I really hope someone is taking these demonstrations seriously. If someone shut down all US airlines simultaneously, would that be an act of war?
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/multiple-airlines-experience-system-wide-outages-across-several-us-airports
Multiple airlines experience system-wide outages across several US airports
Southwest and Delta both acknowledged on social media they were experiencing issues with their systems.
“It's affecting our flights system wide, and we're working to see if it's affecting any other carriers this morning as well,” Southwest wrote in response to a beleaguered flier.
… Delta added: “I completely apologize, we are currently experiencing a System-Wide Outage we are working diligently to get it back up and running. We do not have a specific time as yet.”
The FAA said in a statement the airlines were experiencing issues "with a flight planning weight and balance program called Aerodata. Mainline operations and regional operations are impacted to varying degrees."
The agency said United, JetBlue and Alaska Airlines were also affected.
… Last week, travelers across the country were experiencing widespread computer outages causing delays across multiple airlines. American Airlines, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue were among the carriers affected.






The Regulation that keeps on giving?
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/30/covert-data-scraping-on-watch-as-eu-dpa-lays-down-radical-gdpr-red-line/
Covert data-scraping on watch as EU DPA lays down “radical” GDPR red-line
An interesting decision came out of Poland’s data protection agency this week after the watchdog issued its first fine under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
On the surface the enforcement doesn’t look so remarkable: A ‘small’ ~€220K fine was handed to a Sweden-headquartered European digital marketing company, Bisnode, which has an office in Poland, after the national Personal Data Protection Office (UODO) decided the company had failed to comply with data subject rights obligations set out in Article 14 of the GDPR.
But the decision also requires it contact the close to six million people it did not already reach out to in order to fulfil its Article 14 information notification obligation, with the DPA giving the company three months to comply.
Bisnode previously estimated it would cost around €8M (~$9M) in registered postal costs to send so many letters, never mind the burden of handling any related admin.
So, as ever, the strength of data protection enforcement under GDPR is a lot more than the deterrent of top-line fines. It’s accompanying orders that can really rearrange business practices.
Local press reports that Bisnode has said it will delete the sanctioned records, presumably rather than shell out to send millions of letters. It also intends to challenge the UODO’s decision, initially in Polish courts — relying on caveats contained in Article 14 which relate to how much effort a data controller has to expend to contact people to tell them it’s processing their data.
… Article 14 of the GDPR creates an obligation on data controllers to inform people whose personal data they intend to process when the information in question has not been directly obtained from them. So, for instance, when personal data has been scraped off the public Internet.
The relevant chunk of the regulation is pretty long — but key points include that the person whose data has been scraped must be informed who has their data (which includes anyone the data has been shared with, and any proposed international transfers); the types of data obtained; what is going to be done with; and the legal basis for the processing.






Sound familiar? Stay tuned.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/01/ukraine-elections-comedian-secures-comfortable-first-round-win.html
Comedian secures comfortable first-round win in Ukraine’s presidential elections
A comedy actor with no political experience has thrashed the incumbent in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential elections, according to exit polls.
Volodymyr Zelensky, who plays a fictional president in a popular TV show, secured 30.4 percent of the vote on Sunday, early results showed. Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire magnate and Ukraine’s current leader, received 17.8 percent.






I like someone else to do the research for me. I’ll just add them to my toolkit, because you don’t really need them until you really, really need them.
https://www.bespacific.com/source-our-search-for-the-best-ocr-tool-and-what-we-found/
Source – Our Search for the Best OCR Tool, and What We Found
“Source is an OpenNews project designed to amplify the impact of journalism code and the community of developers, designers, journalists, and editors who make it.”
Our Search for the Best OCR Tool, and What We Found: A side-by-side comparison of seven OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from Factful – There are a lot of OCR options available. Some are easy to use, some require a bit of programming to make them work, some require a lot of programming. Some are quite expensive, some are free and open source. We selected several documents—two easy to read reports, a receipt, an historical document, a legal filing with a lot of redaction, a filled in disclosure form, and a water damaged page—to run through the OCR engines we are most interested in. We tested three free and open source options (Calamari, OCRopus and Tesseract) as well as one desktop app (Adobe Acrobat Pro) and three cloud services (Abbyy Cloud, Google Cloud Vision, and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision). All the scripts we used, as well as the complete output from each OCR engine, are available on GitHub. You can use the scripts to check our work, or to run your own documents against any of the clients we tested…”