An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Five industry groups representing major internet providers and cable companies filed suit on Thursday seeking to block a Vermont law barring companies that do not abide by net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Vermont by groups representing major providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. It followed a lawsuit by four of the groups earlier this month challenging a much broader California law mandating providers abide by net neutrality rules.

The trade associations are also challenging an executive order on the issue signed by Vermont Governor Phil Scott. The Vermont lawsuit was filed by the American Cable Association; CTIA -- The Wireless Association; NCTA -- The Internet & Television Association; USTelecom -- The Broadband Association and the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association. The lawsuit argues that states cannot regulate "indirectly through their spending, procurement, or other commercial powers what they are forbidden from regulating directly."

Facebook today revealed that, using 3.5 billion publicly shared Instagram photos and their accompany hashtags, its computer system has achieved new advances, with a 85.4 percent accuracy rate when used on ImageNet, a well-known benchmark dataset. From a report: The results were shared onstage at F8, Facebook's annual developer conference taking place today at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Other news announced at F8 this year include the release of Oculus Go, new Facebook Stories sharing capabilities, and the reopening of app and bot reviews following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. See the full rundown here. The results of Facebook's research mean that its computer vision in the real world can see more specific subsets, so instead of just saying "food," it's Indian or Italian cuisine; not just "bird" but a cedar waxwing; not just "man in a white suit" but a clown.

According to security company Sophos, scam websites have been using obfuscated Google Maps links to redirect users to dodgy websites. The Register reports: The reason for this is Google's recent efforts to get rid of its Goo.gl URL-shortening service. The link-shortening site is a favorite for scammers looking to hide the actual address of pages. Without Goo.gl to pick on, scammers are now abusing a loophole in the Maps API that allows for redirects to be put into Google Maps URLs. This allows the attackers to chain the links to their scam pages within a link to Google Maps, essentially creating a more trustworthy URL that users are more likely to follow. The trick also has the benefit of being harder to catch and shut down than links made with the well-policed Goo.gl service. Because it uses Google Maps, there's no reporting structure in place to get the scammers shut down and the scammers don't have to use a Google-owned interface or API to do it.

Yes, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer actually called them "Grinch bots." From the New York Post: The senator said as soon as a retailer puts a hard-to-get toy -- like Barbie's Dreamhouse or Nintendo game systems -- for sale on a website, a bot can snatch it up even before a kid's parents finish entering their credit card information... "Bots come in and buy up all the toys and then charge ludicrous prices amidst the holiday shopping bustle," the New York Democrat said on Sunday... For example, Schumer said, the popular Fingerlings -- a set of interactive baby monkey figurines that usually sell for around $15 -- are being snagged by the scalping software and resold on secondary websites for as much as $1,000 a pop...

In December 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, which Schumer sponsored, to crack down on their use to buy concert tickets, but the measure doesn't apply to other consumer products. He wants that law expanded but knows that won't happen in time for this holiday season. In the meantime, Schumer wants the National Retail Federation and the Retail Industry Leaders Association to block the bots and lead the effort to stop them from buying toys at fair retail prices and then reselling them at outrageous markups.

Fitbit has published the results of a study that uses their longitudinal sleep database to analyze millions of nights of Sleep Stages data to determine how age, gender, and duration affect sleep quality. (Sleep Stages is a relatively new Fitbit feature that "uses motion detection and heart rate variability to estimate the amount of time users spend awake in light, deep, and REM sleep each night.") Here are the findings: The average Fitbit user is in bed for 7 hours and 33 minutes but only gets 6 hours and 38 minutes of sleep. The remaining 55 minutes is spent restless or awake. That may seem like a lot, but it's actually pretty common. That said, 6 hours and 38 minutes is still shy of the 7+ hours the the CDC recommends adults get. For the second year in a row Fitbit data scientists found women get about 25 minutes more sleep on average each night compared to men. The percentage of time spent in each sleep stage was also similar -- until you factor in age. Fitbit data shows that men get a slightly higher percentage of deep sleep than women until around age 55 when women take the lead. Women win when it comes to REM, logging an average of 10 more minutes per night than men. Although women tend to average more REM than men over the course of their lifetime, the gap appears to widen around age 50.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700,000-year-old horse in Canada's Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia...extinct horses, rhinos, and deer,
This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?