An unnamed South Korean presidential official tells Reuters that the summit would be held ahead of a proposed meeting with President Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un expected in May or June.

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Google is adding new features to Gmail, including a snooze button, and soon, the ability for messages to self-destruct.

Sis. Patricia Fox has been given 30 days to get out of the country after she apparently joined protest rallies against controversial Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.

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The U.S. District Court judge put his decision on hold for 90 days to give the Department of Homeland Security time to provide a better explanation as to why the program is unlawful.

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Funds in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund are at risk because the World Bank is not adequately monitoring how they are used. The U.S. has contributed $3 billion to the fund.

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A group of 120 — including Apple's Tim Cook, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and chef Guy Savoy — were invited to the grandest party in the nation's capital, honoring French President Emmanuel Macron.

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Pete Recommends – weekly highlights on cyber security issues – April 23 2018 – LLRX  MIT Explainer: What is a blockchain? | beSpacific  New on LLRX – Pete Recommends – weekly highlights on cyber security issues – April 23 2018 | beSpacific  Emails Suggest Interior Dept. Prioritizing Fossil Fuel Interests Over Wildlife Well-Being | beSpacific  How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews | beSpacific  Supply Chain Vulnerabilities from China in US Federal Information and Communications Technology | beSpacific  50+ Sites to Download Free Sound Effects for Almost Everything | beSpacific  Navigating through Wikipedia articles on desktop just got a lot easier | beSpacific  Paper – False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey | beSpacific  Data USA adds more than 7,300 profiles of higher education institutions to visualization platform | beSpacific 

Blockchain – Where it came from, what it does, and how you make one by MIT Technology Review Editors. April 23, 2018.

• “What is it? A public, permanent, append-only distributed ledger.
• What’s that? A mathematical structure for storing data in a way that is nearly impossible to fake. It can be used for all kinds of valuable data.
• Where did it come from? “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.” These are the words of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, in a message sent to a cryptography-focused mailing list in October 2008. Included was a link to a nine-page white paper describing a technology that some are now convinced will disrupt the financial system…”

"The executive order, at its heart, says Yemeni people are bad and they need to stay away. We say no! We are part of the fabric of the country," says a Yemeni-American whose mother was denied a visa.

(Image credit: Deb Amos/NPR)

NPR's Ailsa speaks to Natalie Barnes and her mother Paulette Wilson about how their family was shocked in 2015 to receive word from the British Home Office that Paulette was no longer considered a citizen and risked deportation to Jamaica where she was born after not have visited there for 50 years.

The Avengers try to keep a space-tyrant from bedazzling his space-glove and performing cosmic genocide. The film doubles down on character interactions both familiar (good) and unfamiliar (less good).

(Image credit: Chris Zlotnick/Marvel Studios)

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – weekly highlights on cyber security issues – April 23 2018 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health/medical, to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways our privacy and security is diminished, often without our situational awareness.

Pacific Standard – Records reveal that, following requests by fossil fuel industry groups, a top official at the Department of the Interior appeared to take credit for helping to delay new federal protections for a once-endangered species.

“The Texas hornshell is a sleek green-gray mussel that once thrived in the Rio Grande watershed, its habitat stretching from southern New Mexico down into the arid Texas borderlands. Some of its habitat happens to overlap with rich deposits of oil and gas. Amid a long-term decline in its range, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed to declare the mussel an endangered species. Upon taking office, however, the Trump administration changed tack. A top official at the Department of the Interior (DOI), Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the species at the behest of fossil fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government, according to public records obtained by the Guardian and Pacific Standard as well as Documented and the Western Values Project, both watchdog groups. DeVito, a Boston energy lawyer and the former co-chair of Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign in Massachusetts, is a little-known figure in the United States government. He is one of a host of political appointees hired by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, whose department oversees well over 400 million acres of public land and can determine the fate of the species that inhabit them…Although the mussel was eventually granted protections in February of 2018, former DOI officials with knowledge of the department’s rules and procedures say DeVito’s apparent involvement in the listing process raises both ethical and legal questions. “Listing decisions under the Endangered Species Act are meant to be entirely science-based decisions that result from—in some cases—years of review by experts in the field, not political appointees,” says Elizabeth Klein, a former associate deputy secretary at the DOI during the Obama years and now the deputy director of New York University’s state energy and environmental impact center. “A delay in and of itself might not be the end of the world—but then again it very well could be for an imperiled species.”

Washington Post: “On Amazon, customer comments can help a product surge in popularity. The online retail giant says that more than 99 percent of its reviews are legitimate because they are written by real shoppers who aren’t paid for them. But a Washington Post examination found that for some popular product categories, such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers, the vast majority of reviews appear to violate Amazon’s prohibition on paid reviews. Such reviews have certain characteristics, such as repetitive wording that people probably cut and paste in. Many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook, where sellers seek shoppers on dozens of networks, including Amazon Review Club and Amazon Reviewers Group, to give glowing feedback in exchange for money or other compensation. The practice artificially inflates the ranking of thousands of products, experts say, misleading consumers. Amazon.com banned paying for reviews a year and a half ago because of research it conducted showing that consumers distrust paid reviews. Every once in a while, including this month, Amazon purges shoppers from its site whom it accuses of breaking its policies. But the ban, sellers and experts say, merely pushed an activity that used to take place openly into dispersed and harder-to-track online communities. There, an economy of paid reviews has flourished. Merchants pledge to drop reimbursements into a reviewer’s PayPal account within minutes of posting comments for items such as kitchen knives, rain ponchos or shower caddies, often sweetening the deal with a $5 commission or a $10 Amazon gift card. Facebook this month deleted more than a dozen of the groups where sellers and buyers matched after being contacted by The Post. Amazon kicked a five-star seller off its site after an inquiry from The Post…”

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities from China in U.S. Federal Information and Communications Technology, April 2018. This research report was prepared at the request of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission to support its deliberations.

“The U.S. government needs a national strategy for supply chain risk management (SCRM) of commercial supply chain vulnerabilities in U.S. federal information and communications technology (ICT), including procurement linked to the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC). This strategy must include supporting policies so that U.S. security posture is forward-leaning, rather than reactive and based on responding to vulnerabilities, breaches, and other incidents after they have already damaged U.S. national security, economic competitiveness, or the privacy of U.S. citizens. This study uses a comprehensive definition of “U.S. government ICT supply chains” that includes (1) primary suppliers, (2) tiers of suppliers that support prime suppliers by providing products and services, and (3) any entities linked to those tiered suppliers through commercial, financial, or other relevant relationships. U.S. federal government ICT supply chains are multi-tiered, webbed relationships rather than singular or linear ones. The supply chain threat to U.S. national security stems from products produced, manufactured, or assembled by entities that are owned, directed, or subsidized by national governments or entities known to pose a potential supply chain or intelligence threat to the United States, including China. These products could be modified to (1) perform below expectations or fail, (2) facilitate state or corporate espionage, or (3) otherwise compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a federal information technology system…”

Police said the officers are in critical condition. "Dallas is at the precipice looking into the hell of heartbreak," the city's mayor said.

Hongkiat: “Imagine a movie or video without sound effects. Even a magnificent film like Titanic would look nothing more than a joke if there are no ‘Wham’, ‘Bam’ and ‘Smash’ sounds in it. Background music and sound effects are important for making a video (or even an audio production) engaging and in its full essence. There are thousands of online resources to download sound effects, however, not all of them can offer you high-quality material that’s also free. So, in this post, I am listing 50+ cool websites to download just about any type of sound effect for free…”

Page previews, deployed today, is one of the largest changes to desktop Wikipedia made in recent years. “If you’re on a computer, or have access to one, go to Wikipedia and check out your favorite article. At first, what you see there will be very familiar—the core reading experience on the site hasn’t changed much in the last four years. But take your cursor and hover over a link. See what pops up? That’s the newly deployed page previews feature, available today on the English Wikipedia, and deployed in stages to the hundreds of other language Wikipedias over the last year.* The feature allows you to get a quick grasp of what’s behind a link without committing to a click-through. This seemingly cosmetic change may seem far from revolutionary, but has been built through careful and vigorous A/B testing; scaling APIs to Wikipedia levels of traffic and a change to how we build our code (blog post to follow). Our testing shows that the feature makes it easier and more efficient for Wikipedia readers to interact with our content and get more context about a topic on Wikipedia…”

False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey. Srijan Kumar, Neil Shah (Submitted on 23 Apr 2018) Cornell University Library. arXiv.org > cs > arXiv:1804.08559

“False information can be created and spread easily through the web and social media platforms, resulting in widespread real-world impact. Characterizing how false information proliferates on social platforms and why it succeeds in deceiving readers are critical to develop efficient detection algorithms and tools for early detection. A recent surge of research in this area has aimed to address the key issues using methods based on feature engineering, graph mining, and information modeling. Majority of the research has primarily focused on two broad categories of false information: opinion-based (e.g., fake reviews), and fact-based (e.g., false news and hoaxes). Therefore, in this work, we present a comprehensive survey spanning diverse aspects of false information, namely (i) the actors involved in spreading false information, (ii) rationale behind successfully deceiving readers, (iii) quantifying the impact of false information, (iv) measuring its characteristics across different dimensions, and finally, (iv) algorithms developed to detect false information. In doing so, we create a unified framework to describe these recent methods and highlight a number of important directions for future research.”

On Tuesday, defense attorneys told jurors Andrea Constand's story could not be trusted. Prosecutors argued Bill Cosby was a sexual predator who preyed on "young, aspiring, unsuspecting women."

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