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Whistleblower reveals Cambridge Analytica work for Leave.EU
A former director of Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL Group has given parliament a trove of emails and data indicating that the political consultancy firm had worked on the Leave.EU campaign, despite the campaign's denials (The Guardian).
In a letter to Damian Collins at the DCMS, Brittany Kaiser says that “chargeable work was completed for UKIP and Leave.EU, and I have strong reasons to believe that those datasets and analysed data processed by Cambridge Analytica as part of a Phase 1 payable work engagement.”
Samsung profits fall in line with predictions
In line with its own forecasts, Samsung has reported a 55.6 per cent year-on-year drop in its second-quarter earnings (TechCrunch). Contributing to the fall have been weak memory chip and smartphone markets and internal preparations for a trade dispute with Japan that may cut the Korean firm supply of vital materials. By contrast, Chinese smartphone rival Huawei's revenues are up 23 per cent despite US government interference.
Amazon's latest speech synthesiser can convincingly read the news
Amazon has launched a new, cloud-based neural text-to-speech engine that can reproduce the traditional cadences of a newsreader with surprising accuracy (VentureBeat). Amazon Polly is available to all AWS users, including free tiers, with a basic interface that lets you simply paste in text. However, the female British voices have more of a synthetic edge than their US and male counterparts.
We're finally cracking vegan cheese's terrible taste problem
Order a vegan burger at a restaurant and it’ll likely come served with a dubious yellow slice that looks and tastes vaguely like cheese – largely inoffensive, but hardly memorable (WIRED). Unlike alternative milks that froth and plant-based patties that bleed, most vegan cheeses haven’t quite nailed that distinctive stretchy texture and delightful umami flavour that are the hallmarks of dairy cheese. But that could be about to change.
Play Diablo in your browser
A clever emulation team at Rivsoft has got Blizzard's original 1996 Diablo action-RPG working in a web browser (PC Gamer). It'll load up the original shareware version by default, but if you have a copy of Diablo, you can just drag in a data file and slash your way through the whole thing in Opera, if that's how you'd like to spend the morning.
Why you're so grumpy when it's hot
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
