Articles by Slashdot from December 2015

schwit1 writes: Rather than re-fly it, Elon Musk suggested that, after some testing, SpaceX will likely put its first recovered Falcon 9 first stage on display instead. '"[We will] do a static fire at...

An anonymous reader writes: Back in August, an Indiegogo campaign raised $566,023 to produce Axanar, a Star Trek movie in development by an independent group of fans, who also happen to be film profes...

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter has updated their site rules to prohibit "behavior intended to harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence another user's voice." According to the new rules, "You ma...

An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix reports that Artem S. Tashkinov's Major Linux Problems on the Desktop has been updated for 2016. It is a comprehensive list of various papercut issues and other in...

Unknown Lamer writes: It has been confirmed that Debian founder Ian Murdock has died. From the Docker blog: "It is with great sadness that we inform you that Ian Murdock passed away on Monday night. T...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla developer James Long has posted a sort of internal monologue on the difficulties of being a hobbyist open source project maintainer. He says, "I hugely admire peopl...

An anonymous reader writes: As somebody who sits in front of a computer most of the day, and has for a number of years, this article at the NY Times struck a bit close to home. It compiles a list of t...

Mal-2 writes: An international group of scientists from Russia, France, and Germany have developed ion-exchange synthetic membranes based on amphiphilic compounds that are able to convert the energy o...

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have created an algorithm that can accurately detect code written by different programmers (PDF), even if the code has been compiled into an executable binary. ...

jaromil writes: Apple Italy, a subsidiary of Apple Sales International based in Ireland, has for years managed the company's sales on the Italian Peninsula. As Italian tax authorities noticed the comp...

blottsie writes: In an interview with the Daily Dot on Tuesday, Adam Segal, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program explained what China's new anti-terroris...

Earthquake Retrofit writes: A new Google Chrome extension lets you remove mentions of Donald Trump from your browsing experience. Trump Filter scans websites for references to the Republican president...

schwit1 writes: An estimated ten percent of pedestrian injuries that land people in emergency rooms are due to distracted walking, a recent study found. That's thousands of people injured — some...

itwbennett writes: Roughly 100 low-income families were evicted from an apartment complex on the land in Austin, Texas where Oracle plans to build a new 560,000 sq. foot cloud-computing campus. Some o...

v3rgEz writes: Troy Hunt, a security researcher who tracked breached websites, reflects on the recent "grey hat" hacking of VTech, in which a hacker downloaded millions of kids' photos, chat logs, and...

An anonymous reader writes: Techdirt is running a story about Square One Publishers Rudy Shur, and his confusion over the DMCA process, and exactly what Google has control over. The story goes: "After...

szczys writes: There is little to complain about when it comes to the new FAA rules regarding drones (unless perhaps you live in DC). The regulations are basically an End User Licensing Agreement and ...

An anonymous reader writes with news that the EFF has given Microsoft a dubious award this month for their slider patent. According to Ars: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 'Stupid Patent of the ...

An anonymous reader writes: Google is ditching the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in Android and moving to only OpenJDK. The news first came by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" f...

blottsie writes: In an interview with the Daily Dot on Tuesday, Adam Segal, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program explained what China's new anti-terroris...

An anonymous reader writes: The AVG Web TuneUp Chrome extension, forcibly added to Google Chrome browsers when users were installing the AVG antivirus, had a serious flaw that allowed attackers to get...

An anonymous reader sends word that Sao Paulo's city hall has proposed levying fees on Uber to operate in the city. Engadget reports: "Many cities try to limit or ban ridesharing services like Uber, b...

An anonymous reader sends word that the Marines have decided that Boston Dynamics' robotic pack mules are too noisy to use. NBC reports: The massive robotic mule developed by Alphabet-owned Boston Dyn...

schwit1 writes: Faced with a shrinking budget and poor economic conditions, Russia has once again trimmed back its proposed ten-year space plan for the next decade in space, canceling all Moon mission...

HughPickens.com writes: Ben Sisario writes at the NYT that Discogs has built one of the most exhaustive collections of discographical information in the world, and with 24 million items for sale, (eBa...

MojoKid writes: The cool thing about playing Duck Hunt on the NES back in the day, was that you got to point a plastic gun at the television and shoot directly at fowl or clay discs. It offered a deep...

DewDude writes: If you thought done registration was bad enough; it just got worse for anyone living in the nation's capital. On Christmas Day (of all days); the FAA put into effect a rule that bans t...

Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have discovered serious security vulnerabilities in a pair of protocols used by software in some point-of-sale terminals, bugs that could lead to easy theft of money f...

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading authors, inventors, and futurists. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recogni...

MarkWhittington writes: One of the provisions of the new NASA spending bill, which provided a hefty $1.3 billion boost to the space agency's budget, is a mandate to build a prototype habitation module...

Nerval's Lobster writes: David Foote, an analyst who accurately predicted the tech industry's job growth in 2015, is back with some new predictions about which segments will do well in 2016 (Dice link...

An anonymous reader writes: British astronaut Tim Peake was trying to call his parents to wish them a Merry Christmas from the International Space Station and dialed the wrong number giving a retired ...

An anonymous reader writes with this bit of news from the Intercept. If you login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploads a copy of your recovery key to a Micro...

An anonymous reader writes: While companies like Valve have given their seal of approval to HD fan remakes and re-imaginings of their classic games, many more are all too eager to wield the ban hammer...

theodp writes: In A New Chapter for Computer Science Education, the U.S. Department of Education explained earlier this month that the federal STEM Education Act of 2015 'provides an unprecedented opp...

BarbaraHudson writes: The Guardian is the latest to report about experiments with a basic income, in this case in Utrecht. The idea has been around for more than 2 centuries, and has become a bit of a...

An anonymous reader writes: Verizon is offering up to $650 to customers who switch to their network. PC reports: "To get the discount, you'll need to port your number to Verizon, trade in your current...

An anonymous reader writes: A new malware family called ProxyBack infects PCs and transforms them into a Web proxy. ProxyBack malware works by infecting a PC, establishing a connection with a proxy se...

Ammalgam writes: Microsoft's CMO recently admitted that Microsoft was behind in the mobile arena and needed time to build a competitive phone. In the Windows community however, some feel that the Wind...

nerdyalien writes: There's a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken o...

An anonymous reader writes: FCC filings published today are offering a glimpse of the "Enterprise Edition" of Google Glass. According to Engadget: "...The work-focused eyepiece touts a much slicker (a...

An anonymous reader writes: Researcher Chris Vickery has discovered an incorrectly configured database that exposes the details of 191 million U.S. voters. Reuters reports: "While voter data is typica...

HughPickens.com writes: Jad Mouawad writes at the NYT that a driver's license may no longer be enough for airline passengers to clear security in some states, if the Department of Homeland Security ha...

New submitter fardindany writes with news that the months-old Ashley Madison hack seems to have had little impact on new users joining up. CNN reports: "Despite the infamous hack that exposed millions...

Lemeowski writes: Compliance concerns have long prevented financial services businesses from adopting mobile capabilities as quickly as other industries. But Yvette Jackson of Thomson Reuters argues t...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are all pursuing AI-powered chatbots — an intersection between several popular technologies: personal assistant software, search engin...

An anonymous reader writes: I know this is a vague question, but hoping to get some useful feedback anyway. I'm an experienced SW Engineer/Developer who is looking to get into the Machine Learning are...

szczys writes: It is surprising to learn how broken the JavaScript Random Number Generator has been for the past six years. The problem is compounded by the fact that Node.js uses the same broken Math...

An anonymous reader writes: Unfortunately the hard disk drive industry is not ready to go live with Heat-assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The technology is yet not reliable enough for mass producti...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has been under heavy criticism for distributing its "Free Basics" app in areas of the world that have less-developed communications infrastructure. The app essenti...

An anonymous reader writes: A lengthy report at the Wall Street Journal brings allegations of data manipulation against blood-testing startup Theranos. The company raised hundreds of millions of dolla...

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has finally started to roll out its new rules for small drones. The agency was notably slow to do so — slow enough that many ...

An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post has an article about current and near-future AI research while managing to keep a level head about it: "The machines are not on the verge of taking over...

overThruster writes: The Wall Street Journal reports: "The rare sight of a giant squid swimming inside a marina was captured on video on the coast of the Sea of Japan. According to a manager at the Mi...

At MIT Technology Review, Rachel Metz lists four factors that she believes will mean great advancements for virtual reality in the next year. More and better games; wider adoption of specialized camer...

New submitter henrydan798 writes to note that Star Wars: The Force Awakens has set a new record for ticket sales, becoming the fastest movie ever to earn a billion dollars at the till. As the L.A. Tim...

An anonymous reader writes: Core developers in the Bitcoin project have left and started a new currency called Decred. Developers are citing a lack of transparency and a conflict of interests between ...

Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report:An enormous am...

MojoKid writes: We all know what Microsoft wants to do with Windows 10. It's supposedly the last monolithic release of Windows and the ultimate plan is to unite hardware from different device categori...

Mark Wilson writes: Apple may have said that it opposes the idea of weakening encryption and providing governments with backdoors into products, but things are rather different in China. The Chinese p...

HughPickens.com writes: Liz Alderman writes in the NYT that bills and coins now represent just 2 percent of Sweden's economy, compared with 7.7 percent in the United States and 10 percent in the euro ...

Press2ToContinue writes: Apple's Lightning cable cartel be damned: Switzerland is moving forward with a plan for a single, universal phone charger across the country, standardizing phone chargers acro...

Bruce66423 points out an analysis at The Guardian of North Korea's Red Star Linux-based OS, based on a presentation Sunday to the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin : The features of their Fedora ...

An anonymous reader writes: I have a shelf full of books and other book-like things ranging from old to very old that I would like to turn into PDFs (or other similarly portable format), and have been...

New submitter OldMan17 writes: On Dec 24 while many of us were busy in frenzy of commercial excess and socially-conditioned good cheer, The Atlantic published an article by Bruce Schneier predicting t...

The growing availability of books via internet (whether instant, in the form of downloads from Amazon's Kindle store or the Google Play store, or in physical form by post) puts pressure on conventiona...

Michael Larabel at Phoronix has been assiduously reporting on some of the small advancements in open source 3-D graphics; in aggregate, those small advancements make for big improvements in hardware (...

schwit1 writes with Corey Doctorow's story at the Guardian diving into the questions of applied ethics that autonomous cars raise, especially in a world where avoiding accidents or mitigating their da...

circletimessquare writes: Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, was identified as Ross Ulbricht by one agent googling, off work hours, in just two weekends in 2013. Many agents had been working on ...

StartsWithABang writes: Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine not only what it's made out of, but how long it's been since the Bi...

George Clayton Johnson, writer of the first-aired episode of Star Trek, and co-author of Logan's Run, died on Christmas Day of cancer, at the age of 86. Johnson was a prolific television writer, penni...

Mark Wilson writes: After making it easier to report abusive tweets and increasing the size of its anti-troll team, Twitter believes it is getting 'bad behavior' under control. As well as bullying of ...

HughPickens.com writes: Christopher Ingraham reports at the Washington Post that the Department of Justice has announced that it's suspending a controversial asset forfeiture program that allows local...

The L.A. Times takes to task the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and various military agencies for their combined role in supporting the expenditure of vast amount of money on a system called...

The Steam bug that allowed users to see other users' account details may not have been as harmful as it first appeared. Valve said in a statement (reported on Mashable) that while cached data showed u...

New submitter writes: I just replaced my dishwasher with a basic, inexpensive Sears model. It works fine, but only has 3 different wash cycles. I'm betting that the code to manage more cycles (as in m...

jones_supa writes: Developer Julian Andres Klode has this week made some improvements to significantly increase the speed of incremental updates with Debian GNU/Linux's APT update system. His optimiza...

schwit1 writes: Those who take part in "geeky events" are more likely to have an "elevated grandiose" level of narcissism, according to a study conducted by the University of Georgia. Psychologists ex...

An anonymous reader points out Vice's rather dark view of the state of Internet freedom, the author of which posits that "one fact about the internet is quickly becoming clear this year: Americans' fr...

MarkWhittington writes: The last time men walked on the moon was during the flight of Apollo 17, 43 Decembers ago. According to a story in Forbes, lunar soil and rock samples returned by the last moon...

After being blocked by an obstruction ("the object") which left it idle just over two years ago, repair work has continued on Bertha, Seattle's enormous tunnel-boring machine. Now, reports KOMO News a...

MojoKid writes: If you're a fan of the Back to the Future series, the past few months have been fun to watch. We've seen Lexus unveil its take on the "hoverboard" with a maglev-based creation and toda...

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found around 8,000 Aethra routers (with no admin passwords) as part of a botnet that attacked WordPress sites, trying to brute-force admin accounts. Mo...

Earlier this month, we noted the Perl 6 advent celendar, Now, an anonymous reader writes to note that, right on schedule, and after 15 years of work, Perl 6 has been released. The top two bullet point...

theodp writes: More than 50 years ago, lucky kids found an Automatic Conveyor Erector Set under the Xmas tree. And while President Obama lamented last year that kids — including his own — ...

An anonymous reader writes: Back in February, Sony unloaded the part of its business that built PCs. Now, a year later, competitor Fujitsu is doing the same. The company announced it would be spinning...

An anonymous reader writes: Ruby developers have announced the official release of Ruby 2.3.0. This release introduces a frozen string literal pragma, which is "a new magic comment and command line op...

An anonymous reader writes: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, is one of the biggest investors in technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, he spoke about how he envisions the future of co...

periegetes writes: This idea has been bugging me for a while. It takes months to organize a physical election, and several days to count the results, so it makes sense that we don't organize elections...

An anonymous reader writes: The Steam game distribution platform is suffering from a particularly bad bug right now. If you log in and try to look at your account details, you're shown the details of ...

StartsWithABang writes: Earlier this month, a conference was held devoted to the question of whether untestable scientific ideas like string theory and the multiverse are actually science or not. Whil...

An anonymous reader writes: Liz Upton, Director of Communications for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has just published an email where someone was asking how much would it cost them for the Foundation t...

An anonymous reader writes: Engineers working on planes, rockets, and other vehicles are always looking for new metals to make their creations lighter and stronger. A new invention from UCLA demonstra...

An anonymous reader writes: If you participate in social media, you've probably noticed the flood of posts that happen any time a social issue becomes prominent in the news. Whether it's sharing a sup...

An anonymous reader writes: Commercial drone development has come a long way in the past five years or so, but (as evidenced by the near miss in Italy) they still aren't something you'd want to see cr...

An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket after launching a group of satellites into orbit. It's a huge breakthrough for the commercial space industry, beca...

The Missouri-based National Audio Company, reports Ars Technica, is sweeping up in a category that our future-looking selves might twenty years ago have imagined would be dead and buried in the year 2...

dkatana writes: AWS started out defining its virtual CPUs as being composed of EC2 compute units, or ECUs, which it defined as an equivalent to a physical Xeon processor. However, a virtual CPU now lo...

An anonymous reader writes: While the Western vision of an internet café includes a shoddy WiFi hotspot and a few old desktops running Windows XP, the Chinese counterpart is more closely related ...

An anonymous reader writes with this news from Ars Technica: The Australian government has repeatedly called for citizens to turn off two-factor authentication (2FA) at its main digital government por...

MarkWhittington writes: 2015 was a historical year for NASA with its close flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto last July. But the space agency rings out the year with some close looks at two divergent wor...

Lauren Weinstein writes: The U.S. Air Force has just issued a solicitation for a radio-based 'Portable Anti Drone Defense' system — essentially a remote drone disruption device that can be easil...

Evidently even Forrest Mimms isn't famous enough to fly without hassle when carrying a briefcase full of electronics; he writes at Make about his experiences, both before and after 2001. A relevant sl...

HughPickens.com writes: NBC reports that defending World Cup champion Marcel Hirscher, who won silver in the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, had a lucky escape after he narrowly avoided bein...

An anonymous reader writes: The hacking crew was not kidding about their Christmas DDoS attacks on Xbox & PSN. This morning the group started warmup attacks on the EA network, taking it down for 3...

New submitter saizai writes: TSA has made electronic strip search mandatory whenever they feel like it. "TSA is updating the AIT PIA to reflect a change to the operating protocol regarding the ability...

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month, Mozilla announced that Firefox OS smartphones would no longer be sold via carriers. Because the company refused to talk about what's next for Firefox OS...

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is of c...

GrantRobertson writes: For my graduate project, I am considering developing a web engine designed around sharing and organizing actual information in a way that people would actually like to and easil...

theodp writes: Command the dancers to "point left" in Google's dance-themed Code Boogie learn-to-code tutorial on the Santa Tracker website, and the dancers actually point to their own right. The less...

StartsWithABang writes: They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not "eureka!" but "that's funny," and the Apollo 17 astronauts, just over 43 years ago, certainly got such ...

itwbennett writes: Hyatt Hotels said Wednesday that it recently identified malware on the computers that run its payment-processing systems. And while Hyatt didn't provide more details on the breach, ...

An anonymous reader writes: In response to an article claiming Ubuntu didn't reach its goal of 200 million users this year — a goal set out by Mark Shuttleworth in 2011 to surpass 200 million us...

itwbennett writes: Earlier this month, Wyndham settled a lawsuit with the FTC over weak security practices that resulted in 3 major data breaches in 2008 and 2009 that compromised the credit card info...

JoeyRox writes: Starting in 2016 Asus will ship all phones and tablets with AdBlock Plus integrated into their mobile browser. The ad-blocking software will not only be pre-installed but enabled by de...

coondoggie writes: The National Archive blog takes a look at the background of the nation's premier defense unit's 60 years of tracking of Santa as he travels around the globe delivering his Christmas...

sciencehabit writes: Black holes earn their name because their gravity is so strong not even light can escape from them. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of han...

HughPickens.com writes: NBC reports that defending World Cup champion Marcel Hirscher, who won silver in the slalom at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, had a lucky escape after he narrowly avoided bein...

popo writes: Native Advertising, or advertorial content that's camouflaged to mimic a site's original content is all the rage among web publishers these days particularly as ad-blocking takes a bigger...

New submitter flopsquad writes: On December 22, the Federal Circuit released a decision overturning, on First Amendment grounds, the part of US trademark law that prohibits registration of "disparragi...

An anonymous reader sends word that many online systems at the United States Patent and Trademark Office are down due to damaged equipment after a power outage. A statement from the USPTO reads in par...

An anonymous reader writes: A man was arrested after trying to sell Hollywood movie scripts and social security numbers to an undercover DHS agent. The hacker known online as Jeff Moxey managed to hac...

MarkWhittington writes: In the hit movie, "The Martian", NASA astronaut Mark Watney survives by planting potatoes in one of the modules of the Mars base who is stranded at. The plot device received a ...

An anonymous reader sends the latest update on Eddie Tipton, the man who worked for the Multi-State Lottery Association who was convicted of rigging a lottery game so he could win a $14 million jackpo...

An anonymous reader writes that Facebook's plan to provide Indians with free access to a number of chosen internet services has run into some big trouble. FC reports: "Indian telecom regulators have r...

New submitter Pollux writes: In the Fall of 2016, the College Board will begin a new course titled "AP Computer Science Principles," designed to "introduce students to the central ideas of computer sc...

szczys writes: The CRC Handbook is one great example of how access to information has changed over the years. Now, you open up Google and find your answers. In decades past, hard data needed to solve ...

itwbennett writes: Security researchers and crypto experts now believe that a combination of likely malicious third-party modifications and Juniper's own crypto failures are responsible for the recent...

erier2003 writes: Amid a torrent of cyberattacks and seemingly endless data breaches, the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, the government's premier cybersecurity monitoring unit, has never been ...

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, when a Brazilian judge shut down WhatsApp, it affected roughly half of the country's ~200 million residents. It's not the first time — or the second, or th...

HughPickens.com writes: Scott Shane writes in the NY Times that the National Archives and Records Administration has released a detailed list of the United States' potential targets for atomic bombers...

An anonymous reader writes: Governor Jay Inslee announced Tuesday that software used by the Washington Department of Corrections has been making mistakes in calculating sentences since 2002, resulting...

AmiMoJo sends this report from the BBC: Germany's highest court has ordered a man to destroy intimate photos and videos of his ex-partner because they violate her right to privacy. The Federal Court s...

An anonymous reader writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is testing a new mobile messaging service. They say one of the defining new features of the service is the inclusion of AI-drive...

codguy writes: Up to now, airline passengers have been able opt out of the TSA's Advanced Imaging Technologies (AIT) whole body scanners, and request a physical pat-down for their security check. But ...

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. authorities blocked a British Muslim family from boarding a plane at London's Gatwick airport. They were flying to Los Angeles on a trip to visit Disneyworld. "U.S. De...

jetkins writes: What would you do if your firewall was being persistently targeted by port scans from a specific group of machines from one particular company? I run a Sophos UTM9 software firewall ap...

BitterOak writes: Kim Dotcom has lost his extradition case in New Zealand, and will now (probably) have to face trial in the U.S. on charges of money laundering, racketeering, and copyright violation....

hypnosec writes: Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully produced 50 grams of plutonium-238, an isotope that produces heat without a lot of other, problematic radiation. This makes it suitable ...

An anonymous reader writes: In a new interview with Fortune, outspoken Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric automaker is just two years away from developing fully autonomous vehicles that can operate...

HughPickens.com writes: Nicholas Cage is known as an avid collector, with interests that include real estate, rare cars and comic books: In 2011, he sold a like-new copy of Action Comics No. 1, which ...

prisoninmate writes: Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker is an open source tool, a shell script that lets anyone port any of the official or unofficial Ubuntu Linux flavors for the Raspberry Pi 2. Ubuntu Pi Flavo...

An anonymous reader writes: New research published in the journal Psychological Science (abstract) found that children who grow up in poverty within the United States tend to have lower IQs than peers...

An anonymous reader writes: Google's battle against poor passwords continues. The company is now testing a new Google Account option that lets users login using their phone, skipping the part where yo...

JMarshall writes: A new, elastic silver ink allows stretchy circuits to be drawn using a regular pen. Unlike previous inks, which have been made with silver nanoparticles and are prone to clog pens ov...

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists offers a pretty thorough run-down of the pros and cons of the Paris climate accords. William Sweet examines not only the political machinations be...

An anonymous reader writes: Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, has written an article about how the scientific community regards research into cold fusion, and those...

sciencehabit writes: NASA has suspended its next mission to Mars after problems with a French-built seismological instrument could not be fixed in time for the scheduled launch. The mission, a lander ...

An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Yahoo Autos says Google and Ford plan to announce a partnership to build self-driving cars. "By pairing with Google, Ford gets a massive boost in self-dri...

mdsolar writes: The Department of Energy is formally launching its initiative aimed at establishing a disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. The department said Monday that it is accepting input on the...

theodp writes: Two weeks ago, as the nation's schools 'taught kids to program' with an Hour of Code, Microsoft and others celebrated a 6-year lobbying effort that culminated in the passage of legislat...

schwit1 writes: Spoofing is far from the only problem facing Department of Homeland Security and the way it gets drones to the border. In addition to giving grants to law enforcement agencies to purch...

itwbennett writes: Slashdot readers will recall the story posted last week about the misconfiguration of the MongoDB database that powers Hzone, a dating app for the HIV-positive, and the ensuing thre...

An anonymous reader writes: For over a decade, Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights have been a festive online holiday tradition for millions of Internet users world-wide, so it was sadly the end of a...

An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of the discovery of two backdoors on Juniper's NetScreen firewall devices, Cisco Systems has announced that they will be reviewing the software running on their...

Lauren Weinstein writes: Recent claims by some (mostly nontechnical) observers that it would be "simple" for services like YouTube to automatically block "terrorist" videos, in the manner that various...

itwbennett writes: Due to recent research showing that SHA-1 is weaker than previously believed, Mozilla, Microsoft and now Google are all considering bringing the deadline forward by six months to Ju...

An anonymous reader writes: The FTC and Oracle have come to an agreement regarding Oracle's deceptive Java security updates, which only removed recent versions of vulnerable Java SE, but left behind o...

New submitter kozubik writes: Jim Salter at arstechnica provides a detailed, technical rundown of ZFS send and receive and compares it to traditional remote syncing and backup tools such as rsync. He ...

An anonymous reader writes: SuperTux, the free software game inspired by Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers, has put out its first stable release in a decade. SuperTux 0.4 rewrites the game engine to mak...

Robotech_Master writes: It always puzzles me whenever I run across a post somewhere that uses Javascript to try to prevent me from copying and pasting text, or even viewing the source. These measures ...

Rei writes: At 8:40 PM today, SpaceX successfully launched and relanded the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, as well as delivering to orbit the last portion of ORBCOMM's communica...

blottsie writes: Newly released evidence shows that Irish detectives who worked the case of two convicted drug dealers may have also used data obtained through CMU's Software Engineering Institute's m...

alphadogg writes: Every decade or so Microsoft seems to feel the need to buy a Ray Ozzie company. This time it's Talko, a Boston-based startup dedicated to helping workgroups (or families or other set...

sciencehabit writes with interesting news about a possible new avenue for earthquake prediction. Sciencemag reports: "Ask seismologists when they'll be able to predict earthquakes, and the answer is g...

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC News service is trialling a tool which provides synthesized journalist voice-overs in different languages, with translation provided by unspecified established onli...

An anonymous reader writes: The Mars 2030 Experience' is part of NASA's ongoing efforts to build public support in a real manned mission to the Red Planet. Partnering with FUSION to produce the experi...

SmartAboutThings writes: Winamp could once again be brought back to life after Vivendi Group took over the majority stake in Radionomy, the previous owner of the app who purchased it from AOL in early...

itwbennett writes: In settlement of a long-standing dispute over patents that Ericsson considers essential to the implementation of a number of mobile communications standards, including GSM, the 3G s...

An anonymous reader writes: The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has announced that it will push back the mandatory implementation of TLS 1.1+ encryption, over the very insec...

Lucas123 writes: Carmakers and their tier 1 parts suppliers at CES in January are expected to launch an unprecedented number of software advances centered around cloud services and over-the-air update...

szczys writes: New FAA rules about drone registration and operation are now in effect. So far the talk has centered around registering your aircraft, and about the weight restriction. But all of this ...

dcblogs writes: An occupation long associated with innovation, electrical and electronics engineering, has stopped growing, according to the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an upda...

An anonymous reader writes: The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has finally approved the new 451 status code for HTTP error messages involving web pages which have been repressed or removed...

An anonymous reader writes: An article from Berkeley's California Magazine explains some of the reasons science reporting is often at odds with actual science. Quoting: "Where journalism favors neat s...

davidwr writes: A security researcher and the Associated Press are reporting that hackers have infiltrated many of the United States' power grid networks. "About a dozen times in the last decade, soph...

theodp writes: Teaching multivariate statistics to college students, writes AnnMaria De Mars, was a piece of cake compared to her current project — making a game to teach statistics to middle sc...

An anonymous reader writes: Disney has been successful for the better part of a century. But they haven't always had to work as hard to do it. Over the past couple of decades, they've been facing more...

An anonymous reader writes that Microsoft says the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade will begin early next year. The company had previously promised a roll out this month. Venturebeat reports: "Windows Phone ...

braindrainbahrain writes: A U.S.-based website that covers the unofficial exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, has been accused of cyber terrorism in a civil...

itwbennett writes: In a blog post on Rapid7's community portal Sunday, HD Moore posted some notes on the Juniper ScreenOS incident, notably that his team discovered the backdoor password that enables ...

Press2ToContinue writes with this profile of Anatoli Brouchkov, a scientist who isn't afraid to take an extremely hands-on approach to science. Vice reports: "Anatoli Brouchkov is a soft-spoken guy wi...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook announced that it officially replaced Flash with HTML5 for its video player. They made the change because of security reasons, but developers also found it easier ...

An anonymous reader writes: Last month 188 entries turned up on GitHub in an event challenging programmers to write computer code to generate 50,000-word novels. "The 'novel' is defined however you wa...

Zothecula sends news about the tiniest color picture ever printed. Gizmag reports: "Scientists have created a picture that only fleas could truly appreciate. That's because the inkjet-printed image ta...

itwbennett writes: A database for sanriotown.com, the official online community for Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters, has been discovered online by researcher Chris Vickery,' writes CSO's Steve...

Nerval's Lobster writes: New data from research firm Nielsen shows that — surprise, surprise — Facebook, Google, and Apple dominated the list of most-used mobile apps. Facebook's core app ...

jones_supa writes: For four years, Garth Braithwaite has been working at Adobe on open source projects as a design and code contributor. In addition to his work at the company, he also speaks at confe...

Lauren Weinstein sends word about this admission by the FAA that has led many to have concerns about privacy. Forbes reports: "The FAA finally confirmed this afternoon that model aircraft registrants&...

An anonymous reader writes: South Korean gaming firm Nexon has vowed to release mobile games with longer life cycles, focusing on attracting users for at least 10 years rather than relying on fad sale...

Earthquake Retrofit points out this story at the Register which could mean some big changes in the future of the internet. "On the last day of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the conference o...

mikejuk writes with this story about a Japanese team working on creating touchable holograms. I Programmer reports: "One method of creating a volumetric, i.e. true 3D, display, is to use a high power ...

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli startup Rayzone created a device that can hack any smartphone that has its WiFi connection open. The device can steal passwords, files, contact lists, photos, and v...

AmiMoJo writes: By default the popular AdBlock Plus plug-in allows some "acceptable" ads to be displayed. A blog post announcing updates to policy describes the goals of the update: easier to understa...

An anonymous reader writes: The London Police have an Intellectual Property Crime Unit. They just issued a press release bragging about "dismantling" a "gang" running "commercial-scale copyright infri...

nerdyalien writes: Apple CEO Tim Cook dismissed as "total political crap" the notion that the tech giant was avoiding taxes. Cook's remarks, made on CBS' 60 Minutes show, come amid a debate in the Uni...

1sockchuck writes: Over the past decade, there have been repeated predictions of the imminent arrival of higher rack power densities. Yet extreme densities have remained focused in high performance co...

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about a recent essay (PDF) from researcher Jacob Haqq-Misra, who argues that any future colonies established on Mars should be independent from natio...

An anonymous reader writes: Most of us are aware by now of the myriad internet games created not for their own sake, but as a marketing tool for another product. But we're not the target audience for ...

An anonymous reader writes: Volkswagen has put itself in a tough spot. After cheating emissions standards, the company faces billions in fines and repair costs to bring those vehicles into spec and ma...

martiniturbide writes: The Internet Archive, the online non-profit library that stores almost everything that is digital, the same one that hosts a lot of classic games , hosts a massive collection of...

hypnosec writes: High-Speed Operando Tomography and Digital Volume Correlation have been used by a University College London-led team to show in real-time how lithium batteries degrade as they are use...

MarkWhittington writes: Readers wondering where Andy Weir, whose book The Martian featured a NASA astronaut stranded on Mars, will take us next need wonder no longer. According to a story in the Huffi...

An anonymous reader writes: Wine 1.8.0 is now the latest stable release of Wine Is Not An Emulator and available from WineHQ.org. Wine 1.8 features include support for DirectWrite, Direct2D support, v...

vasanth writes: The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully launched six Singapore satellites on Wednesday. The agency also tested the fourth stage of its PSLV rocket, a four stage/engi...

sciencehabit writes: Using one of the world's most powerful lasers, physicists have found experimental evidence for Saturn's helium 'rain,' a phenomenon in which a mixture of liquid hydrogen and heliu...

An anonymous reader writes: Early on Friday, the U.S. Senate approved the 2,000 page 'omnibus' budget bill that allocated $1.15 trillion in government funding. Later in the day, President Obama signed...

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has this month approved test flights for Terrafugia's flying car. The team behind TF-X, patented in 2011, will see a two-foot...

theodp writes: Politico reports that the White House is talking to groups about a push for computer science education in the coming weeks, possibly in mid-January, which could involve commitments from...

schwit1 writes: For the first time ever astronomers have been able to predict and photograph the appearance of a supernova, its light focused by the gravitational lensing caused by a galaxy and the da...

An anonymous reader writes: A new bug in Outlook allows attackers only to send you an email, and without clicking or downloading attachments, a user's computer can be compromised. The bug [PDF] is bec...

An anonymous reader writes: Capcom has announced that their upcoming Street Fighter V game, one of the most anticipated games for 2016, will also be available for SteamOS and Linux. Already in place i...

An anonymous reader writes: The Phantom Squad hacking group appears to have anticipated its own Christmas schedule for attacks on the Xbox and PlayStation networks by taking credit for a three-hour ou...

An anonymous reader writes: The Khronos Group has announced that the Vulkan specification is complete and undergoing legal review and final polishing, but it means that Vulkan will not be published th...

MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and c...

New submitter etnoy writes: Quantum key distribution is supposed to be a perfectly secure method for encrypting information. Even with access to an infinitely fast computer, an attacker cannot eavesdr...

AaronW writes: A 12-year-old Sikh boy in Dallas, Texas was accused by another student of bringing a bomb to school. Apparently he had a powerbag; a backpack with a built-in phone charger. Rather than ...

aarondubrow writes: Today, the National Science Foundation, in partnership with the DoD, NASA, NIH, and USDA, announced $37 million in new awards to spur the development and use of co-robots — r...

The Real Dr John writes: A new study published in the journal Nature provides evidence that intrinsic risk factors contribute only modestly (less than ~10–30% of lifetime risk) to cancer develop...

the_newsbeagle writes: In October 2016, a stadium in Zurich will host the world's first cyborg Olympics. During this event, more officially called the Cybathlon, people with disabilities will use adva...

maxcelcat writes: I've used Thunderbird for about a decade, and Netscape Mail before that (I have an email from 1998 from Marc Andreessen, welcoming me to Netscape Email, telling me different fonts ca...

CIStud writes: Due to the recent terror events, the Consumer Technology Association is instituting drastic new security measures for attendees coming to the International Consumer Electronics Show (CE...

itwbennett writes: With the latest update for Windows 10, Microsoft has extended SmartScreen to block drive-by attacks in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11, the Microsoft Edge Team said Wednesda...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with news that staffers for the Bernie Sanders campaign improperly viewed the voter data gathered by Hillary Clinton's campaign by exploiting a software error. "The discovery...

catchblue22 writes: UMass Amherst scientists have analyzed fMRI data to link brain architecture with consciousness and abstract thought. "We momentarily thought our research failed when we saw that ea...

Press2ToContinue writes: In the film Minority Report, people are rounded up by the Precrime police agency before they actually commit the crime. In the movie, this pre-crime information is provided by...

schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an averag...

Peter Eckersley writes: The EFF has launched Panopticlick 2.0. In addition to measuring whether your browser exposes unique — and therefore trackable — settings and configuration to websit...

m2pc writes: Ars Technica reports that Juniper Networks firewalls have been discovered to include "unauthorized code" inserted into their ScreenOS software. Juniper has has published an advisory addre...

New submitter dasgoober writes: Lifelock has agreed to pay $100 million to settle charges that it failed to properly protect user data, the F.T.C. announced on Thursday. This is the second settlement ...

HughPickens.com writes: We've all said "just one more episode before bed" to ourselves only to fall asleep halfway through while Netflix kept playing. It's frustrating to try to put the pieces back to...

Advocatus Diaboli sends word that The Intercept has obtained a secret catalog of surveillance gear used by the U.S. from a concerned intelligence official. They report: "The intercept has obtained a s...

msm1267 writes: A security researcher is in a bit of a scrum with Facebook over vulnerability disclosures that not only tested the boundaries of the social network's bug bounty program, but he said, a...

prisoninmate writes: Canonical released a patch for the Raspberry Pi 2 Linux kernel 4.2 packages of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, fixing four critical security issues. Canonical u...

1sockchuck writes: Does it make sense for state to offer tax incentives to lure huge data center projects? After an extended debate, legislators in Michigan have approved tax breaks for a $5 billion d...

Peterus7 writes: The Tacoma city council just voted unanimously to invest and upgrade their Click! fiber network as a municipal ISP, which likely means gigabit speeds. This decision was made in light ...

An anonymous reader writes: A federal jury reached a verdict that Cox Communications must pay $25 million to BMG Rights Management for failing to disconnect subscribers accused of online piracy. Torre...

Ewan Palmer writes that everyone's least favorite medication price gouger, Martin Shkreli, has run into some legal problems. According to the article "Pharmaceutical start-up owner Martin Shkreli, dub...

hackingbear writes: China's Dark Matter Particle Explorer Satellite Wukong, named after the fictional character Monkey King, was successfully launched at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu p...

An anonymous reader writes: A group of leading U.S. property owners, including AvalonBay Communities and Camden Property Trust, have met with lodging rental site Airbnb to discuss ways that they can g...

itwbennett writes: Under an agreement finalized Wednesday that applies to all 192 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO), tariffs on imports of consumer electronics will be phased out ...

szczys writes: What would the Galactic Economy look like following the destruction of two Death Stars? This is the informed Star Wars debate taking shape between to people who know their economics. El...

New submitter schklerg writes: Like many, I am tired of being the product of the corporate "cloud" overlords. To that end, I've got my own Linux server running Tiny Tiny RSS (RSS — Feedly replac...

ShaunC writes: Soon after Comcast implemented its data caps in Tennessee, one customer began getting calls warning that he was approaching his monthly usage limit. The company's data cap meter was tic...

An anonymous reader writes: Jonas Echterhoff from Unity has posted the latest Unity WebGL benchmark results on the Unity blog. He writes, "A bit over a year ago, we released a blog post with performan...

hypnosec writes: Researchers at Oxford University have demonstrated a 'hybrid' logic gate using two isotopes of calcium, the abundant isotope calcium-40 and the rare isotope calcium-43. One of the lea...

An anonymous reader writes: VideoLAN today launched VLC, the world's most used media player, for Chrome OS. You can download the new app, which is a port of the VLC version for Android, from the Chrom...

kheldan writes: The California DMV will be allowing so-called 'autonomous cars' on the roads — with some restrictions. Namely: There must be a licensed driver behind the wheel at all times, aler...

jones_supa writes: Canonical introduced Amazon Product Results as part of Ubuntu 12.10, which meant that local searches performed by a user in Dash were also sent online. This made many Ubuntu users s...

An anonymous reader writes: Following initial news of the project in March, IBM, under the supervision of the Linux Foundation and in partnership with several major tech interests including Fujitsu, h...

Bennett Haselton writes:T-Mobile has been accused of violating Net Neutrality by providing "Binge On" plans that come with unlimited data, but only from select streaming websites such as Hulu and Netf...

An anonymous reader writes: A few naughty users have started spamming Reddit with Star Wars 7 spoilers, but also hoaxes. Some known Star Wars fans with Reddit accounts were even bombarded with PMs abo...

An anonymous reader writes: British mobile network EE is recalling every one of its promotional Power Bar smartphone chargers amid safety fears that they may overheat and blow up. The portable blue ch...

itwbennett writes: A scan performed over the past few days by John Matherly, the creator of the Shodan search engine, has found that there are at least 35,000 publicly accessible and insecure MongoDB ...

mdsolar writes with this National Geographic story about the danger of rising sea levels to low-lying power plants across the country. According to the story: "Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedwa...

New submitter rafaelj writes: Apparently, Tim Berners Lee was not aware of the real impact on internet freedom in Brazil when he supported the Marco Civil to pass in the Brazilian congress last year. ...

thegarbz writes: After a previous court ruling covered on Slashdot where Dallas Buyers Club was forced to post a $600,000AU bond and accused of speculative invoicing, it appears they have once again f...

gb7djk writes: The investigative journalist Duncan Campbell has written an article at The Register claiming that the UK Government has been secretly creating a database of all telephone calls, financi...

v3rgEz writes: In the 1990s, during our nuclear disarmament initiative, the Congress preserved two intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos as historic sites. The Minuteman Missile National His...

theodp writes: Microsoft is boasting that UK Prime Minister David Cameron learned to code during this year's Hour of Code thanks to its Minecraft-themed tutorial, much like US President Barack Obama l...

davidshenba writes: Sticking to a vegetarian diet may not the best for environment — in fact, it might be harmful to it. According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the ...

neoritter writes: The issues of reproducibility in journals continues to present problems. This time in the world of clinical geneticists where a misleading or incorrect journal on the effect of a gen...

An anonymous reader writes: Last year on Christmas, the LizardSquad hacking group took down PSN and Xbox Live for many hours via DDoS attacks. This year another group, called Phantom Squad, is plannin...

szczys writes: While you may have heard of the Ghost Army that was used to fake troop movements during WWII, it's unlikely that you truly grasp the level of skill and success these elite groups achiev...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has announced a US-based trial of minor changes to its controversial process of name verification, apparently in response to last year's controversy over LGBT and ...

MarkWhittington writes: While NASA remains fixated on its Journey to Mars, quietly, the FAA is positioning itself as the lead United States Government agency for a return to the moon. According to a s...

An anonymous reader writes: A day after Philips announced that it would drop support for third-party Hue bulbs the company has reversed its decision. An announcement reads is part: "We recently upgrad...

HughPickens.com writes: Sewell Chan reports at the NYT that Britain's highest court has unanimously rejected an attempt by Donald J. Trump to block the construction of a wind farm near his luxury golf...

An anonymous reader writes: George Hotz, known for unlocking early iPhones and the PlayStation 3, has developed an autonomous driving system in his garage. "Hotz's approach isn't simply a low-cost kno...

An anonymous reader writes that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) was inserted into the omnibus budget deal passed by the House of Representatives late last night. Engadget reports: "La...

mdsolar writes with news that city officials in Woodland, North Carolina have taken issue with being ridiculed by the internet and want to set the record straight. According to the article: "Usually w...

sciencehabit writes: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) leads the way among U.S science agencies getting increases in the final 2016 spending bill released today. NIH is the winner in absolute do...

An anonymous reader writes: Several major tech and open source sites—including Opensource.com and Infoworld—have published lists of the top open source projects of the year. What's your pi...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Twitter have agreed to remove hateful posts from their platforms within 24 hours in Germany, officials announced yesterday. The web companies committe...

David Rothman writes: Eric Posner, the fourth most-cited law professor in the U.S., says the government may need to jail you if you even visit an ISIS site after enough warnings. He says, "Never befor...

schwit1 writes: In the past forty years the use of descriptive words by scientists to positively hype their results in papers has increased steadily. "Researchers at the University Medical Center Utre...

SmartAboutThings writes: Bill Gates is known as a big philanthropist, and now his own company will commit to even more charity work by launching a new organization, Microsoft Philanthropies. Microsoft...

New submitter h33t l4x0r writes: Presidential candidate Marco Rubio recently "fired off a letter (PDF) to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to allow states to block municipal bro...

prisoninmate writes: A zero-day security flaw was discovered by developers Ismael Ripoll and Hector Marco in the upstream GRUB2 packages. GRUB2 did not correctly handle the backspace key when the boot...

StartsWithABang writes: Many of us dreamed of becoming astronauts as a child, but gave up on that dream for a number of reasons — the seemingly impossible odds, the demands of daily life, the ri...

An anonymous reader sends word of new data protection rules up for vote in the European Parliament which would make it illegal for companies to handle the data of children aged 15 and younger. Current...

subh_arya writes: Researchers from NYU, UToronto and MIT have come up with a technique that captures human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts to recognize handwritten chara...

itwbennett writes: Sometime before November 29, the MongoDB housing the data of Hzone, a dating app for HIV-positive singles, was exposed to the Internet. The company, displeased with having the secur...

An anonymous reader writes: Mac security software suite MacKeeper is recovering after a hack leaked millions of users' personal information. Kromtech, the software developer, confirmed that it had rec...

MarkWhittington writes: An argument about class warfare has broken out over the notion of a commercial Mars colony. It started when Elon Musk, who is said to be planning to retire on the Red Planet, m...

tedlistens writes: Generations of physics teachers, textbooks, and articles have taught that the spectacular collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 75 years ago, in November 1940, was caused by resona...

WeMedia is partly a think tank and partly a consulting firm that advises news organizations on how to deal with the ever-changing world of online journalism. Andrew Nachison cofounded WeMedia with Dal...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 43 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include a 64-bit version for Windows (finally!), a new strict block...

hype7 writes: The Harvard Business Review is running an article looking at the recently announced OpenAI initiative, and its decision to structure the venture as a non-profit. It goes on to ask some p...

kheldan writes: A newly introduced piece of federal legislation aims to give consumers more choices about when their browsing behavior is being tracked. Today, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Ed Mar...

schwit1 writes: The Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children wit...

jones_supa writes: For those using the Continuum feature of Windows and who work from home or in the office, you'll be pleased to know that the Remote Desktop Universal app is not only happening but w...

An anonymous reader writes: I've been using email since the early '90s and have probably half a million emails in various places and accounts. Some of them are currently in .tar files, others in the o...

sfcrazy writes: Collabora Productivity, a UK-based consulting company, has collaborated with ownCloud Inc. to release a developer edition of online LibreOffice, which they call CODE (Collabora Online ...

An anonymous reader writes: The city council of Seattle has unanimously voted in favour of a proposal which will require Uber — and driving-related companies which operate on the same principle ...

The Washington Post reports that all Los Angeles public schools have been closed for the day after a "'credible threat' of violence to students at numerous schools in the sprawling district, and a sch...

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix has spent four years developing a new and more efficient video-encoding process that can shave off 20% in terms of space and bandwidth without reducing the quality ...

Ewan Palmer writes: A man has been arrested in connection with the alleged hacking of electronic toy manufacturer VTech which affected millions worldwide. The 21-year-old was arrested in Berkshire, So...

MojoKid writes: AMD announced today that the company is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give game developers, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to th...

An anonymous reader writes: CNET's Michael Franco recently sat down and watched "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" again in preparation for the release of "The Force Awakens" later this week. His advi...

Patrick O'Neill writes: Carly Fiorina wants the government to be able to "work around" encryption to aid intelligence agencies and law enforcement in their investigations, she said on Monday. The Repu...

An anonymous reader writes: A software glitch causes the Boeing 787 to report its position incorrectly, which has led Australia and Canada to 'blacklist' the aircraft from using ADB-S and until it is ...

An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 decision that DirecTV’s service agreement barring mass arbitration by its customers must be enforced. The NYTimes re...

New submitter scrote-ma-hote writes: From stuff.co.nz, news comes that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now able to solemnize marriages. The registration was listed in the NZ gazette yest...

An anonymous reader writes: Valve and HTC have touted 'room-scale' VR—a large tracking volume for virtual reality experiences—as a major advantage of SteamVR and the Vive headset. But Ocul...

mrspoonsi writes: On Monday morning, Eric Jackson, manager of hedge fund SpringOwl, sent a brutal 99-page presentation to Yahoo's board, outlining his case for why the company should drop Marissa Maye...

sciencehabit writes with news about how the hair mites you carry can be used to determine your ancestry. "Right now, deep in your hair follicles and sweat glands, tiny mites are feeding on dead skin c...

mrspoonsi writes: On Monday morning, Eric Jackson, manager of hedge fund SpringOwl, sent a brutal 99-page presentation to Yahoo's board, outlining his case for why the company should drop Marissa Maye...

New submitter hydrodog writes: A Texas plumber traded in his truck, which ended up in ISIS videos showing his logo and phone number. Now he is getting hundreds of harassing phone calls for 'supporting...

An anonymous reader writes: A month after temporarily blocking social media sites including Facebook and WhatsApp, the Bangladeshi government has now taken steps to take down online chat software Skyp...

itwbennett writes: Shari Steele, a 20-year veteran of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has been hired as executive director of the Tor Project, the widely used anonymity tool that frequently ...

sandbagger writes: Purchasers of the Philips Hue 'smart' ambient lighting system are finding out that the new firmware pushed out by the manufacturer has cut off access to previously-supported lightbu...

An anonymous reader writes: Joomla just issued a emergency security patch after Sucuri observed a large number of attacks on Joomla sites using malicious user-agent strings. Attackers were adding mali...

An anonymous reader writes: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating ISP speed and service claims. He's asked consumers to help by testing their broadband speeds and reporting the ...

colinneagle sends word that a developer has claimed to have achieved a jailbreak of the PlayStation 4. Networkworld reports: "If you have a PS4 and want to run homebrew content, then you might be happ...

An anonymous reader writes: Peter Diamandis announced today the launch of a new Xprize competition. $7 million is available for teams who are capable of pushing the boundaries of ocean exploration. "O...

An anonymous reader writes: Humanoid robots in space are attractive because their emulation of the human form makes them capable of a huge range of tasks. But remotely controlling such bots is a very ...

szczys writes: Leaded Gas did a great job of keeping engines from knocking thanks to tetraethyl lead. Unfortunately the fumes from the chemical are highly poisonous. R-12 is a refrigerant that revolut...

An anonymous reader writes: On Saturday, world leaders completed an ambitious international agreement to address climate change. But when the officials received the first copy of what was supposed to ...

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has finally unveiled its new drone registration rules. Starting on 21 December, all newly-purchased drones between 250 grams (.55 l...

sciencehabit writes: Astronomers have discovered about 2000 planets around other stars, but they have few hard facts about what they are like, such as the contents of their atmospheres. Now, a team of...

An anonymous reader writes: According to documents obtained by The Telegraph, Google considers the UK a key market for development of its self-driving car program. In one of the five meetings the docu...

itwbennett writes: A weekend data breach at the European Space Agency (ESA) by hackers calling themselves "Anonymous" has resulted in the release of 8,107 names, email addresses, and passwords of ESA ...

theodp writes: To commemorate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace, Google's CS Education in Media Program partnered with YouTube Kids on Happy Birthday Ada! for Computer Science Education Week. For tho...

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter has sent out unexpected warning notices to a number of users, informing them that their account might have been targeted by state-sponsored hackers. This is the fir...

mdsolar writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don't want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off ...

Reuters reports that 15 to 20 vandals dressed in black this weekend defaced Facebook's Hamburg offices, spray-painting "Facebook dislike" on a wall, and causing some minor property damage. From the st...

An anonymous reader writes: Wednesday Google hosted a special edition of their annual "Demo Day" event featuring 11 early-stage startup companies founded by women from eight different countries. More ...

The L.A. Times reports that researchers using the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered an astronomical first: a low-mass star with a huge, persistent, swirling surface feature akin to t...

Lauren Weinstein says there are smart people in government, "who fully understand the technical realities of modern strong encryption systems and how backdoors would catastrophically weaken them," but...

sciencehabit writes: Every bird alive today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana, a new study su...

Zothecula writes: Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce than regular steel, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape whi...

mache writes: My cousin is finishing up a major remodel of his home in Houston and has installed video cameras for added security. At my suggestion, he wired up all the cameras to be on a separate VLA...

MarkWhittington writes: The 43rd anniversary of the mission of Apollo 17, the last time men walked on the moon, has elicited a strange kind of nostalgia, and no little melancholia in some parts of the...

mikejuk writes: If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, you might not have to wait much longer. A University of Washington team has essentially reversed...

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, The Verge, and many others (including this widely run Reuters story), a heavily backed non-profit group called OpenAI on Friday introduced itself and its utopia...

An anonymous reader writes with word that MIT researchers "created an alternative to Tor, a network messaging system called Vuvuzela that pollutes the network with dummy data so the NSA won't know who...

theodp writes: The WSJ's Yoree Koh reports that computer science has been recognized as important an academic subject as math and English in the new Every Student Succeeds Act, putting it on equal foo...

Fast Company takes a brief look at the Aerodrome, a facility open (though not yet complete) in Boulder City, Nevada, which bills itself as the world's first droneport." From the article:There are othe...

StartsWithABang writes: When you take a look at a spiral galaxy in the night sky, it seems obvious that the stars on the inner parts of the galaxy are going to orbit in less time than the stars in the...

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR about the rapidly shifting roles of cable companies and streaming media providers: While cable providers over the past few decades have grown fat ...

sandbagger writes: The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn't want to call them backdoors, and it doesn't want to dictate what they should look like. Tech companies [...

HughPickens.com writes: Lisa Jenning reports at Restaurant News that Chipotle plans to do DNA-based tests of all fresh produce before it is shipped to restaurants. The Centers for Disease Control and ...

An anonymous reader writes: Most of us are now drowning in digital media, and the flood of information has robbed [us] of the ability to focus and concentrate—or do much of anything, uninterrupt...

An anonymous reader writes: After in September Google discovered SSL certificates issued in its name by Symantec, and after in October the company discovered over 2,500 more certificates issued for no...

schwit1 writes: Federal investigators looking into the San Bernardino massacre deployed a spy plane overhead after the attacks in an apparent attempt to find additional suspects. The Department of Hom...

An anonymous reader writes: A high school senior from New York analyzed data for more than 1,100 stars and pinpointed the frequency of Jupiter analogs (planets with similar mass and orbital period to ...

the_Bionic_lemming writes: Raising over 6.3 million dollars in just one month MST3K fans helped push the new 14 episode series past the Official Kickstarter Veronica Mars total of $5,702,153 by raisin...

jones_supa writes: 195 countries have adopted the first global pact to fight climate change by reducing emissions. Countries will have to publish greenhouse gas reduction targets and revise them upwar...

An anonymous reader writes: As more and more people live closer together in tightly packed subdivisions, the mental stress of noise becomes a serious issue. Noise nuisance complaints are on the rise, ...

An anonymous reader writes with this story from Ars Technica UK: Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects, even if you ...

HughPickens.com writes: CBS reports that hot on the heels of its campaign against ISIS, the shadowy hackers' collective known as Anonymous is going after a new target: Donald Trump. The latest Anonymo...

andyring writes: Lincoln, Neb., in the heart of silicon prairie is getting gigabit fiber to every home and business in the next four years. It's a wet dream for anyone in the tech world. No install fe...

Tekla Perry writes: A year ago Yahoo eliminated its test and quality assurance team, as part of project Warp Drive, its move to continuous delivery of code. The shift wasn't easy, Yahoo tech execs say...

New submitter Farfetched619 writes: In November, Microsoft revealed that they would be reducing free OneDrive storage from 15GB to 5GB for all users, current and new. Microsoft mentioned that some sub...

campuscodi writes: PHP7 and HHVM have been exchanging punches for a while via benchmarks. While the PHP supporters were always saying, just wait until the stable version comes out, well... the stable ...

StartsWithABang writes: If you calculate the forces between two fundamental particles separated by subatomic distances, you find that the strong, electromagnetic or weak nuclear force could all be the...

MojoKid with word of The Stack, a new peripheral product from Lenovo that has a ThinkPad logo emblazoned on each component, writingIn a nutshell, this is Lenovo's take on a line of peripherals that al...

An anonymous reader writes: During the summer of 2014, the movie studio LionsGate suffered a major setback when a high quality leak of the then-unreleased Expendables 3 film appeared online. Fearing a...

New submitter Maury Markowitz writes: Star Raiders was the Atari 8-bit home computer's killer app, inspiring Ted Nelson to claim that "The Atari machine is the most extraordinary computer graphics box...

An anonymous reader writes: A couple months ago, we discussed news that Mozilla was planning to give back to the open source projects they rely on, to the tune of $1 million. Now, Mozilla has announce...

Say hello once again to David Smatlak, who works with Write the Docs -- a group that started some years back as Read the Docs.They have conferences in the U.S.and Europe, and Meetups in over a dozen c...

dcblogs writes: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, has morphed from a vocal supporter of the H-1B program to a leading critic of it. He has done so in...

An anonymous reader writes: Linux Voice has a nice retrospective on the development of the Cray supercomputer. Quoting: "Firstly, within the CPU, there were multiple functional units (execution units ...

An anonymous reader writes: Two of the largest and oldest chemical companies, Dow and DuPont, have planned a merger. Dow's 53,000 employees will join forces with DuPont's 63,000 employees, which will ...

itwbennett writes: As previously reported on Slashdot, browser makers are considering an accelerated retirement of the older and increasingly vulnerable SHA-1 function. But Facebook and CloudFlare are...

New submitter ripvlan writes: CNN reports that a $700 million mine hunting system created by Lockheed Martin doesn't perform as expected. From the article: "The Remote Minehunting System, or RMS, was ...

astroengine writes: Jupiter's Big Red Spot is the largest example of a long-lived storm in the solar system, but now it has some pretty stiff competition in another star system. However, this "exo-sto...

HughPickens.com writes: Josh Constine writes at TechCrunch that a company named Gigster is trying to bring the Uber business model to software development. Simply: a user sends them an idea, Gigster p...

jjslash writes: For a few years now, Intel CPU overclocking has been limited to more expensive Core i5 and Core i7 'K' processors. Skylake launched this year with the rumor of strong non-K processor o...

jones_supa writes: One in three torrent sites is spreading malware, claims a recent joint report (PDF) from Digital Citizens Alliance and RiskIQ, which compiled data from over 800 sites. Most of the t...

An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, Valve introduced a new "trade hold" system that should prevent scammers from stealing items from Steam users' hijacked account, or at least minimize the occur...

TheAlexKnapp writes: In a recent paper (abstract), a team used techniques from computational topology to look at the neural activity in the rat hippocampus as it solved a maze. Mathematician Kevin Knu...

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, the newest and most unknown player in the electric car game, has selected North Las Vegas as the home for their billion dollar factory. The 3 million square...

blottsie writes with this story from The Daily Dot that the President met with encryption advocates on Thursday and is expected to make a statement on his official stance before the end of the year. F...

An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechDirt points out that AT&T's big fiber deployment project isn't yet adding up to much. They posted a press release last week saying how they've launche...

itwbennett writes: In an interview with CSO's Ira Winkler, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas discusses the agency's cybersecurity role, breaking it down into 2 broad categori...

An anonymous reader writes: A now-inactive page at a Microsoft Azure development sites shows a page that reveals the first two extensions for the Microsoft Edge browser to be Pinterest and a port of t...

schwit1 writes with good news for fans of living a long and ultimately unfulfilling life. Happy people live longer, a relationship that's been documented in a variety of research studies. But a new pa...

Lucas123 writes: Samsung has become the latest electronics company to create a division specifically for manufacturing parts for the automotive industry. South Korea's largest smartphone maker said it...

StartsWithABang writes: One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions ...

UnknowingFool writes: Facebook has released specifications on their newest Open Rack-compatible hardware server they named Big Sur. It is for AI computing at a large scale. Using eight 300W GPU slots ...

New submitter insitus writes: On 10 December, Germany's new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 ...

An anonymous reader writes: Career website Glassdoor today released its eighth annual Employees' Choice Awards, a list of the 50 best companies to work for in the coming year. Airbnb was picked as the...

itwbennett writes: At a press event at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, the agency was keen to talk about the capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer. 'Engin...

1sockchuck writes: Data center providers are offering space with less power infrastructure than traditional mission-critical facilities, citing demand from customers looking to forego extra UPS and ge...

schnell writes: The New York Times reports that "the world's most popular song" is at last poised to be released into the public domain. From the story: "In September, a federal judge ruled that Warne...

Mike Godwin worked as the first staff counsel of the EFF and served as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine and was elected to the Open So...

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the ...

Nerval's Lobster writes: Former CEO Steve Ballmer once publicly referred to Linux as a 'cancer.' Not content to just let Ballmer blow up about it, company also spent a good deal of money and legal eff...

Patrick O'Neill writes: Despite requests from police following the deadly Paris attacks, France will not ban the Tor anonymity network or public Wi-Fi, Prime Minister Manual Valls said on Wednesday."A...

An anonymous reader writes: Insurance group Chubb will start offering the UK's first cyber-bullying policy – 'troll insurance' – through which it will accept claims of up to £50,000 ...

Lucas123 writes: A legacy of lackluster electronic security in healthcare and an increase in the amount of online patient data will lead to an increase in the number of consumers who will have their h...

An anonymous reader writes: Chinese web giant Baidu has successfully completed a driverless car test route on a variety of road types near the company's Beijing headquarters. The self-driving BMW 3 Se...

Bruce Perens writes: At the TAPR conference this year, I did a talk on why Open Hardware licenses don't actually work, and how it would actually hurt us if they did. I'm not saying you should stop mak...

An anonymous reader with news of the newest release of open source WordPress, which adds a slew of new features to the blog management tool that will "make your site more connected and responsive." Yo...

theodp writes: Stephen Wolfram received a PhD in particle physics at age 20 (his thesis committee included Richard Feynman). So it's probably not too surprising that Wolfram's new book, An Elementary ...

schwit1 sends word that Apple has reportedly suspended plans to offer a live internet-based television service and will focus on being a platform for media companies to sell directly to customers thro...

SmartAboutThings writes: Windows Live Writer is a blogging tool that Microsoft originally released back in 2006, and it still remains popular today, which has prompted Microsoft to promise that it wil...

Rei writes: After being grounded for six months after a strut failure doomed the launch vehicle, Elon Musk has confirmed rumors that SpaceX plans to try for launch again on December 19th, with a stati...

An anonymous reader writes: Amy Hess, the head of the FBI's science and technology division has admitted that the FBI sometimes exploits zero-day vulnerabilities and uses stingrays to catch bad guys. ...

Lucas123 writes: A legacy of lackluster electronic security in healthcare and an increase in the amount of online patient data will lead to an increase in the number of consumers who will have their h...

linuxscreenshot writes: Just in time for the holidays, it's a new release of elementary OS. Freya 0.3.2 is a minor release, mostly focused around solving some issues folks have had with UEFI & Sec...

sciencehabit writes: Our home galaxy isn't as hospitable to life as you might think. Cosmic radiation, supernova explosions, and collisions with small galaxies make much of the Milky Way too hellish f...

coondoggie writes: The former U.S. Department of State man accused of hacking into hundreds of victims' e-mail and social media accounts, stealing thousands of sexually explicit photographs, and threa...

mrspoonsi sends word that the U.S. government wants to toughen crash tests to measure pedestrian impact and evaluate driver assisting technology. USA Today reports: "U.S. regulators are overhauling th...

jones_supa writes: It turns out that OEM helper software is still often quite fragile and can expose systems wide open to attack. Currently Lenovo, Dell and Toshiba all have unpatched vulnerabilities ...

astroengine writes: The Japanese space agency JAXA has released a confirmation that their Venus mission Akatsuki did indeed enter orbit at Venus on Dec. 7 (JST) — releasing unprocessed images of...

szczys writes: In 2003 AMD was on top of the world. Now they're not, but they're also still in business. AMD continues to produce inexpensive, well-engineered semiconductors. The fall over the last 10...

schwit1 writes with news that using gene editing technology researchers have bred pigs that do not produce a protein necessary for the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) virus to spr...

An anonymous reader writes: Curious about the performance of a Raspberry Pi Zero, Phoronix has published a number of Raspberry Pi 2 + Pi Zero performance benchmarks with paired power consumption data....

StartsWithABang writes: If you want to explore the Universe, you need a telescope with good light gathering power, a high-quality camera to make the most out of each photon, and a superior observing l...

Say hello to David Smatlak, who works with Write the Docs -- a group that started some years back as Read the Docs.They have conferences in the U.S.and Europe, and Meetups in over a dozen cities. It's...

An anonymous reader writes: South Korean electronics giant Samsung has announced a new focus on developing driverless cars and infotainment systems in its attempt to compete with domestic rival LG in ...

An anonymous reader writes: For this December Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released twelve security bulletins, eight of which have been rated critical. Those refer to the cumulative security updates f...

Patrick O'Neill writes: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption to allow American law enforcement to read protected communications w...

itwbennett writes: In May 2013, SAP launched its Autism at Work program, with the goal of recruiting and hiring 'hundreds of people' with autism worldwide. Now the company is expanding the program, an...

An anonymous reader writes: Back in November, shortly after the Volkswagen emissions scandal broke, the company voluntarily disclosed the results of a quick internal probe which found that 800,000 mor...

Blacklaw writes: The UK's National Crime Agency, formerly known as the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, has published a list of warning signs that supposedly indicate a child may be heading toward ...

An anonymous reader writes: Kim Stanley Robinson's popular trilogy Red/Green/Blue Mars is going to see its first book turn into a TV series produced by Spike TV and is slated for release in 2017. The ...

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo has confirmed reports from last week by saying it plans to spin off all of its assets aside from its $31 billion stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. "In the ...

wbr1 writes: As reported yesterday, Wired and Gizmodo think Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Cu...

Eloking sends a report on new research from MIT, where scientists have developed a promising technique to shrink cancerous tumors. By "twisting RNA strands into a triple helix and embedding them in a ...

An anonymous reader writes: ISC-CERT is warning of a critical vulnerability (score 9.8 out of 10) in Internet-enabled XZERES 442SR wind turbines. According to CERT, the Web administration portal of th...

An anonymous reader writes: Google announced that they have invited Chicago and Los Angeles to investigate whether the company's Fiber internet service would work there. If it works out, they would be...

schwit1 sends word that a new study published in PLOS Medicine has examined how lifestyle risk factors can affect mortality rates, both alone and in combination with each other. Having a single major ...

snydeq writes: Misconceptions and flawed implementations may have many organizations missing the true upsides of devops, writes Adam Bertram in his article on devops practices gone wrong. "Saying that...

New submitter Will Mason writes: The HTC Vive VR headset, originally planned to launch by the end of this year, has been pushed back until April 2016. HTC plans to unveil a second developer kit for th...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla announced today at its developer event in Orlando that the company is ending its smartphone experiment. Mozilla will stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartpho...

An anonymous reader writes: In a lengthy exposé, Wired lays out its case that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright. As evidence, Wired cites leaked co...

An anonymous reader writes: Chipmaker Qualcomm is on the receiving end of an antitrust investigation in Europe, where officials say the company has abused its market dominance by offering financial in...

An anonymous reader writes: Credit card numbers are constantly being stolen, but the people who take them don't usually use them. Instead, they sell them to others who will. Many cards are traded at o...

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave's 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, qu...

An anonymous reader writes: In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has proposed the creation of 'tools' to stop or limit the spread of messages and content ...

Josiah Zayner, a research fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, is running an Indiegogo campaign to make DIY gene editing kits that use the CRISPR technique to modify DNA. The campaign has already exce...

StewBeans writes: Typically it's developers — not senior IT executives — who have been pushing their IT departments to adopt open source software, but the tide is beginning to turn. The We...

sarahnaomi writes with this excerpt from Motherboard: Brace yourself, because your favorite social media platform might get turned on its head: Twitter is experimenting with a new way of sorting your ...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched an iOS content blocker called Focus by Firefox. It's a "content blocker" because although Focus is capable of blocking some ads, this latest project ...

An anonymous reader writes: For the past 12 years, NetHack 3.4.3 has been the most recent version of the classic roguelike dungeon exploration game. On 7 December 2015, the official NetHack DevTeam an...

An anonymous reader writes: Transport and energy companies will have to ensure that the digital infrastructure that they use to deliver essential services, such as traffic control or electricity grid ...

HughPickens.com writes: Mike McPhate reports in the NY Times that two home shopping industry veterans, Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, are set to premier GunTV, a new 24-Hour shopping channel for g...

MojoKid writes: AMD's Radeon Technologies Group has announced a couple of new features for Radeon graphics support in 2016. FreeSync over HDMI support will be coming to all Radeons that currently supp...

itwbennett writes: Kazakhstan passed a law that would require citizens to install a certificate on their personal computers and mobile devices that would allow the government to snoop and capture web ...

szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actu...

An anonymous reader writes: Can Twitter Spot Terrorists and Put Them In Jail? Hany Farid, the chairman of the Computer Science department at Dartmouth University, thinks so. He told the New York Times...

Patrick O'Neill writes: Hours after Donald Trump suggested the U.S. ban Muslims from entering the United States, the leading Republican presidential candidate said America should also consider "closin...

HughPickens.com writes: Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in the NY Times about B-52's and why the Air Force's largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until...

An anonymous reader writes: Researches have used recurrent neural network architecture to develop an audio-interpretation system that can understand how wet a road is, using techniques more commonly e...

sciencehabit writes with news that Japan plans on killing 333 minke whales this year as part of their whale research program in the Antarctic Ocean. "We did our best to try to meet the criteria establ...

An anonymous reader writes: Streaming entertainment is now the dominant form of broadband usage in North America. A new report from Sandvine says streaming accounts for roughly 70% of downstream traff...

schwit1 writes: In discovering a new solid state for carbon scientists have also discovered that it is a relatively inexpensive way to produce diamonds. The researchers have found that, depending on t...

Nerval's Lobster writes: The idea with Clang, a compiler front-end for C, C++, Objective-C++, and Objective-C, and LLVM (a compiler infrastructure) is that you can mix the compiler front-end with a ta...

Trachman writes: This is a fascinating article about hit and run suspect arrested after her own car reported the crash to authorities. The crash system activates when sensors on the car detect a sudde...

szczys writes: For hardware developers, electronic surplus stores feel like being a kid in a candy shop. It's hard to walk down an aisle packed floor to ceiling with bins of seemingly-random component...

An anonymous reader writes: The first Zumwalt-class destroyer, the USS Zumwalt, the largest ever built for the U.S. Navy headed out to sea today. Departing from shipbuilder Bath Iron Works, the ship l...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has shut down Creative Labs and has pulled several apps developed there, namely Slingshot, Riff, and Rooms, from the app store. Creative labs was launched two year...

itwbennett writes: According to a new report by Trend Micro, the North American cyber criminal underground has " [essentially] become a gun show for everyone as long as they can participate and are wi...

chicksdaddy writes: Just a month after an FBI official admitted that his agency sometimes advised companies stricken with ransomware to pay the ransom, two U.S. Senators are requesting information abo...

MarkWhittington writes: On May 17, 2010, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency Venus Climate Orbiter probe or as it is now called Akatsuki lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center. It was supp...

An anonymous reader writes: NASA has issued a warning to private space companies: the agency is moving on from its focus on low-Earth orbit. William Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight, said, "We...

An anonymous reader writes with this story about how the Apple vs. Samsung battle brought to light the inner workings of Apple product development. BGR reports: "Following a contentious patent battle ...

Deathspawner writes: There's never a lack of stuff to be impressed by in Minecraft, but rarely does that impressive stuff involve a corporation. Recently, Verizon teamed up with some prolific Minecraf...

LichtSpektren writes: After previously apologizing on October 16th for forcing Windows 10 on some users of Windows 7 and 8.1 via the Windows Update mechanism, Microsoft disabled the default update opt...

An anonymous reader writes: Programmer Dave Cheney raised an interesting question today: How will you be programming in a decade? If you look back to a decade ago, you can see some huge shifts in the ...

An anonymous reader writes: The Chinese capital of Beijing has issued a "red alert" for air quality within the city, the first time the city has reached the level of caution where it's deemed "unhealt...

AmiMoJo writes: A music fan in Melbourne managed to sneak his way backstage at a gig this week by editing a band's Wikipedia page on his phone. David Spargo was attending a show by Australian duo Peki...

An anonymous reader writes: Nuclear weapons specialists are limited in their research today. Prudence and international treaties prevent them from setting off any nuclear weapons, so they have to run ...

An anonymous reader writes: Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Paris released a draft of an agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. No part of the draft has been finalized as many points rem...

Several readers sent word that French newspaper Le Monde got its hands on documents showing the French government is debating two new pieces of legislation that are unfriendly to internet users. The f...

An anonymous reader writes: According to reports TAG Heuer is struggling to keep up with the high demand for its $1,500 TAG Heuer Connected Android Wear-powered smartwatch. Since its launch in Novembe...

walterbyrd writes: Earlier this year, Jide released a 2-in-1 tablet called the Remix Ultra, which shipped with a custom version of Android called Remix OS. The software features a taskbar, a desktop, ...

theodp writes: Google Santa Tracker is back, notes the Official Google Blog, and kids can brush up on their computer skills there with new coding games throughout the month. If they want to explore mo...

An anonymous reader writes: An Atlas V rocket carrying a Cygnus cargo spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station has lifted off from Cape Canaveral. This is the first flight of the Cygnus ...

HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports that Hillary Clinton spoke at the Brookings Institution's annual Saban Forum on Sunday and said that the Islamic State had become "the most effective recruiter ...

An anonymous reader writes: Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of donating $45 billion of Facebook stock garnered a lot of praise a fair bit of criticism. The Facebook CEO answered some of the apprehensio...

MojoKid writes: There's little question that VR and AR technologies have the potential to make a major impact across a seemingly endless number of applications and industries. Google has teamed up wit...

itwbennett writes: A pair of companion bills now pending in the House and Senate would define the use of bots to buy tickets as an 'unfair and deceptive practice' under the Federal Trade Commission (F...

Eloking writes: Apple's iPad tablet ushered in the modern tablet era when it was introduced in 2010, and it's dominated tablet sales ever since. iPad sales have stagnated recently, but nevertheless Ap...

merbs writes: Anote Tong, the president of low-lying Kiribati, has spent nearly a decade trying to save his people from rising sea levels. There's a good chance he will not succeed. This is how he lea...

An anonymous reader writes: Instead of creating their own exploits, some lazy Chinese hackers took the Root Assistant Android rooting toolkit and remodeled it into a trojan, which they packed inside c...

transporter_ii writes: Scientists from University College London seem to have come up with a two-pronged treatment regiment that they believe would help patients suffering from chronic pain. And in a ...

An anonymous reader writes: Google has published a patent for a needle-free blood draw technology which could be incorporated into a wrist wearable or hand-held device. The patent filing explained tha...

schwit1 writes: The first two satellites in the first private weather satellite constellation will be launched on India's PSLV rocket. This project is a win-win for aerospace. Not only will this weath...

JoeyRox writes: The recent terror attack in California reflects "an evolution of the terrorist threat that Mr. Obama and federal officials have long dreaded: homegrown, self-radicalized individuals op...

An anonymous reader writes: In the 1950s, Panama Disease wiped out the dominant type of banana that was imported worldwide. Banana-growers had to switch to a different strain, the Cavendish banana, at...

GillBates0 sent word that New Delhi, the capital of India, is growing increasingly bold with its attempts to fight air quality problems around the city. The metro area is home to over 21 million peopl...

itwbennett writes: The US Federal Trade Commission has appointed Lorrie Faith Cranor as Chief Technologist. Cranor is the director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory and a m...

An anonymous reader writes: Back in September, Porsche unveiled a prototype for an electric vehicle. They were trying to gauge interest and figure out if they have the technical know-how to build one....

rbrandis writes: Windows Server 2012 has two main editions, Standard and Datacenter. They had identical features, and differed only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they su...

An anonymous reader writes: Automated license plate readers have become a serious point of contention between law enforcement and privacy-minded citizens. But the advance of technology might make it a...

An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers discovered a nest of monstrous baby galaxies 11.5 billion light-years away using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The young galaxies see...

An anonymous reader writes: SF author Charlie Stross has put together a short list of what he considers to be shibboleths for implausible science fiction. (If you're unfamiliar with the term, read the...

Lasrick writes: Two articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists analyze the IAEA's December 2nd report (PDF) on the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear program. Ariane Tabatabai goes ...

An anonymous reader writes: An opinion piece at The Conversation questions the common belief that autonomous vehicles will easily solve a host of problems with road-based travel, including safety and ...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft announced today that it will soon open source the "Chakra" JavaScript engine used inside its Edge browser and Internet Explorer. The company plans to publish the ...

Zothecula writes: A team of researchers from four institutions located in Romania and St. Kitts have worked together to determine whether graphene could be used to create more durable dental materials...

prisoninmate sends news that Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" has been officially released. Following a few technical problems with their website, the Mint developers posted release announcements for both the C...

jones_supa writes: Nokia announced on Friday that it has completed the sale of its HERE digital mapping and location services business to a group of German car manufacturers made up of Audi, BMW and D...

ktetch-pirate writes: Copyright troll firm Prenda may be gone, but one of its principals — Paul Hansmeier — is starting to feel Karma's burn. In a bankruptcy hearing on the 3rd, Judge Sanb...

MojoKid writes: If you've ever been late on paying a bill, it's unlikely that you ever thought that you were running the risk of being publicly shamed about your shortcomings. However, for a few unfor...

itwbennett writes: The OpenSSL Software Foundation has released new patches for the popular open-source cryptographic library, but for two of its older branches, OpenSSL 1.0.0t and 0.9.8zh, they will ...

StartsWithABang writes: After a 9 year journey to Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto this past July, taking so much data that it will take a full 16 months to sen...

reifman writes: On June 3rd, I had brain surgery to treat a benign tumor called a meningioma. I knew ahead of time that the surgeon wouldn't be able to remove the entire tumor – its geography ex...

An anonymous reader writes: A "useful and usable distribution of Perl 6" was released Saturday, a new beta version of the Rakudo compiler to support the coming production release this Christmas. And t...

An anonymous reader writes: It's hard to exist in the tech world today without hearing the constant refrain about learning to code: "it's easy, we desperately need programmers, and everyone should lea...

An anonymous reader writes: For some time, Mozilla has been experimenting with advertisements in the "suggested tiles" on new Firefox tabs. They received a lot of criticism from the community for it, ...

An anonymous reader writes: DragonFlyBSD 4.4 is now available for download (x86_64 ISO) and is a feature release that presents many improvements and new features. DragonFlyBSD now uses the Gold Linker...

HughPickens.com writes: 75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't ope...

szczys writes: Tired of his trains being constantly late, Eric Evenchick headed to the Via Rail (Canada's communter train service) website to find which trains had a better on-time rate. Unfortunately...

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a ruling in favor of former NYPD officer Gilberto Valle — the so-called "cannibal cop." In 2012, Valle was fired and ...

MojoKid writes: It's been discovered that some third-party heat sinks can physically damage Intel's new Skylake CPUs, along with the pins in the accompanying motherboard socket. The problem has prompt...

schwit1 writes: Jim Sensenbrenner, former chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, was one of the driving forces behind the Patriot Act. He introduced the legislation a month and a half after t...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday that it aided law enforcement agencies in several regions to disrupt a 4-year-old botnet called Dorkbot. The botnet aims to steal log...

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have explored the mysteries of aging in humans for hundreds of years, but now they're beginning to turn their attention to our pets. Why do cats live longer than dogs? ...

pbahra writes: In a race that fuses video-game technology and real world driving skill, two professional drivers, on two separate but identical tracks, have raced against each other — effectivel...

itwbennett writes: Adding fuel to the growing concern over how manufacturers of devices such as routers and smart TVs deal with security vulnerabilities that emerge in their products, Trend Micro foun...

An anonymous reader writes: Veracode has put together a report after static analysis of over 200,000 apps, and its results show that Classic ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP generated the most security bugs i...

NormalVisual writes: After decades of mystery, the lunar impact site for the Apollo 16 S-IVB third stage has finally been found. These boosters were directed to impact on the Moon beginning with Apoll...

sciencehabit writes in with bad news for Holographic Universe fans. From Sciencemag: "It's a classic underdog story: Working in a disused tunnel with a couple of lasers and a few mirrors, a plucky ban...

itwbennett writes: There are plenty of things wrong with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), writes Ken Terry. Among them: 'The records are hard to read because they're full of irrelevant boilerplates.....

An anonymous reader writes: After years of legal wrangling over smartphone patents, Apple and Samsung appear to have reached an agreement. The two companies released a joint statement (PDF) saying Sam...

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone should keep two bank accounts so they can still access their money if one bank is hit by a cyber attack, a former Bank of England adviser has warned. "I'd certainl...

HughPickens.com writes: Jesse Eisinger writes in the NYT that if you heard that Mark Zuckerberg donated $45 billion to charity, you are wrong. Here's what really happened: Zuckerberg did not set up a ...

UnknowingFool writes: Former CEO Steve Ballmer had some strong opinions about the direction of Microsoft's mobile strategy. As reported last month, Microsoft's Project Astoria has not been received we...

McGruber writes: On November 17, two Georgia women filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp had released the Social Security numbers, birthdates, Drivers Licens...

MarkWhittington writes: With the Paris Climate Conference apparently ending in failure and experts such as Matt Ridley suggesting that, in any case, global warming is not a cause for immediate concern...

1sockchuck writes: This week's Slashdot poll shows a strong preference for renewable energy to power data centers, with solar energy leading the pack. But until recently, only a few colocation provide...

MojoKid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in education ma...

Donald Robertson, is the Free Software Foundation (FSF) copyright administrator (and wearer of several other hats as well), so he's the FSF person to turn to when you want to discuss trade agreements,...

New submitter ily2013 writes: My family have invented a product that will prevent electrical related fires for homes and businesses. A patent has been filed and approved worldwide, which includes the ...

Peter Eckersley writes: As of today, Let's Encrypt is in Public Beta. If you're comfortable running beta software that may have a few bugs and rough edges, you can use it to instantly obtain and insta...

itwbennett writes: At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers heard arguments over the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015. The proposed legislation would allow companies to pursue t...

schwit1 writes: An expedition to the Indian Ocean is about to begin an effort to drill a core down through the Earth's crust and into its mantle. Geologists have been trying to drill through the conta...

An anonymous reader writes: After selling off its phone business to Microsoft in 2013, Nokia began an internal reboot which would see the company focusing on the upcoming virtual reality market. The c...

Nerval's Lobster writes: PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB are the three "main" open-source relational databases available today (there are four if you count FireBird, but for brevity we're excluding it)...

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo have announced a new version of its almost-mothballed Messenger app, which, in addition to new integration with Flickr and Tumblr images, now permits users to 'unsend...

puddingebola writes: National Trading Standards and trading standards services in Scotland have released figures that 15,000 of 17,000 hoverboards have been seized at ports of entry in the UK because ...

jcr writes with the news that Apple's Swift has gone open source: From Apple's press release: "We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming lang...

StartsWithABang writes: By surveying an area of the sky containing over 150,000 stars visible to it, the Kepler satellite monitored each one over a multi-year period looking for periodic changes in br...

whoever57 writes: If you ever thought that your cellphone does not make calls as well as the cellphone you had 10 years ago, you may be right. The UK's Ofcom (roughly equivalent to the FCC) tested cel...

Patrick O'Neill writes: Just over week after a hacker breached a United Arab Emirates Bank, demanding a $3 million ransom to stop tweeting customers' information, he appears to have dumped tens of tho...

szczys writes: Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don't come to fruition. The cause of this ...

Fudge Factor 3000 writes: The Hawaiian Supreme Court has pulled a construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope project. A vocal minority of Hawaiians has vehemently protested the construction of...

trbdavies writes: Reporting from the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene-editing summit in D.C., the Washington Post quotes Harvard genetics professor George Church...

sciencehabit writes: Is the pressure to publish tempting scientists to improperly tweak their findings in order to create more cohesive stories? If researchers could report just the one finding they f...

Zothecula writes: According to a recently-granted patent, Airbus is exploring the potential of creating a new breed of versatile, modular aircraft that would see detachable passenger cabins slot into ...

itwbennett writes: One holds your files hostage, the other overcharges to fix nonexistent computer problems. And now they may be working together. On one scammy tech support site seen by Symantec, an ...

ranton writes: Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, made news last April when he raised all employee salaries to at least $70,000. He claimed his motive was based on research that shows increased wages...

An anonymous reader writes: After a long wait web developers can finally start migrating their code to PHP 7. The new version comes with minimal syntax modifications, and is more focused on improving ...

v3rgEz writes: Federal civil rights officials at the Department of Justice are launching an effort to combat widespread constitutional abuses in U.S. courts in the hope of ending budget-driven policie...

New submitter wb8nbs writes: Florida patent troll Atlas LLC has filed a suit against the municipality of Naperville, Illinois (paywalled). Atlas claims infringement of their patent on wireless communi...

sciencehabit writes with news that the House voted 242-180 to repeal the EPA's Clean Power Plan, and 235-188 to block EPA rules governing emissions from new power plants. Science reports: "Congress ha...

An anonymous reader writes: Authorities say 14 people were killed and 14 others were injured in a mass shooting in San Bernardino today. Police have mounted an intense manhunt for the gunmen who fired...

An anonymous reader writes: After a long wait web developers can finally start migrating their code to PHP 7. The new version comes with minimal syntax modifications, and is more focused on improving ...

We all know (or know about) Richard M. Stallmann, founder of and vociferous spokesman for the Free Software Foundation. But the organization is far from a one-man band, and Donald Robertson, their cop...

An anonymous reader writes: A Microsoft lawyer has put forward the company's conviction that the Defend Trade Secrets Act 2015, currently being debated at the United States Senate Judiciary Committee,...

McGruber writes: In Albany, NY, Bruce Roter has secured approval to build the Museum of Political Corruption, dedicated to the state's long history of scandal. In the last decade alone, more than 30 s...

LichtSpektren writes: Google Chrome version 47 is now available for download. This release features 41 security fixes, very tiny UI changes (except for the built-in PDF viewer, which was redone entire...

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a large number of zero-day flaws in 8 routers/modems from 4 manufacturers (ZTE, Huawei, Gemtek, Quanta) that would allow attackers to build a hu...

An anonymous reader writes: This article criticizes the Raspberry PI Foundation's new computer the Zero. It points out that the Foundation says the purpose of the new Pi is to reach students but with ...

An anonymous reader sends news that a UK woman named Debra Fry has begun a campaign to raise awareness for "electro-hypersensitivity" (EHS) after the suicide of her daughter, Jenny, earlier this year....

An anonymous reader writes: Wikipedia has developed a new artificial intelligence system aimed at improving the quality of its entries and detecting both mistakes and damaging edits made to its articl...

Deathspawner writes: Western Digital today announced a new, helium-filled enterprise HDD that allows for 10TB capacities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingl...

itwbennett writes: In a complaint (PDF) filed Tuesday with the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claims that "despite publicly promising not to, Google mines students'...

New submitter ElectronF sends news that officials within the Australian government are blaming China for an attack on computer systems at the Bureau of Meteorology. "The bureau owns one of Australia's...

An anonymous reader writes: When Elon Musk unveiled his idea for the"Hyperloop" transportation system based on capsules zipping through depressurized tubes, much was made about the enormous technical ...

Lucas123 writes: Hard disk drive per-gigabyte pricing has remained relatively stagnant over the past three years, and prices are expected to be completely flat over at least the next two, allowing SSD...

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Yahoo!'s board of directors is considering the sale of their internet business in a series of meetings s...

Earthquake Retrofit writes: The Washington Post has a story about Gordon Pennycook, a doctorate student at the University of Waterloo who studies why some people are more easily duped than others. "Wh...

An anonymous reader writes: Today the robotics industry is a multi-billion dollar business — but it all started with Joe Engelberger and Georges Devol, who formed Unimation in 1956, the world's ...

jones_supa writes: Canonical has announced that a new kernel update is now live in the default software repositories for the Ubuntu 14.04 operating system. According to the security notice, two Linux ...

An anonymous reader writes: In October, we discussed the troubling revelation that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had its own stingray devices, which are commonly used by law enforcement to interce...

An anonymous reader writes: The Facebook stock currently held by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan is worth roughly $45 billion. Today, the couple posted a letter addressed to their newborn ...

An anonymous reader writes: Hackers have targeted three Greek banks for a third time in five days, demanding a ransom from each lender of 20,000 bitcoin (€7m), according to Greek police and the c...

An anonymous reader writes: The city of Los Angeles is considering a new plan to fight prostitution: sending letters to men who solicit prostitutes in the hopes that the letters are seen by family mem...

itwbennett writes: Buyer beware. If it's security you're looking for, the #3 Master Lock might not be for you. In a video, locksport enthusiast Bosnian Bill demonstrates how to open a new #3 Master Lo...

This conversation was generated by a post Eric S. Raymond published on his "Armed and Dangerous" blog that said, "...if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be a...

hcs_$reboot writes: The investigation took a year, but we finally know why Air Asia Flight QZ8501, en route to Singapore from the Indonesian city of Surabaya on December 28 last year, crashed into the...

An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, has adapted a gaming system to help radiographers improve the quality of X-rays. The technology...

theodp writes: The Microsoft-sponsored PBS 'reality' show Code Trip, in which Roadtrip Nation and Microsoft YouthSpark partnered to send three students across the U.S. on a "transformative journey int...

sciencehabit writes: In the mid-19th century, researchers claimed they could tell the sex of an individual just by looking at their disembodied brain. But a new study (abstract) finds that human brain...

An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird ...

An anonymous reader sends word that a three-day summit has begun in Washington to discuss the future of genetic engineering. It has a particular focus on the CRISPR technique, which has made gene edit...

itwbennett writes: Researchers at FireEye have disclosed an ongoing Phishing campaign targeting pro-democracy media organizations in Hong Kong that's using Dropbox storage services as a command and co...

enFi writes: All dice are slightly unfair; automating 3k rolls x 29 dice allows detailed exploration. For example: GameScience claims their d20s are fairest, and actually has the fairest die in the st...

tsu doh nimh writes: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been quietly launching stealthy cyber attacks against a range of private U.S. companies -- mostly banks and energy firms. These ...

An anonymous reader writes with this lead from Help Net Security's story on a topic we've touched on here many times: the broad powers arrogated by the Federal government in the form of National Secur...

An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to 'Adobe Animate CC', killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further an...

An anonymous reader writes: Enlightenment DR 0.20 has been released. The most significant change is full Wayland support where E20 can act as its own Wayland compositor and the whole shebang. Enlighte...

prisoninmate writes: Google announces that its Google Chrome web browser will no longer be available for 32-bit hardware platforms. Additionally, Google Chrome will no longer be supported on the Ubunt...

HughPickens.com writes: Located between Hawaii and Australia, the Marshall Islands are made up of 29 atolls and five islands with a population of about 70,000, all of whom live about six feet above se...

An anonymous reader writes: Joel Hodgson has announced that actor and comedian Patton Oswalt will join the MST3K cast as "TV's Son of TV's Frank". "I first became aware of Patton around fourteen years...

An anonymous reader sends word that Italy will spend 150 million Euros on reforming information and security services. Part of this reform will be monitoring communication among users of the "chat" fe...

yoink! writes: According to an article in The Register, corporations big and small are coming under legal fire from CryptoPeak. The Company holds U.S. Patent 6,202,150, which describes "auto-escrowabl...

snydeq writes: IT pros lend firsthand advice on the challenges of going solo in Bob Violino's report on the hidden costs of going freelance in IT. 'The life of an independent IT contractor sounds attr...

MojoKid writes: Toward the beginning of the year, it was revealed that Microsoft was going to "unlock" the seventh core on the Xbox One's processor, enabling developers to eke just a bit more performa...

MarkWhittington writes: Russia has made no secret of its desire to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface sometime in the late 2020s. As the United States, at least for the current administration, has d...

An anonymous reader writes: British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming has spotted what appears to be a 'code-protest' in the next generation of the hypertext protocol. Each new connection forg...

An anonymous reader writes: The VTech hack just got a little worse. Reports say that in addition to the 4.8 million records with parents' names, home addresses, passwords and the identities of 227k ki...

An anonymous reader writes: AT&T customers trying to hold on to their old unlimited-data plans will have to pay a little more starting in February. AT&T's legacy plans for unlimited data will ...

coondoggie writes: "Cyber Monday is generally thought to be the start of the online holiday shopping season. We would like to encourage shoppers who are already online in search of bargains to conside...

Zothecula sends word that French team has developed a battery using sodium ions in the usual "18650" format. Gizmag reports: "A team of researchers in France has taken a major step towards powering ou...

szczys writes: Feynman predicted that we would some day "swallow the doctor" and to some extent that is already happening. There are cameras in pill-form that the patient swallows to monitor the diges...

EmagGeek writes A recent lawsuit against Obama alleges he has a legal duty to act against climate change, and young climate activists, including 15-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh, are taking him to tas...

An anonymous reader writes: In the never-ending series of hackable, improperly protected IoT devices, today we hear about an IoT smart home alarm system that works over IP. Made by RSI Videofied, the ...

A few weeks ago you had a chance to ask author, entrepreneur, and software developer Jeff Atwood about founding Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, as well as his new endeavor, the Discours...

benrothke writes: Large enterprises have numerous information security challenges. Aside from the external threats; there's the onslaught of security data from disparate systems, platforms and applica...

An anonymous reader writes: A campaign taking shape in Brazil seeks to fight online harassment in an unusual way: by posting the abusive comments on real billboards. "The group collects comments from ...

An anonymous reader sends the story of another prison where inmates are learning the basics of programming, despite having no access to the vast educational resources on the internet. Instructors from...

An anonymous reader writes: Outside of the limelight of Intel's Core "Skylake" processors is the cheapest model, a $60 Intel Pentium G4400 dual-core processor that runs at 3.3Gz and has built-in HD Gr...

dkatana writes: In a panel on 'Privacy in the Smart City' during this month's Smart City World Congress, Dr. Carmela Troncoso, a researcher from Spain, argued that data anonymization itself is almost ...

AmiMoJo writes: Food company Nestle has started a petition to get a KitKat emoji into the Unicode standard. They aren't alone, Taco Bell wants a taco emoji added, and Durex suggested adding a condom. ...

An anonymous reader writes: BlackBerry has announced that it will pull its operations in Pakistan from today, quoting a recent government notice which read that the company would not be permitted to c...

An anonymous reader writes: An article at The Guardian takes a look at the way in which we hold jobs as technology as changes. Its central thesis is this: "My father had one job in his life, I've had ...

New submitter the_Bionic_lemming writes: Recently Joel Hodgson, the creator of Mystery Science 3000 -- which had a successful run of over 197 shows -- has after 15 years launched a kickstarter to rela...

Taco Cowboy writes with news that Penn State researchers have discovered a way to produce ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that could be ideal for a space elevator. According to the report at Space.com,...

It's not just CO2 levels that Volkswagen manipulated; according to a wire story, Volkswagen officials knew at least a year ago that some of the company's officially-reported fuel-efficiency claims wer...

An anonymous reader writes: Various sources report Israel's Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely meeting with representatives of Google and YouTube to discuss censoring Palestinian video...

The Seattle Times reports on a development in Seattle that might have implications for other cities with contentious relationships with transportation coordinating services like Uber. Seattle councilm...