TLDR 2019-02-28

False reviews from companies have been a problem on Amazon’s marketplace for years and Amazon has been fighting this problem by going after the companies and individuals that sell review services. In a landmark case, the FTC has successfully sued Cure Encapsulations Inc for purchasing fake reviews, as these fake reviews amounted to false advertising. The company claimed that their product worked as an effective dietary aid, however, studies showed that the ingredients actually caused acute liver failure. Cure Encapsulations Inc was fined $12.8 million, sending a clear message to other companies that producing fake reviews is an unacceptable practice.

Google Duo now works on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, but Microsoft Edge appears to not be supported. Users can make phone calls directly from their browser to other users who are registered with the Google Duo service. The video chat service has proven to be popular and has outlived Google Allo, which was launched alongside it. OnePlus has announced deep integration of Google Duo in its phones.

Beta thalassemia is a genetic disease that leaves the patient dependent on blood transfusions as they are not able to produce hemoglobin normally. A treatment using CRISPR technology will extract bone marrow stem cells from the patient, activate a gene that will produce hemoglobin (fetal hemoglobin), and then reinfuse the cells back into the bloodstream. Theoretically, this will cure the patient with one treatment.

Ripcord has developed a machine for scanning documents at record-breaking speeds. The machine is able to detect and remove staples, adjust to different document sizes, and make the scanned documents searchable. Using this machine will help many companies remove the need for physical document archives and also help companies work faster. Currently, most companies have to wait for days or weeks to access paper data. Ripcord has received $65 million in funding from investors, and while it may replace some jobs, manual document searching and data entry is usually a task that not many people want to do.

Frontend Bootcamp is a two-day workshop created by Microsoft that will teach the basics of frontend development through building a working web app. The course is designed to be accessible by anyone but previous experience with programming and web technologies is recommended. The first day will focus on fundamentals such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and the second day will be on advanced topics such as TypeScript, testing, and state management. The project is still under development.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management, originally designed by Google. k3s is designed to be a fully compliant Kubernetes distribution that is much lighter. It removes older and non-default features and plugins, and simplifies the process of running a Kubernetes system.

The Dow Jones’ watchlist is used by many financial institutions and government agencies to identify high-risk individuals in order to approve or deny financing, or even shut down bank accounts. An independent security researcher found a copy of the database which was left on a server without a password. The database contained 2.4 million records which included information such as names, addresses, date of births, genders, photographs, and current locations. Each record also had extensive notes regarding the individuals.