 Humans Might Be Able To Sense Earth's Magnetic Field
A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field. "We have not as a species lost the magnetic sensory system that our ancestors [millions of years ago] had," said Prof Joseph Kirschvink, leader of the research from the California Institute of Technology. "We are part of Earth's magnetic biosphere." The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal eNeuro, Kirschvink and colleagues in the U.S. and Japan describe how they m
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1,600 Korean Hotel Guests Were Secretly Filmed and Live-Streamed Online
dryriver shares a report from CNN: About 1,600 people have been secretly filmed in hotel rooms in South Korea, with the footage live-streamed online for paying customers to watch, police said Wednesday. Two men have been arrested and another pair investigated in connection with the scandal, which involved 42 rooms in 30 accommodations in 10 cities around the country. Police said there was no indication the businesses were complicit in the scheme. Cameras were hidden inside digital TV boxes, wall
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San Francisco Moves To Ban E-Cigarettes Until Health Effects Known
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Officials in San Francisco have proposed a new law to ban e-cigarette sales until their health effects are evaluated by the U.S. government. The law appears to be the first of its kind in the U.S. and seeks to curb a rising usage by young people. Critics, however, say it will make it harder for people to kick addiction. A second city law would bar making, selling or distributing tobacco on city property and is aimed at an e-cigarette firm renting
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HardOCP Is Getting 'Mothballed' As Kyle Bennett Accepts Job At Intel
Slashdot reader grasshoppa writes: Kyle Bennett, long-time owner/operator of one of the last independent review sites, HardOCP, announced that effective April 1st he will be leaving it behind to start a new career at Intel. "Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel's Technology Leadership Marketing group," Bennett writes. "Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusias
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AT&T CEO Interrupted By a Robocall During a Live Interview
At an Economic Club event in Washington, DC today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interrupted on stage by a robocall, pausing an interview in front of dozens of people and driving home that absolutely no one is safe from the spam epidemic. From a report: Over the past few months, regulators at the Federal Communications Commission have been feeling the pressure from lawmakers and consumers who are urging them to put an end to the relentless onslaught of robocalls people receive every day. L
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Google Will Implement a Microsoft-Style Browser Picker For EU Android Devices
Back in 2009, the EU's European Commission said Microsoft was harming competition by bundling its browser -- Internet Explorer -- with Windows. Eventually Microsoft and the European Commission settled on the "browser ballot," a screen that would pop up and give users a choice of browsers. Almost 10 years later, the tech industry is going through this again, this time with Google and the EU. After receiving "feedback" from the European Commission, Google announced last night that it would offer A
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Volvo To Add In-Car Sensors To Prevent Drunk Driving
Volvo is installing cameras and sensors in its cars from the early 2020s, monitoring drivers for signs of being drunk or distracted and intervening to prevent accidents. These new safety features come a couple weeks after the automaker announced it will limit the top speed to 112mph on all its new cars from 2020 to help reduce the number of accidents. Reuters reports: Head of R&D Henrik Green said cameras will be installed on all Volvo models built on its SPA2 platform for larger cars, start
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Four Wikipedias To 'Black Out' Over EU Copyright Directive
Sherwin Siy and Jan Gerlach, writing for the Wikimedia Foundation: Volunteer editor communities in four language Wikipedias -- German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak -- have decided to black out the sites on 21 March in opposition to the current version of the proposed EU Copyright Directive. Those language editions of Wikipedia will redirect all visitors to a banner about the directive, blocking access to content on Wikipedia for 24 hours. A final vote on the directive is expected on 26 March.
T
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'Energizing Times': Microsoft To 'Go Big' at E3 in Response To Google Stadia
Microsoft announced its Xcloud game-streaming service last August, with the ambition of streaming console-quality games to gamers wherever they are. Yesterday, Google made its foray into the space with the announcement of Stadia. Google promises that Stadia will be "coming [in] 2019," potentially stealing a march on Xcloud, which is due only to enter public trials this year. But in an internal email sent to rally the troops, Phil Spencer, Microsoft's gaming chief, seemed unsurprised and apparent
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Many People Think AI Could Make Better Policy Decisions Than Politicians
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A new survey on Europeans' attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial intelligence instead of politicians. The Center for the Governance of Change at Spain's IE University polled 2,500 adults in the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands in January. The results reflect an intense anxiety about the changes brought about by advances in tech, with mo
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China's E-Buses Dent Oil Demand More Than Electric Cars Do
China's fleet of electric buses appear to be denting oil demand more than electric cars. "By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China," reports Bloomberg, citing a new report published by BloombergNEF. "That's more than three times the displacement by all the world's passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12 percent)." From the report: Despite rapid growth, the impact
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Oculus Unveils the Rift S, a Higher-Resolution VR Headset With Built-In Tracking
Oculus VR unveiled the Oculus Rift S, a higher-resolution pair of virtual reality goggles that remove the need for external cameras by incorporating built-in tracking. The company partnered with Lenovo "to help it speed up manufacturing and to improve upon the design of the original Rift," reports The Verge. From the report: The result is a new VR device that is more comfortable, sports 2560 x 1440 resolution (or 1280 x 1440 per eye), and features the same inside-out tracking system that will sh
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Streaming and Cloud Computing Endanger Modding and Game Preservation
Services like Google's Stadia seem convenient, but they could completely change the past and future of video games, writes Rich Whitehouse, a video game preservationist and veteran programmer in the video game industry. From the story: For most of today's games, modding isn't an especially friendly process. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, people like me are digging into these games and reverse engineering data formats in order to create tools which allow users to mod the games.
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Jury Finds Bayer's Roundup Weedkiller Caused Man's Cancer
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares in Germany's Bayer's fell more than 12 percent on Wednesday after a second U.S. jury ruled its Roundup weed killer caused cancer. Tuesday's unanimous jury decision in San Francisco federal court was not a finding of Bayer's liability for the cancer of plaintiff Edwin Hardeman. Liability and damages will be decided by the same jury in a second trial phase beginning on Wednesday. Bayer, which denies allegations that glyphosate or Roundup cau
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Kaspersky Lab Files Antitrust Complaint Against Apple Over App Store Policy
Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service relating to the company's App Store distribution policy. From a report: Kaspersky's complaint is specifically to do with Apple's removal of the Kaspersky Safe Kids app. In a blog post on the Kaspersky website, the firm says it received notice from Apple last year that the app, which had been in the App Store for three years, did not meet App Store guidelines owing to the
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Google Bans VPN Ads in China
Google has banned ads for virtual private network (VPN) products targeting Chinese users, ZDNet reported on Wednesday. From a report: The company cited "local legal restrictions" as the cause of the VPN ad ban. "It is currently Google Ads policy to disallow promoting VPN services in China, due to local legal restrictions," Google said in an email today. The email was received and shared with ZDNet by VPNMentor, a website offering advice, tips, and reviews of VPN products. The company said Google
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Britain Could Run Short of Water by 2050, Official Says
To the casual observer, Britain -- an island nation that's no stranger to rain -- could not get much wetter. From a report: But, as it turns out, that's a fallacy. And if preventive steps are not taken, in less than three decades, Britain might run out of water, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, a public body responsible for conservation in England, said on Tuesday. "On the present projections, many parts of our country will face significant water deficits by 2050, particularly in t
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Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash
As the Lion Air crew fought to control their diving Boeing 737 Max 8, they got help from an unexpected source: an off-duty pilot who happened to be riding in the cockpit. Bloomberg reports: That extra pilot, who was seated in the cockpit jumpseat, correctly diagnosed the problem and told the crew how to disable a malfunctioning flight-control system and save the plane, according to two people familiar with Indonesia's investigation. The next day, under command of a different crew facing what inv
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LLVM 8.0 Released With Cascade Lake Support, Better Diagnostics, More OpenMP/OpenCL
After being delayed for the better part of one month, LLVM 8.0 officially is finally available. From a report: LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the release a few minutes ago and summed up this half-year update to LLVM and its sub-project as: "speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag,
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It's Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones, Researcher Finds
A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. From a report: For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable informati
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Google Fined Nearly $1.7 Billion For Ad Practices That Violated European Antitrust Laws
European regulators on Wednesday slapped Google with a roughly $1.7 billion fine on charges that its advertising practices violated local antitrust laws, marking the third time in as many years that the region's watchdogs have penalized the U.S. tech giant for harming competition and consumers. The Washington Post: Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's top competition commissioner, announced the punishment at a news conference, accusing Google of engaging in "illegal practices" in a bid to "c
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NVIDIA's Latest AI Software Turns Rough Doodles Into Realistic Landscapes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AI is going to be huge for artists, and the latest demonstration comes from Nvidia, which has built prototype software that turns doodles into realistic landscapes. Using a type of AI model known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), the software gives users what Nvidia is calling a "smart paint brush." This means someone can make a very basic outline of a scene (drawing, say, a tree on a hill) before filling in their rough sketch with nat
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Researchers Create the First AI-Controlled Robotic Limb That Can Learn To Walk Without Being Programmed
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers at the University of Southern Carolina (USC) claim to have created the first AI-controlled robotic limb that can learn how to walk without being explicitly programmed to do so. The algorithm they used is inspired by real-life biology. Just like animals that can walk soon after birth, this robot can figure out how to use its animal-like tendons after only five minutes of unstructured play.
Today, most robots take months or years before th
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Opera Adds Free and Unlimited VPN Service To Its Android Browser
Opera has added a free VPN service to its Android browser. The Norwegian browser maker, which went public last year, also addressed concerns about potential hidden costs of using its free VPN offering. From a report: As users become more cautious about their privacy, many have explored using VPN services. According to a GlobalWebIndex estimate, more than 650 million people worldwide use such tools to mask their identity online and fend off web trackers. Opera has long recognized this need; in 20
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How Diet May Have Changed the Way Humans Speak
"Ancient hunter-gathererers often had front teeth that met together, unlike today's more common alignment where the upper front teeth 'overbite' the lower front teeth," writes Slashdot reader omfglearntoplay. "This malocclusion is a result of changes to the ancestral human diet and introduction of soft foods, according to a new study published in the journal Science." ABC News reports: More than 2,000 different sounds exist across the roughly 7,000 to 8,000 languages that humans speak today, fro
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California Reintroduces 'Right To Repair' Bill After Previous Effort Failed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: California State Assembly member Susan Talamantes Eggman on Monday announced the introduction of Assembly Bill 1163, which will require manufacturers like Apple to "make service literature and equipment or parts available to product owners and to regulated, independent repair shops." "For nearly 30 years California has required that manufacturers provide access to replacement parts and service materials for electronics and appliances to aut
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Bill Gates Talked With Google Employees About Using AI To Analyze Ultrasound Images of Unborn Children
Bill Gates said he talked to Google researchers about the application of artificial-intelligence technology in healthcare. "While Microsoft and Google are arch-competitors in many areas, including cloud computing and artificial intelligence research, the visit is an example of how Gates' broad interest in technology trumps Microsoft's historical rivalries with other tech companies," reports CNBC. From the report: Gates talked about the use of AI in weapons systems and autonomous vehicles before
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MoviePass Brings Back Its Unlimited Movie Plan
The subscription plan that made MoviePass explode in popularity is coming back. If you're willing to pay for a full year (via ACH payment), "MoviePass Uncapped" will cost the same as the original unlimited plan, namely $9.95 per month, and will allow you to get an unlimited number of 2D movie tickets. TechCrunch reports: Now, you may be thinking that this kind of deal is exactly what got MoviePass into so much trouble last year, to the point where it nearly ran out of money and began announcing
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Crytek Shows 4K 30 FPS Ray Tracing On Non-RTX AMD and NVIDIA GPUs
dryriver writes: Crytek has published a video showing an ordinary AMD Vega 56 GPU -- which has no raytracing specific circuitry and only costs around $450 -- real-time ray tracing a complex 3D city environment at 4K 30 FPS. Crytek says that the technology demo runs fine on most normal NVIDIA and AMD gaming GPUs. As if this wasn't impressive already, the software real-time ray tracing technology is still in development and not even final. The framerates achieved may thus go up further, raising th
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Trump Blockade of Huawei Fizzles In European 5G Rollout
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Last summer, the Trump administration started a campaign to convince its European allies to bar China's Huawei from their telecom networks. Bolstered by the success of similar efforts in Australia and New Zealand, the White House sent envoys to European capitals with warnings that Huawei's gear would open a backdoor for Chinese spies. The U.S. even threatened to cut off intelligence sharing if Europe ignored its advice. So far, not a single Eur
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Is It Time For Apple To Acknowledge Flexgate?
In January 2019, iFixit revealed a design flaw where the ribbon cable that connects the body of some MacBook Pros to their display wears down too quickly, causing uneven backlighting at the bottom of the display. There now appears to be growing frustration among users at Apple's reaction. Vlad Savov from The Verge said it is time for the company to acknowledge and deal with the issue: A petition, now numbering more than 15,000, would beg to differ. It calls for Apple to publicly recognize Flexga
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Netflix Won't Join Apple's Video Streaming Service
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings confirmed that his company won't be playing a role in Apple's upcoming video streaming service. From a report: "We want to have people watch our content on our service," he said Monday. "We've chosen not to integrate into their service." Apple is expected to reveal its offering at an event next Monday. Apple is trying to supplement its original shows by finalizing deals with networks like HBO, Showtime and Starz to license a library of already released content. Hastings
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Why Google Stadia Will Be a Major Problem For Many American Players
Earlier today, Google launched its long-awaited "Stadia" cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Unlike services from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, Stadia is powered by Google's worldwide data centers, allowing users to play games across a variety of platforms -- browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices -- all via the internet at a 4K resolution. One major problem with Stadia, which Google didn't mention in its presentation, is that it will require a ton o
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Facebook To Overhaul Ad Targeting To Prevent Discrimination
Facebook will overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit and employment ads as part of a legal settlement. From a report: For the social network, that's one major legal problem down, several to go, including government investigations in the U.S. and Europe over its data and privacy practices. The changes to Facebook's advertising methods -- which generate most of the company's enormous profits -- are unprecedented. The social network says it will no longer all
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Kickstarter's Staff Is Unionizing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The staff of Kickstarter announced plans to unionize today. If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States. Members of the union, which goes by Kickstarter United, say they want to improve inclusivity and transparency at the company. To unionize, they're working with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153. In a statement, the union said: "Kicks
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Three or More Eggs a Week Increase Your Risk of Heart Disease and Early Death, Study Says
It's been debated for years: Are eggs good or bad for you? People who eat an added three or four eggs a week or 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day, have a higher risk of both heart disease and early death compared with those who eat fewer eggs, new research finds. From a report: "Eggs, specially the yolk, are a major source of dietary cholesterol," wrote Victor Zhong, lead study author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinbe
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As Costs Skyrocket, More US Cities Stop Recycling
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syndicated source]. From a report: Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents' recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bo
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Twitter Cracks Down on API Abuse, Will Charge B2B Developers
To prevent its own Cambridge Analytica moment and make sure it's getting paid for its data, Twitter said today it will audit developers that use its APIs. From a report: Starting June 19th, Twitter will require developers of any app that calls recent tweets from or mentions a user more than 100,000 times per day to submit their app for review. If a developer proves they have a legitimate consumer use case, like running a third-party Twitter client or doing research, they'll be granted free acces
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The Most Powerful iMac Pro Now Costs $15,927
Apple recently updated the upgrade options for the iMac Pro, and getting the very best will cost you. A baseline model will cost you just under $5,000, and maxing out the hardware to absurd heights runs a whopping $15,927. An anonymous reader writes: The most expensive possible upgrade is a $5,200 charge for upgrading the RAM from 32GB to a startling 256GB. Other addons include an additional $700 for a 16GB Radeon video card and $2,400 for a 2.3 Ghz Intel processor with 18 cores. Almost $16,000
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Google Debuts Video Games Streaming Service Stadia
Google today launched its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. From a report: Stadia is not a dedicated console or set-top box. The platform will be accessible on a variety of platforms: browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices. In an onstage demonstration of Stadia, Google showed someone playing a game on a Chromebook, then playing it on a phone, then immediately playing it on PC -- a low-end PC, no less --, picking up where the game left off
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Trello Limits Teams on Free Tier To 10 Boards, Rolls Out Enterprise Automations and Admin Controls
In this week's episode of which popular service will reduce its offerings to the non-paying users, Trello said it will have a go. From a report: Trello, a Kanban-inspired project management app organized around the idea of boards containing cards with attachments, to-do items, and comments, is getting a few much-needed improvements. Today, the Trello team announced that Trello Enterprise, a corporate-class subscription tier launched in 2015, will gain 13 new features this week, including improve
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Norsk Hydro, One of the World's Largest Aluminum Producers, Switches To Manual Operations After Ransomware Infection
Norsk Hydro, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, said today it has "became victim of an extensive cyber-attack" that has crippled some of its infrastructure and forced it to switch to manual operations in some smelting locations. From a report: The cyber-attack was later identified as an infection with the LockerGoga ransomware strain, the company said during a press conference. News of the cyber-attack broke earlier this morning in a message the company sent to investors and stock ex
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EU Citizens Being Tracked on Sensitive Government Sites
EU governments are allowing more than 100 advertising companies, including Google and Facebook, to surreptitiously track citizens across sensitive public sector websites, in apparent violation of their own EU data protection rules, a study has found. From a report: Danish browser-analysis company Cookiebot found ad trackers -- which log users' locations, devices and browsing behaviours for advertisers -- on the official government websites of 25 EU member states [Editor's note: the link may be p
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Firefox 66 Arrives With Autoplaying Blocked by Default, Smoother Scrolling, and Better Search
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release includes autoplaying content (audio and video) blocked by default, smoother scrolling, better search, revamped security warnings, WebAuthn support for Windows Hello, and improved extensions. The company says its main goal with this release is to reduce irritating experiences such as auto-playing videos, pop-ups, and page jumps. Firefox 66 for desktop is available for download now on Fi
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Apple Finally Updates the iMac With Significantly More Powerful CPU and GPU Options
Today, Apple will finally begin taking orders for newly refreshed 21- and 27-inch iMacs. The new versions don't change the basic design or add major new features, but they offer substantially faster configuration options for the CPU and GPU. From a report: The 21.5-inch iMac now has a 6-core, eighth-generation Intel CPU option -- up from a maximum of four cores before. The 27-inch now has six cores as the standard configuration, with an optional upgrade to a 3.6GHz, 9th-gen, 8-core Intel Core i9
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Hacked Tornado Sirens Taken Offline In Two Texas Cities Ahead of Major Storm
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A hacker set off the tornado emergency sirens in the middle of the night last week across two North Texas towns. Following the unauthorized intrusion, city authorities had to shut down their emergency warning system a day before major storms and potential tornados were set to hit the area. The false alarm caused quite the panic in the two towns, as locals were already on the edge of their seats regarding incoming storms. The city had run tests of t
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Vladimir Putin Signs Sweeping Internet-Censorship Bills
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed two censorship bills into law Monday. One bans "fake news" while the other makes it illegal to insult public officials. Ars Technica reports on the details: Under one bill, individuals can face fines and jail time if they publish material online that shows a "clear disrespect for society, the state, the official state symbols of the Russian Federation, the Constitution of the Russian Federation, and bodies exercising state power." Insults against Putin
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Pentagon Wants To Test a Space-Based Weapon In 2023
pgmrdlm writes: Defense officials want to test a neutral particle-beam in orbit in fiscal 2023 as part of a ramped-up effort to explore various types of space-based weaponry. They've asked for $304 million in the 2020 budget to develop such beams, more powerful lasers, and other new tech for next-generation missile defense. Such weapons are needed, they say, to counter new missiles from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. But just figuring out what might work is a difficult technical challenge.
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Scientists Grow 'Mini-Brain On the Move' That Can Contract Muscle
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of th
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NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Tech Will Soon Run On Older GTX Cards
NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from the 1060 and up, albeit with some serious caveats," reports Engadget. "Some games like Battlefield V will run just fine and deliver better visuals, but other games, like the freshly released Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate." From the report: What
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Google Seeking To Promote Rivals To Stave Off EU Antitrust Action
Google is trying to boost price comparison rivals such as Kelkoo in an effort to appease European Union antitrust regulators and ward off fresh fines following a $2.7 billion penalty nearly two years ago. "The European Commission said Alphabet unit Google had used its search engine market power to unfairly promote its own comparison shopping service," reports Reuters. From the report: The company subsequently offered to allow price-comparison rivals to bid for advertising space at the top of a s
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House Democrats Plan April Vote On Net Neutrality Bill
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced that the House will hold a vote next month on the Democrats' bill to reinstate the Obama-era net neutrality rules. "Hoyer said in a letter to colleagues that the House will consider the Save the Internet Act during the week of April 8," reports The Hill. From the report: The Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted along party lines in 2017 to repeal the popular regulations prohibiting internet service providers from blocking or thr
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Uber Used Secret Spyware To Try To Crush Australian Startup GoCatch
Uber used a secret spyware program, codenamed Surfcam, to steal drivers from an Australian competitor with the aim of putting that company out of business. The startup was backed by high-profile investors including billionaire James Packer and hedge fund manager Alex Turnbull. ABC News reports: GoCatch was a major competitor to Uber when the U.S. company launched in Australia in 2012. At the time, both companies were offering a new way to book taxis and hire cars using a smartphone app. Surfcam
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New Mirai Malware Variant Targets Signage TVs and Presentation Systems
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Security researchers have spotted a new variant of the Mirai IoT malware in the wild targeting two new classes of devices -- smart signage TVs and wireless presentation systems. This new strain is being used by a new IoT botnet that security researchers from Palo Alto Networks have spotted earlier this year. The botnet's author(s) appears to have invested quite a lot of their time in upgrading older versions of the Mirai malware with new exploits.
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Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users' Passwords Exposed Online
The world's largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. "The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world," reports Motherboard. "It's not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted, but it provided a rolling list of passwords as well as password reset links when a user requested to change their login credentials." From t
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NVIDIA's $99 Jetson Nano is an AI Computer for DIY Enthusiasts
Sophisticated AI generally isn't an option for homebrew devices when the mini computers can rarely handle much more than the basics. NVIDIA thinks it can do better -- it's unveiling an entry-level AI computer, the Jetson Nano, that's aimed at "developers, makers and enthusiasts." From a report: NVIDIA claims that the Nano's 128-core Maxwell-based GPU and quad-core ARM A57 processor can deliver 472 gigaflops of processing power for neural networks, high-res sensors and other robotics features whi
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Google, Microsoft Work Together For a Year To Figure Out New Type of Windows Flaw
Google researcher James Forshaw discovered a new class of vulnerability in Windows before any bug had actually been exploited. The involved parts of the flaw "showed that there were all the basic elements to create a significant elevation of privilege attack, enabling any user program to open any file on the system, regardless of whether the user should have permission to do so," reports Ars Technica. Thankfully, Microsoft said that the flaw was never actually exposed in any public versions of W
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US Reveals Details of $500 Million Supercomputer
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Department of Energy disclosed details on Monday of one of the most expensive computers being built: a $500 million machine based on Intel and Cray technology that may become crucial in a high-stakes technology race between the United States and China (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The supercomputer, called Aurora, is a retooling of a development effort first announced in 2015 and is scheduled to be deliver
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U.S. Students Have Achieved World Domination in Computer Science Skills -- For Now
When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. Tekla Perry shares a report: That's the conclusion of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study was put together by a global team of researchers led by Prashant Loyalka, an assistant professor at Stanford University. The team constructed a careful sampling mechanism
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IBM Signs 6 Banks To Issue Stablecoins and Use Stellar's XLM Cryptocurrency
IBM is taking its banking clients a step closer to cryptocurrency. From a report: Announced Monday, six international banks have signed letters of intent to issue stablecoins, or tokens backed by fiat currency, on World Wire, an IBM payment network that uses the Stellar public blockchain. The network promises to let regulated institutions move value across borders -- remittances or foreign exchange -- more quickly and cheaply than the legacy correspondent banking system. So far three of the bank
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Is Adobe's Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good?
Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs. Which means that, despite the fact that I'd certainly love to see what life is like outside of the world of Adobe, it looks like I'm stuck in that ecosystem for a little while longer. Don't
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Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: The explosion of Amazon's private-label products -- batteries, baby wipes, jeans, tortilla chips, sofas -- has prompted concern that the world's biggest online retailer could use its clout to promote these house brands at the expense of merchants selling similar products on the web store. The issue even surfaced in Senator Elizabeth Warren's recent proposal to break up big technology companies. Turns out most Amazon-branded goods are flops that don't threaten
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Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing, FAA Certified the Suspect 737 MAX Flight Control System
In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration during the 737 Max's certification process, the Seattle Times reports that the U.S. regulator delegated much of the safety assessment to Boeing and that the analysis the planemaker in turn delivered to the authorities had crucial flaws. 0x2A shares the report: Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before t
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Apple Announces 10.5-inch iPad Air and Refreshed iPad Mini
Ahead of a planned event next week, Apple today unveiled two new iPads. From a report: The new, larger, 10.5-inch iPad Air will arrive with a 70 percent performance boost compared to its predecessor, thanks to the company's A12 Bionic chip with Apple's Neural Engine. That'll be useful alongside the now 20-percent larger display -- which is compatible with the first-gen Apple Pencil too.
A new iPad Mini has been a long time coming. The 7.9-inch option will, barring screen size, match the Air
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Meteor Blast Over Bering Sea Was 10 Times Size of Hiroshima
A meteor explosion over the Bering Sea late last year unleashed 10 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, scientists have revealed. From a report: The fireball tore across the sky off Russia's Kamchatka peninsula on 18 December and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT. It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia's south-west, six years ago, and the second largest in the past 30 years. Unlike the
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Slack Hands Over Control of Encryption Keys To Regulated Customers
Business communications and collaboration service Slack said today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool. From a report: Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says that the new tool should appeal to customers in regulated industries, who might need tighter control over security. "M
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Amazon is Introducing Private Investors To High-Risk Startups in a New Pilot Program
Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with startups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. From a report: The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.
The Pro-Rata program is being run by Brad Holden, a former partner at TomorrowVent
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Astronomers Discover 83 Supermassive Black Holes at the Edge of the Universe
"A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars," reports CNET:
The Japanese team turned the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", mounted to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, toward the cosmos' darkest corners, surveying the sky over a period of five years. By studying the snapshots, they've been able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, their method of
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Wells Fargo Sued By 63-Year-Old Pastor They Wrongfully Accused of Forging Checks
Wells Fargo has been hit with a lawsuit from a 63-year-old pastor at the United Methodist Church of Parsippany. Wells Fargo sent his ATM photos to the police, which he says led to false arrest, malicious prosecution -- and humiliation. NJ.com reports:
In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Morris County Superior Court, attorneys for the 63-year-old pastor sought unspecified damages against Wells Fargo, which has come under fire over a series of scandals in recent years. Also named were the State Poli
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BBC Visits 'Hated and Hunted' Ransomware Expert
In "Hated and hunted," a BBC reporter describes visiting a ransomware expert "who has devoted himself, at huge personal cost, to helping victims of ransomware around the world."
They hate him so much that they leave him angry threats buried deep inside the code of their own viruses... "I was shocked but I also felt a real sense of pride," says Fabian. "Almost like, a little bit cocky. I'm not going to lie, yeah, it was nice...." He works remotely for a cyber security company, often sitting fo
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Vaccines Can Help Fight the Rise of Drug-Resistant Microbes
An anonymous reader quotes the Harvard School of Public Health:
Drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea, salmonella, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and many other disease-causing agents are flourishing around the world, and the consequences are disastrous -- at least 700,000 people die globally as a result of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) annually, according to a 2016 review on antimicrobial resistance commissioned by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron. It's a perilous situation, but several new s
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Bacteria Discovered In Irish Soil Kills Four Drug-Resistant Superbugs
NBC News reports on how microbiologist Gerry Quinn "followed up on some folklore his family had passed on to him."
Old timers insisted that the dirt in the vicinity of a nearly 1,500-year-old church in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, an area once occupied by the Druids, had almost miraculous curative powers.... "Here in the western fringes of Ireland there is still a tradition of having this folk cure," Quinn told NBC News. "We can look at it and see maybe it's just superstition -- or we
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Nevada Lawmakers Want Police To Scan Cellphones After Car Crashes
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Most states ban texting behind the wheel, but a legislative proposal could make Nevada one of the first states to allow police to use a contentious technology to find out if a person was using a cellphone during a car crash... If the Nevada measure passes, it would allow police to use a device known as the "textalyzer," which connects to a cellphone and looks for user activity, such as opening a Facebook messenger call screen. It is made by Israe
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Before Google+ Shuts Down, The Internet Archive Will Preserve Its Posts
Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery."
But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge:
In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back
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Why Robo-Calls Can't Be Stopped
"When your phone rings, there's about a 50 percent chance it's a spam robo-call," reports the Washington Post. Now a computer science professor who's researched robo-call technologies reveals the economics behind automatically dialing phone numbers "either randomly, or from massive databases compiled from automated Web searches, leaked databases of personal information and marketing data."
It doesn't matter whether you've signed up with the federal Do Not Call Registry, although companies that
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Are We Getting Close To Flying Taxis?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services:
The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with another high-profile partner, Uber. The prototype, the Bell Nexus, was unveiled earlier this year. Boeing and Airbus also have prototypes of these flying cars in the works. Uber has become the face of the aerial mobility mo
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Texas Lawmakers Want To Stop Tesla From Fixing Its Own Cars
In Texas the local car dealer lobby has blocked Tesla from selling its cars directly to customers. They're using old laws meant to prevent car manufacturers from competing with their own local dealers -- but Tesla never had any local dealers!
And according to Electrek, it gets worse...
Despite this issue, Texans have bought thousands of Tesla vehicles, which the automaker delivers from other states to comply with the law. Tesla has been able to service those vehicles through its own service c
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To Avoid Demonetization, YouTube and Twitch Streamers Sing Badly Over Copyrighted Songs
To avoid copyright claims, "YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have been performing terrible a capella covers of popular songs," reports the Verge:
React videos are a huge part of YouTube's current culture; people lift popular movie trailers and film their reactions to what's happening on-screen. These videos are typically monetized... In recent months, YouTube creators have run into copyright issues while making TikTok reaction videos, where they collect cringey TikTok clips and either reac
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'Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages'
The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception
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Some Companies Choose Microsoft's Cloud Service Because They're Afraid of Amazon
"In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon," reports CNBC:
The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start working its way into other industries -- like automotive. In a recent interview with CNBC, Volkswagen's Heiko Huttel, who runs the company's connected car division, said the carmaker chose Microsoft Azure late last year for its
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Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks To Be Opened By NASA
"Scientists are hoping to unlock some of the universe's mysteries through 50-year-old moon rocks," reports the New York Daily News -- specifically, three samples that spent that half century sealed in airtight canisters.
One Apollo 18 sample from 1972 contains 1.8 pounds of a vacuum-sealed lunar core that is a stratified layer of rock that will be studied by six research teams. About 842 pounds of lunar rocks and soil have been brought back to Earth over six missions. Although a great deal of i
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Massive Study Finds Apple Watch Can Detect Undiagnosed Heart Rhythm Problems
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
Researchers from Stanford University's School of Medicine presented results from a giant study sponsored by Apple Inc. that showed the Apple Watch can sometimes spot patients with undiagnosed heart-rhythm problems, without producing large numbers of false alarms. The Apple-sponsored trial enrolled 419,297 people and was one of the largest heart-screening studies ever.
The study, details of which are being presented today at the American College of Cardiolo
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F5 Acquired NGINX For $670M
Long-time Slashdot reader skdffff quotes ZDnet:
F5 Networks on Monday announced that it will acquire NGINX, which provides popular open-source software of the same name, for $670 million. The deal advances F5's aim of capitalizing on the trend toward multi-cloud deployments.
F5 plans to enhance NGINX's current offerings with F5 security solutions and will integrate F5 cloud-native technology with NGINX's software load balancing technology. This should accelerate F5's time to market of appli
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Are Large Cloud Providers a Threat To Open Source Vendors?
Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers:
In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped. Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so overpowering, in fact, that commercial open so
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After 40 Years 'Dungeons & Dragons' is Suddenly Popular
CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons "has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity."
The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing "Dungeons and Dragons" in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of "Dungeons and Dragons" hit shelves, video platforms Twitch and YouTube are leading a renaissance of the fantasy roleplaying board game -- and business is booming. "DnD has been around for 45 years and it is more popular now than it has ever been,"
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Are Online Activists Silencing Researchers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,759), shares Reuters' report about Michael Sharpe, a medical researcher studying chronic fatigue syndrome, "a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain."
Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation... They obj
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How Debian Almost Failed to Elect a Project Leader
Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been:
This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward... There is nobody there to do any campaigning.
This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in t
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Google's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map
Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..."
It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, Trip
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19-Year-Old WinRAR Vulnerability Leads To Over 100 Malware Exploits
"Last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that's easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors," writes SlashGear. Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes their report:
Check Point, the security researchers that revealed the WinRAR bug, explain that the software is exploited by giving malicious files a RAR extension, so that when opened they can automatically extract malware programs. These programs
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Labor Shouldn't Have To Fear Automation
Munky101 tipped us off to some interesting comments from New York's activist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TechCrunch reports:
It's impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponents of these technologies criticize a displacement that could someday result in wide-scale unemployment among what is often considered "unskilled" roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces
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Was Venezuela's 5-Day Blackout Caused By Cyberattacks -- or Wildfires?
What caused a devastating five-day blackout in Venezuela? Two engineers with expertise in geospatial technologies believe the answer lies in images from a NASA weather satellite showing thermal activity, which they superimposed onto Google Earth, the AP reports:
Within hours of the attack, the government of embattled President Nicolas Maduro began accusing the U.S. of a cyberattack. Maduro has stuck to that narrative, saying hackers in the U.S. first shut down the Guri Dam and then delivered se
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Chicago To Shutdown Composting Business Because Regulations Don't Cover Worms
schwit1 shared an article from Reason's "Volokh Conspiracy" blog:
Nature's Little Recyclers is a father-son business that does composting on empty residential lots, transforming organic waste into nutrient-rich soil. Last year, the business's worms processed 10 tons of banana peels and cups from the Chicago Marathon that would otherwise have gone to a landfill. But Chicago officials are going to shut the business down -- and not because the city doesn't think composting is a good thing (the cit
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VR Company Co-Founder Spends an Entire Week in a VR Headset
An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer:
Not too long into a 168-hour VR marathon session, Jak Wilmot admits the monotony got to him. Wilmot, who is the co-founder of Disrupt VR, also says this experiment is "quite possibly the dumbest thing" he's ever done. So, why do it? For science, of course. I can't imagine immersing myself in a virtual world for a full week, nonstop night and day. Wilmot did it, though, for the most part -- he allowed himself 30 seconds to switch VR headsets when needed, and
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Las Vegas Approves The Boring Company's Underground Loop
The Boring Company's tunnel project in Chicago is "in doubt" (according to the Chicago Tribune), while a project connecting Washington to Baltimore "is waylaid in the environmental-review process."
But it looks like Las Vegas will officially get a tunnel from Elon Musk, CNET reports, "perhaps within this year."
The billionaire's Boring Company on Tuesday got the approval from the 14-member board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) to build and operate an underground loo
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Is Amazon's AWS Approaching 'War' for Control of Elasticsearch?
Long-time Slashdot reader jasenj1 and Striek both shared news of a growing open source controversy. "Amazon Web Services on Monday announced that it's partnering with Netflix and Expedia to champion a new Open Distro for Elasticsearch due to concerns of proprietary code being mixed into the open source Elasticsearch project," reports Datanami.
"Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, responded by accusing Amazon of copying code, inserting bugs into the community code, and engaging with th
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3-5 Degree Rise in Arctic Temperatures Called 'Inevitable'
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found.
Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such chang
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Linux Foundation Launches New Tools Supporting The Open Source Community
"The Linux Foundation is launching a new platform designed to sustain open-source communities," reports SD Times:
CommunityBridge was announced at this week's Open Source Leadership Summit. The Linux Foundation plans to launch a number of tools to the open-source community throughout the next two years.
The platform is currently being released with Community Bridge Funding to help developers raise and spend funding; CommunityBridge Security for potential vulnerabilities and fixes; and Communi
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Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You?
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:
Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success an
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Stanford Unveils New AI Institute, Built To Create 'A Better Future For All Humanity'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mercury News: Amid a worldwide race for supremacy in artificial intelligence, Stanford University on Monday will unveil a new institute dedicated to using AI to build the best-possible future (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is co-directed by Fei-Fei Li, a former chief scientist for AI at Google, now a Stanford computer science professor. The institute will take advan
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