criticism that a sudden US withdrawal from Syria betrays the Kurdish fighters, stains US credibility around the world, and opens an important region to Russia, which is moving in. “We have a situation where Turkey is taking land from Syria. Syria’s not happy about it. Let them work it out,” Trump said. “They have a problem at a border. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

VPNs are big business, and getting bigger, but the prospect of buying a subscription and setting one up can be daunting for a first-timer. However, that’s not your only option. Increasingly, web browsers are offering their own in-browser VPNs (or services described as such). But are they really the same, and how much protection do they offer? Opera is establishing a niche for itself as a pioneer in online security, willing to experiment, take risks, and introduce new privacy features long before the bigger players. It was the first mainstream browser to launch a built-in VPN, offering it for both desktop and mobile devices. “Opera introduced our free, built-in no log browser VPN more than three years ago,” an Opera spokesperson told TechRadar. “We saw the rising demand for VPN services: people wanted to protect their online lives better. We decided to help them with this.” “We are a non-default browser that people have to make a choice to download and use, that’s why we try harder to innovate and offer the best features, as soon as we can” Opera doesn’t charge for its VPN, instead providing it free as an incentive for people to make the switch from rival browsers. “Our browser’s revenue comes from other, unrelated sources such as agreements with the world's most po[CENSORED]r search engines,” the spokesperson explained. “The reception has been great. People value the fact that our VPN, is no log, free and unlimited. Unlike, for example, Firefox, the Opera browser continues to grow its user base and is now the preferred choice of more than 300 million people worldwide on PC and smartphones.” Opera is clearly confident, and its service is certainly easy to use (our colleagues at Tom’s Guide have found that it works particularly well with Netflix), but is it really a VPN? Some would argue no. When is a VPN not a VPN? In September 2019, Mozilla debuted an experimental tool called Firefox Private Network (FPN). It's currently available free for testing to US desktop users, but may well be a paid-for product when it’s released in the near future. Although it works just like Opera’s tool, Mozilla stopped short of actually calling it a VPN, so we asked why it made the distinction. “Firefox Private Network was built to ensure the best possible performance and privacy,” a Mozilla spokesperson told TechRadar. “As opposed to a true VPN, which is a piece of software that works on the OS level of a device, the Firefox Private Network is a secure, encrypted path to the web for the Firefox browser using Cloudflare as a proxy” Because FPN only protects web traffic going through the browser, Mozilla believes ‘proxy’ a more appropriate term. By this measure, Opera’s offering is also a secure proxy, only anonymizing browser traffic. Proxies are useful tools for keeping your everyday browsing private – particularly when you’re using a public Wi-Fi hotspot – but it’s important to be aware of their limitations compared to a ‘true’ VPN. A proxy won’t secure any data sent and received by other applications, including (but not limited to) email clients, media apps, and messaging apps. With online services increasingly urging users to use their own apps rather than a web browser, this is important to bear in mind. It’s also important to know who is providing your browser’s proxy, where the organization is based (different countries have different data privacy laws), and what logs it keeps. Reassuringly, Mozilla is particularly transparent about this. “FPN was carefully built by Mozilla’s team of designers and engineers, making sure you get the best possible performance and privacy, tightly integrated with the Firefox browser,” its spokesperson told us. “And true to our commitment to privacy, the data Cloudflare processes for the Firefox Private Network is subject to Mozilla’s privacy policy. All proxy data will be deleted within 24 hours.” Still, if you want to make sure all your internet traffic is encrypted and anonymized, you'll need to investigate a premium standalone VPN service. Proxies vs VPNs ExpressVPN is one of the world's biggest VPN providers, and currently ranks top in our guide to the best VPNs. “We are glad to see that a growing number of companies share our view that VPNs are an essential online privacy and security tool,” Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN, told us. “We have also been working with Mozilla since 2018 to offer Firefox Lite users a free seven-day trial of ExpressVPN – helping to educate users about the risks of public Wi-Fi while equipping them with tools to protect themselves” However, while he agreed that while browser-based proxies can be useful, he also noted that they don’t protect all internet traffic. He also observed that dedicated VPN services can also invest more in their products, offering services like 24/7 live customer support, premium bandwidth, reliable content unblocking, and state of the art hardware for speed, stability and securityy. For example, ExpressVPN’s servers run on RAM only, not hard drives, which guarantees that all software and data on the server is erased on every reboot. That's not something most browser developers will be able to provide - and certainly not for free. However, there is one company with the resources... What about Chrome? There are certainly plenty of third-party proxy extensions for Chrome (both free and paid), but there’s no sign of Google implementing a proxy or VPN of its own. With over 60% of the global browser market in September 2019 according to StatCounter, Google certainly doesn’t need to dangle a carrot to tempt new users – but it could if it wished. It already provides a VPN for customers of its Google Fi mobile phone service, though that’s out of necessity. Google doesn’t control its own mobile network, so it piggybacks on infrastructure belonging to Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. Each of these companies has its own security and privacy policies, making it a nightmare for Google to create a standard set of privacy policies, so it chose to get around the issue by installing a VPN on each phone. Data is encrypted and sent to a remote server before it goes to any of those three ISPs, meaning they are unable to see what it is, or where it’s come from. That’s not a cheap service, but it proves that Google is prepared to bolster its services with privacy tools when it must. And if proxies become standard with all other browsers, it might feel compelled to follow suit. Earlier this year, Google followed the example set by Mozilla and Opera by giving Chrome users the ability to block third-party cookies (despite its insistence that doing so will only cause advertisers to use shadier methods like fingerprinting to track web users). A true in-browser VPN would be a major asset for Google, particularly if Chrome's po[CENSORED]rity starts to wane as users become frustrated by its infamous RAM-guzzling) and would let it leapfrog other browsers that only offer a proxy. Whether users would trust a VPN provided by Google is another matter, but we certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility of one appearing in Chrome in the next couple of years.

Did you know the American Humane Association monitors over 1,000 productions each year to protect animals in movies, television shows, and other videos? They have a bunch of requirements companies have to meet to show the "No Animals Were Harmed" badge in their end credits. Thank goodness there isn't a similar association devoted to stopping bloggers from beating dead horses, though, because Microsoft once again broke Windows 10 with a cumulative update. The company released the KB4517389 cumulative update to Windows 10 on October 8. It didn't take long for people to start reporting problems: Windows Latest noticed complaints about the update breaking the Start menu on October 12, and by October 13, it had discovered that the update also made the Edge browser unusable. (Which isn't exactly new where Edge is concerned, but we mean it literally here.) Some users have also had problems with installing the update in the first place. None of this comes as a surprise. The last several cumulative updates have borked Windows 10 in various ways: KB4515384 broke Windows Desktop Search, KB4517211 prevented some people from being able to print, and KB4524147 broke the Start menu. Those are just some of the most recent examples; we've had to write similar reports throughout most of 2019. Not all cumulative updates have serious issues, but enough of them have to make us skeptical of any new release. That might help explain why Microsoft pushed the next major update to the now-appropriately-titled Windows 10 November 2019 Update. The company said earlier this month that it was planning to release this major update on October 8. Instead, it released KB4517389. It honestly feels like the update was supposed to be a consolation prize, but instead it raised even more questions about how people are supposed to trust Windows 10 updates not to have severe problems at launch. We know that many people have probably installed the KB4517389 without a single problem, making these issues the exception, not the rule. But that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft has steadily eroded any faith Windows 10 users might have had in updates that fix bugs, include vital security updates and are otherwise supposed to improve their experience. We'll stop beating these dead horses when Microsoft stops delivering them to the 900 million systems running Windows 10.

The high-horsepower car jumped a curb in Australia, but owner Nick Kyrgios wasn't driving and is fine. sn't driving) hit a pole with it. Australian tabloids including the Daily Telegraph posted video like the one above showing the car being carried away on a flatbed. No word on whether Kyrgios was in the car at the time of the accident. On this news item, we'll go with the Instagram comment of someone named @mahinth: "The crash was definitely the line umpire's fault." That's because the world's 28th-ranked men's tennis player, Nick Kyrgios, has a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon that someone (not Kyrgios) was driving this weekend when it jumped a curb and hit a pole. The crash occurred just about six months after the happy photo on his Instagram feed above. The Demon was built in very low numbers by FCA, with only 3300 rolling off the production line in Brampton, Ontario. Kyrgios had his imported to his native Australia, where the world-class men's singles player resides when he isn't traveling the world playing tennis. It is unknown if Kyrgios was in the vehicle as a passenger. The tennis star is known for letting his friends drive his vehicles, a move he is sure to rethink after this latest incident. The Demon is no joke to drive: it has 840 horsepower on tap when gassed up with 100-octane fuel. Known as the 21st century’s John McEnroe, Kyrgios is a colorful personality on and off the court. Just like the Dodge Demon, Kyrgios is loud, brash, and bound to draw attention wherever he goes. He is currently recovering from an injury sustained in the Laver Cup, which is why he's at home in Australia and not on the pro tennis circuit. We hope that the Demon ends up back on the road soon.