Articles by Slashdot from January 2016

Lauren Weinstein writes: The conclusion appears inescapable. Twitter apparently has voluntarily chosen to 'look the other way' while Donald Trump spews forth a trolling stream of hate and other abuses...

frank249 writes: Fox News is reporting that Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to unveil plans for the spacecraft that would send humans to Mars within a decade. Speaking at an event in Hong Kong...

Patrick O'Neill writes: A common configuration mistake in Apache, the most popular Web server software in the world, can allow anyone to look behind the curtains on a hidden server to see everything f...

sfcrazy writes: [Kubuntu founder Jonathan Riddell] is going to announce a new project at FOSDEM that brings the KDE experience to users. There is Fedora that offers latest from Gnome, but there is no ...

broswell writes: For years we used Postini for spam filtering. Google bought Postini in 2007, operated it for 5 years and then began shutting it down. Then we moved to MX Logic. McAfee bought MX Logic...

An anonymous reader writes: WhatsApp 3.0 will come with two privacy-related changes. The first is in the Security section and is in the form of a new setting called "Show security indicators." Turning...

szczys writes: VGA is going away. It has been for a long time but the final nails in the coffin are being driven home this year. It was the first standard for video, and is by far the longest-lived po...

Etherwalk writes: President Obama plans to announce a four billion dollar computer science initiative for K-12 schools, where fewer than 15 percent of American high schools offer Advanced Placement (i...

itwbennett writes: An increasing number of iOS application developers use a technique that allows them to remotely modify the code in their apps without going through Apple's normal review process, po...

New submitter ffkom writes: European police organization Europol was probably jealous of the fame and popularity of the FBI's Most Wanted site, so they finally launched their own, European version. An...

An anonymous reader writes: Just days before candidates begin primary season with caucuses in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Obama administration confirmed for the first time that Hillary Clinton's email...

The New York Times reports that Facebook's newly staked-out role as a site to facilitate local, person-to-person sales (ala Craigslist) has a new wrinkle: the site has announced a site-wide policy res...

merbs writes: Imagine a stretch of open ocean, populated by a swath of wind turbines with skyscraper-sized blades, whipping into the gusts like enormous palm trees. The vision is partly terrifying, pa...

An anonymous reader writes: Printer and copier maker Xerox has announced its plans to split into two separate publicly traded companies, giving billionaire Carl Icahn three board seats in the settleme...

New submitter Mdann52 writes: Following an earlier vote of no confidence, it was announced that the recent appointee, Arnnon Geshuri, had stepped down from the board. This was following community crit...

An anonymous reader writes: Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help co...

An anonymous reader writes: Permanent changes are planned for future Google Chrome releases, which will add a big shiny red cross in the URL bar if the website you're accessing is not using HTTPS. Goo...

An anonymous reader writes: The debate over whether or not Binge On violates Net Neutrality has been raging ever since the service was announced in November. The latest party to weigh in is Barbara va...

szczys writes: Reputations are earned. When a small group of hackers who were part of Anonymous learned they were being targeted for doxing (having their identities exposed) they went after the would-...

An anonymous reader writes: Last Shmoocon, famous reverse engineer Travis Goodspeed presented his jailbreak of the Chinese MD380 digital handheld radio. The hack has since been published at GitHub wit...

sciencehabit writes: Tracking and recording the motion of the sun, the moon, and the planets as they paraded across the desert sky, ancient Babylonian astronomers used simple arithmetic to predict the...

New submitter Kevin by the Beach writes: If you haven't noticed... If you try to play iTunes radio on your devices it is now paywalled (you can get a free three month trial at apple.com/music). The on...

Wycliffe writes: There are plenty of high end 3d printers which allow high precision and large prints. There are also plenty of economical 3d printers but most of them don't have high enough precision...

An anonymous reader writes: In a filing submitted to the FCC, Google has stated that while concerns for health and environmental risks posed by Project Loon testing were 'genuinely held,' 'there is no...

Ammalgam writes: Tom Warren at the Verge today gave voice to what a lot of other technology analysts and today definitively declared that Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is dead. This largely based...

Dangerous_Minds writes: The Canadian government isn't just siding with the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Justin Trudeau is also actively lobbying Europe to try and pass the Comprehens...

itwbennett writes: In a blog post yesterday, Facebook announced it is shutting down the Parse developer platform as of Jan. 28, 2017, giving developers a year to move off its hosted services. This com...

A_Mythago writes: The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) has finalized version 2.0, which has several improvements and updates to continue to meet their mission of preserving privacy, anonymity and...

Qbertino writes: As Spiegel.de reports (German link) inventor Artur Fischer has died at the age of 96. Artur Fischer is a classic example of the innovator and businessman of post-war Germany — h...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has announced that it would roll out a new live video tool called Live, available immediately for US iPhone users, and expanding to the rest of the world and Andro...

kodiaktau writes with a link to today's announcement that DHI Group, Inc. (which you might know better as Dice, the company that bought Slashdot and sister site SourceForge in 2012) today announced th...

SpaceX successfully tested out the parachute system it plans to use to land its Crew Dragon spaceship safely back on Earth today. By using a "mass simulator," SpaceX was able to replicate the weight a...

An anonymous reader writes: A new study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology and The University of Texas at Austin sheds more light ...

hypnosec writes: In what has been claimed to be the first use of gene editing technique CRISPR for replacement of a defective gene associated with a sensory disease, researchers have repaired a geneti...

blottsie writes: Despite widespread reports to the contrary, an app created for Islamic State militants to send private encrypted messages does not exist, a week-long Daily Dot investigation found. Al...

reifman writes: As revolving door of Twitter executives makes headlines and its $100+ million quarterly losses continue, it's not clear the company will survive the year without being acquired for a q...

itwbennett writes: Researchers at SentinelOne reverse engineered the latest variant of the BlackEnergy 3 rootkit (the same malware used in recent attacks against Ukraine's critical infrastructure) and...

Bismillah writes: The recent 13-microsecond timing anomaly was caused by a satellite failure triggering a "software issue", the USAF 50th Space Wing has confirmed. Such an error is large enough to cau...

An anonymous reader writes: The xf86-video-intel 3.0 DDX driver has been in development the past two and a half years without seeing an official release. The last development release even of xf86-vide...

An anonymous reader writes: In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed, becoming the first space-based observatory. In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entir...

Martin Shkreli, of pharmaceutical drug price-gouging fame, threatens Ghostface Killah, whom he calls by his real name, in a recent video. The video features Shkreli threatening to destroy his rare Wu-...

An anonymous reader writes: I live in a Third World country with a more or less open Internet access. I'm thinking of learning robotics. I can access Github and other free software repositories, and I...

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Boy Genius Report: If you think Tesla's plan for world domination begins with the Model S and ends with the Model 3, you're sorely mistaken. While the...

cold fjord writes: Former Justice Department attorney Thomas Tamm sparked an intense public debate about warrantless surveillance nearly a decade before Edward Snowden. Tamm tipped reporters in 2004 a...

An anonymous reader writes: OPNsense, the open-source firewall project powered by FreeBSD that began as a fork of pfSense, is out with a new release. OPNsense 16.1 was developed over the past half-yea...

An anonymous reader writes: On January 2, 2016, the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, United States, were occupied by armed members of rump militias in one of the longest...

An anonymous reader writes: Juniper Research predicts that at least 1 in 3 home routers will be used as public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2017, and that the total installed base of such dual-use routers will r...

Martin S. writes: Thirty years ago today, NASA suffered a spaceflight tragedy that stunned the world and changed the agency forever. When I mentioned this at work most of my colleagues are too young t...

Lucas123 writes: A start-up financial services company called Someone With Group has just completed a pilot of a crowdfunding service that allows hospitals to set up campaigns to help patients pay the...

theodp writes: For years," Charles Erwin Wilson famously said back in the day, "I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." That was then. This is now. The Wa...

An anonymous reader writes: After Mozilla said in October that it would stop supporting Firefox plugins on the older NPAPI technology, Oracle had no choice now but to announce the deprecation of the J...

New submitter thebigjeff writes: Beginning at around 7:30pm EST on 1/27/2016, GitHub's core services (https://status.github.com/) have been offline. Most repositories and other functionality is inacce...

itwbennett writes: In an effort to gauge the impact of the recent Juniper ScreenOS backdoors on government organizations, the House of Representatives is questioning around two dozen U.S. government d...

Koreantoast writes: Go (weiqi), the ancient Chinese board game, has long been held up as one of the more difficult, unconquered challenges facing AI scientists... until now. Google DeepMind researcher...

jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the universi...

An anonymous reader writes: The last time a DeLorean was built was about 35 years ago, but that is all about to change. Next year, you'll be able to buy a new 2017 DeLorean to satisfy all your deepest...

An anonymous reader writes: Despite his on-again off-again relationship with VR headset maker Oculus, the creator of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson, has developed an experimental virtual reality pr...

An anonymous reader writes: The newly discovered Lockdroid ransomware is unique in two ways. First it uses perfectly overlaid popups to trick users into giving it admin privileges. This trick works on...

An anonymous reader sends word about the latest telcos to join Facebook's Open Compute Project. The Stack reports: "A new wave of communications companies has joined Facebook's non-profit Open Compute...

An anonymous reader writes: On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perfor...

An anonymous reader writes: Every year politicians and business men meet at the World Economic Forum in the small mountain town of Davos, Switzerland to discuss various topics and create business deal...

Anant Agarwal is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the CEO of edX. A massive open online course platform founded by MIT and Harvard, edX offers numerous courses on ...

WheezyJoe writes: Not satisfied that a patent troll dropped its lawsuit against them, Newegg has sued the troll. So-called "patent holding company" Minero Digital sought to exact royalty payments on a...

An anonymous reader writes: Barclays, one of the biggest banking and financial services firms in the world, has sold its business on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to Global Trading Systems....

occamboy writes: Perhaps the ultimate conundrum! I've taken over a software project in an extremely specialized area that needs remediation in months, so it'll be tough to build an internal team quick...

sciencehabit writes: The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to meas...

An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world's largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a b...

An anonymous reader writes: According to the Verge (and my wife) Apple Safari browsers are crashing left, right, and center due to Safari's search suggestions feature. "Simply disabling this feature w...

itwbennett writes: While many are still debating how much risk there is of a catastrophic cyber attack on power grid and other critical infrastructure, Israel's Minister of Infrastructure, Energy and ...

An anonymous reader writes: Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly ...

New submitter mjjochen writes: A little something to make you smile (or cry). NPR reports on astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson calling out rapper B.o.B. in a Twitter (& rap) argument over the sta...

An anonymous reader writes: The Drone Racing League has secured a series of significant investments that it hopes will be enough to turn drone races into a spectator sport. The quadcopter drone racing...

Lucas123 writes: Health insurer Centene Corp. revealed that it is looking for six HDDs with information on 950,000 customers that went missing during a data project that was using laboratory results t...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Quanta Magazine: Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can...

An anonymous reader writes: This article details a Linux user's struggles to submit a grant application when the process requires finicky, proprietary software. It also covers familiar ground made tim...

An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is sounding the alarm about a deal between Texas law enforcement agencies and Vigilant Solutions — a company that provides vehicle ...

An anonymous reader writes: Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory? Well, I don't — they're usually annoying daydreams from annoying people. Fortunately, an Oxford mathematician seems to feel...

An anonymous reader writes: The author of the Magic ransomware strain has agreed to release all decryption keys for free if Utku Sen, a Turkish security researcher, takes down his Hidden Tear open-sou...

Bruce66423 writes: The agency that regulates telecommunications in Pakistan has ordered ISPs to bluck a huge list of adult websites. "The action follows a recent order passed down by the Supreme Court...

mdsolar sends news that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a 6-2 ruling in favor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's ability to create incentives for conserving energy and reducing demand on ...

lpress writes: The FCC has dropped Cuba from its exclusion list (PDF), so there are now no restrictions on U.S. telecom company dealings with ETECSA, the Cuban government telecommunication monopoly, o...

An anonymous reader writes: AMD has called for the opening up of GPU technology to developers. Nicolas Thibieroz, a senior engineering manager for the company, announced today the launch of GPUOpen, i...

v3rgEz writes: Who has time to write out all the vaguely threatening conspiracies that need to be sent to celebrities these days? Turns out, that can be automated too: In 1979, the FBI investigated a ...

jones_supa writes that on Tuesday, 26th January, Aalto University's Metsähovi observatory located in Kirkkonummi, Finland, detected a rare anomaly in time reported by the GPS system (Google trans...

An anonymous reader writes: A British filmmaker has forced the people who decide how to censor films to watch a 10-hour movie of paint drying on a wall following a protest fundraising campaign. Charli...

An anonymous reader writes: Randall Rothenburg, the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has made a speech branding the creators of Adblock Plus (who were banned from the conf...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 44 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include push notifications, the removal of RC4 encryption, and new ...

peetm writes: I have an above averagely bright nephew, aged 10, who's into maths and whose birthday is coming up soon. I'd like to get him a suitable present – most likely one that's mathematica...

hypnosec writes: Researchers have developed a graphene-based coating they have proved effective at melting ice from a helicopter blade, paving the way for a real-time de-icer. The thin coating of grap...

According to The Next Web, the NSA would like to get rid of something that a lot of people wish they'd never had in the first place: phone records that the agency has collected over adecadeandahalf (m...

itwbennett writes: In a blog post on Monday, security researcher Chris Vickery outlined the risks associated with networked HP LaserJet printers, which have been made available to the public by the or...

An anonymous reader writes: The Zsun Wifi card reader is a tiny micro SD card reader with WiFi connectivity, and while people managed to access the device serial console a few months ago, the plan was...

Nerval's Lobster writes: Average technology salaries in the U.S. saw the biggest year-over-year leap ever, up 7.7 percent to $96,370 annually, according to Dice's new survey data. Bonuses and contract...

An anonymous reader writes with news that the Maryland Attorney General is arguing that anyone who has ever used a smartphone knows it's tracking them, so no warrant is needed for stingrays. Techdirt ...

dcblogs writes with the latest in the laid off Disney IT worker saga. According to ComputerWorld: "Disney IT workers laid off a year ago this month are now accusing the company and the outsourcing fir...

An anonymous reader writes: Uber has announced that it has been conducting trials in Houston, Texas, since late 2015 which use data from the gyrometer in drivers' smartphones, combined with accelerome...

theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Melinda Gates concluded a Davos panel discussion about gender parity with a personal story about her own family, explaining how she originally became interested in...

An anonymous reader sends word that Marvin Lee Minsky, co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, has died. The Times reports: "Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist&rs...

An anonymous reader writes: After first announcing the introduction of a video streaming service in May last year, Spotify is finally launching the feature this week. The Swedish company has taken its...

itwbennett writes: Broadband in the United States still lags behind similar service in other industrialized countries, so Congress made broadband expansion a national priority, and it offers subsidies...

Applehu Akbar writes: Yellow Cab Cooperative, the largest taxi company in San Francisco, has filed Chapter 11. While competition from those newfangled ride-sharing services is a natural target for bla...

mdsolar writes with this story from Smithsonian magazine about how building a national transmission network could lead to a gigantic reduction in carbon emissions. From the story: "The United States c...

New submitter captaindomon writes: It may come as no surprise that the Uber helicopter flights which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival were apparently illegal and quickly grounded. "Thanks to the ...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has announced it is building a new data center in Clonee, Ireland, a small village close to Dublin. The facility, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims will be one of t...

Jason Koebler writes: Toppling a telecom monopoly is the dream of many an American, but the folks at NYC Mesh are actually doing something about it. On any given weekend, Brian Hall and his fellow org...

szczys writes: Making change for $1.00 and getting $1.10 back. That's the premise of overunity, free energy, and perpetual motion experiments. Using money as the the analogy is fitting because these c...

An anonymous reader writes: 2016 has not started well for blood-testing startup Theranos. Already facing allegations of data manipulation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have found pro...

An anonymous reader writes with news about an editor revolt at Wikimedia to remove Arnnon Geshuri from the foundation's board. Ars reports: "Nearly 200 Wikipedia editors have taken the unprecedented s...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is moving its machine learning Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK) from its own hosting site, CodePlex, to GitHub. They're also putting it under the MIT open sou...

blottsie writes: Newly unsealed court transcripts from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York show that Apple now refuses to unlock iPhones for law enforcement, saying "In most c...

An anonymous reader writes: A court in Germany has ruled that the 'Share' links which Amazon provides to customers directly after making a purchase at the site are unlawful. The "Share" functionality ...

Qbertino writes: I'm toying with the thought of moving my web development (PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript with perhaps a little Python and Ruby thrown in) into the cloud. The upsides I expect would be: 1)...

An anonymous reader writes: One of the easiest complaints to lob at a modern film is that the special effects look bad. It's been over two decades since Jurassic Park; the novelty is finally wearing o...

An anonymous reader writes: It's only January and we're already seeing the first anti-science education bills of 2016 going through the Oklahoma legislature. The state's lawmakers fight over this ever...

An anonymous reader writes: Driverless cars could mean a huge downsizing of the auto insurance industry, as the frequency of accidents declines and liability shifts from the driver to the vehicle's so...

itwbennett writes: Earlier this month, an SSH backdoor was identified in Fortinet firewall appliances. Last week, the company said that the problem was not an intentional backdoor, but the result of a...

Mark Wilson writes: The U.S. is not afraid to throw its weight around; it likes not only to be involved in things, but to be in control. For decades, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and...

An anonymous reader writes: Eric Springer describes his recent troubles with Amazon to highlight one of the biggest weak points in information security: customer service. You can use complex passwords...

jones_supa writes: Saxo Bank, an investment bank based in Denmark, has released a list of its outrageous predictions for 2016. Among these predictions, economist Christopher Dembik claims that Europe ...

schwit1 writes: A major review of published research suggests that chronic stress and anxiety can damage areas of the brain involved in emotional responses, thinking and memory, leading to depression ...

The Next Web features a quick look at an eyebrow-raisingly fast Rubik's Cube-solving robot, created by developers Jay Flatland and Paul Rose. How fast? The robot can solve a scrambled cube in one seco...

mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure record...

An anonymous reader writes: Ransomware has locked computers in three major Indian banks and one pharmaceutical company. While the ransom note asks for 1 Bitcoin, so many computers have been infected t...

phlawed writes: USB ports are everywhere. It is very convenient for powering low-power devices, and by using a run-of-the-mill phone charger you can easily get 10+ watts or so. In other words: everyon...

Ars Technica reports that the AZERTY keyboard layout used in France has a problem: it's not very good for writing French words, many of which require accents that can be accessed only awkwardly. An ex...

Lauren Weinstein writes: In a time of fascist politicians spouting simplistic slogans about race, religion, terrorism, and censorship, along with whatever other pandering platitudes they believe will ...

cold fjord writes: The Mirror reports that Edward Snowden is experiencing some unexpected fallout from the notoriety he received from his activism for government transparency. It seems he has become s...

MarkWhittington writes: Back in 2012, when NASA first proposed building a deep space habitat (DSH) beyond the moon, the Obama administration took a dim view of the idea. However, fast forward over thr...

MojoKid writes: The tiny single-board PC movement that's leading the Internet of Things (IoT) market is largely dominated by ARM-based processors, and for good reason — they're cheap, low power ...

Mark Wilson writes with this story from Beta News: One of the greatest problems facing anyone trying to tackle the problem of privacy on the web is dealing with the ideologies of different countries, ...

Reader John Tromp points to an explanation posted at GitHub of a computational challenge Tromp coordinated that makes a nice companion to the recent discovery of a 22 million-digit Mersenne prime. A d...

The Linux 4.5 merge window has been open for the last two weeks; that means that the 4.5-rc1 kernel is expected to emerge, with the official kernel following in about eight weeks. An anonymous reader ...

walterbyrd writes: The DOJ as well as Ohio, Illinois, California, and North Carolina say that Dish disregarded federal laws on call etiquette. US lawyers are asking for $900 million in civil penalties...

An anonymous reader writes: A network administrator in Denmark is requiring users to perform a finger press on a banana to receive their Wi-Fi passwords. "The banana is mounted and in production," he ...

An anonymous reader writes: After the Hidden Tear (open-source) ransomware code was used to create the Cryptear.B ransomware, now the EDA2 open-source project was used in the same way to create the Ma...

An anonymous reader writes: Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), recently launched a new section that lets users easily browse vulnerable webcams. The feed includes images of mari...

mdsolar writes: Economic and industrial data released [Thursday] by the Chinese government's statistical agency indicates the country's carbon emissions likely fell by around 3% — with the contr...

An anonymous reader writes: Google's 'Cardboard' virtual reality initiative has put low-cost smartphone VR viewers in the hands of millions, but the experience provided by these simple phone holders d...

HughPickens.com writes: Elizabeth Olsen writes at the NYT that a growing number of older Americans are driving for Uber or its competitor Lyft to augment their retirement income. Older drivers are pri...

Mr.Intel writes: A Utah lawmaker wants computer technicians to face jail time if they don't immediately report child pornography they discover on someone's computer. The proposal would require compute...

New submitter andyjl writes: The software industry lost one of pioneers on Tuesday, January 20, 2016 when Ed Yourdon died from post-operative complications. Ed was a pioneer of the Structured Programm...

theodp writes: According to Chalkbeat, the expansion of charter schools, the movement to break New York City's large schools into smaller ones, and the push to teach computer science have something in...

New submitter mdnuclear writes: In a strange echo of the depressed oil economy SolarCity recently announced a layoff of a quarter of its workforce as the apparent result of the Nevada PUC's decision t...

An anonymous reader writes: By chaining together a series of known Windows security flaws, researchers from Foxglove Security have discovered a way to break into almost all of Microsoft's recent versi...

MarkWhittington writes: The commercial space race between Blue Origin and SpaceX continued Friday when the former company launched the same New Shepard spacecraft that it had launched and then landed ...

1sockchuck writes: With new construction projects underway in Alabama and Tennessee, Google will soon have 5 of its 8 company-built U.S. data center campuses located in the Southeast. The strategy is ...

v3rgEz writes: Government research often pushes the boundaries between science and science fiction. Today, the proud bearer of that mantle is often DARPA, experimenting with robots, cybernetics, and m...

itwbennett writes: According to a new Google report, the search giant disabled more than 780 million "bad ads," including include ads for counterfeit products, misleading or unapproved pharmaceuticals...

MojoKid writes: The original Intel Compute Stick wasn't without issues. Last year's model featured dated 802.11n wireless connectivity and had only a single USB port, which meant using a hub and/or do...

whoever57 writes: Google UK has come to an agreement with HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) under which it will recognize a larger share of its UK sales in the UK, instead of funnelling them th...

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Telegraph: The FBI took over the world biggest child pornography website in a sting operation intended to catch viewers of sexual images of childr...

An anonymous reader writes: Malwarebytes has caught one of Symantec's resellers running a tech support scam that was scaring users into thinking they were infected with malware and then graciously off...

An anonymous reader writes: Submarine cable operator Seacom has announced that civil construction activity was the cause of widespread outages which left large parts of Africa without internet connect...

turkeydance writes: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is asking pregnant women to avoid 22 countries that have seen outbreaks of the Zika virus. That's up eight from just yesterday. ...

An anonymous reader writes: In November, Google open sourced TensorFlow, its machine learning platform. Now, the company is following up by teaching people how to use it. They've launched a free cours...

It sounds like a joke at first, but Risto Lähdesmäki, CEO of user interface design firm Idean (corporate motto: Life is too short for crappy UX), pointed us at DogTelligent and several other...

coondoggie writes: You may not associate the Central Intelligence Agency with historical UFO investigations, but the agency did have a big role in such investigations many years ago. This week the age...

Layzej writes: Climate contrarians have long predicted imminent global cooling. A few have been willing to place wagers that mainstream scientists have been quick to accept. Often acceptance of the be...

Lucas123 writes: A new survey from Johns Hopkins revealed that 59% percent of Americans, if they were to buy a new handgun, are willing to purchase a smart gun. More surprisingly, the web-based survey...

An anonymous reader writes: The Rust team has announced the release of version 1.6 of their programming language. The biggest new feature is that libcore — the Rust core library — is now s...

szczys writes: You've used many devices that have Intel's Management Engine built into them, even if you haven't heard of it before. This is the lowest level of security, built directly into the chips...

An anonymous reader writes: Australian unblocking service uFlix recently announced that Netflix has begun implementing its plans to block users who take advantage of web proxies and VPNs to get around...

An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, NSA director Mike Rogers said, "encryption is foundational to the future." He added that it was a waste of time to argue that encryption is bad or that we ough...

An anonymous reader writes: The GNU Emacs text editor now has merged the X Widgets branch. What this work allows is for embedding GTK+ user interface widgets within Emacs for features like landing MPl...

theodp writes: From Stephen Wolfram's blog post announcing the Wolfram Programming Lab: "It's a very important — and in fact transformative — moment for programming education. In the past ...

itwbennett writes: There is growing evidence that intrusions into the power grid and other critical infrastructure by hostile foreign nation states are real and happening. But there's "much less agree...

phantomfive writes: As the Google v. Oracle copyright case drags on, Oracle is claiming that Android has generated $31 billion in revenue for Google, $22 billion of which was profit. Court records als...

coondoggie writes: There was a 20% increase in firearm discoveries at TSA airport checkins from 2014's total of 2,212. It's an astounding number really, but the details get worse. The TSA goes onto sa...

HughPickens.com writes: In 1992 there were 847 bank robberies in the UK; by 2011 that had dropped to just 66. Now Lawrence Dobbs writes in the Telegraph about how technology is killing off this age ol...

mrspoonsi sends news that Swedish automaker Volvo has issued a bold promise: by 2020, there will be no serious injuries or fatalities in new Volvo cars.Volvo already has various smart features in its ...

An anonymous reader writes: FACC Operations GmbH, an Austrian company that produces various airplane parts for companies like Airbus and Boeing, has announced a cyber-incident during which cyber-fraud...

An anonymous reader writes: Apple has announced plans to launch its first iOS app development center in Europe. The location will be in Naples, Italy, with the center aiming to teach youngsters how to...

wiredmikey writes: Well known security expert HD Moore announced that he is leaving Boston-based security firm Rapid7 to help launch a new venture capital firm focused on helping early-stage security ...

campuscodi writes: Microsoft has submitted an official pull request to the Node.js project, through which it's asking the project's maintainers to enable support for ChakraCore, the JavaScript engine ...

itwbennett writes: Google has developed a patch for Android in response to a flaw in the Linux kernel and has shared it with device manufacturers. That doesn't mean the patch will hit users' phones ri...

joabj writes: Earlier today, Docker announced that it had purchased the Cambridge, U.K.-based Unikernel Systems, makers of the OCaml-based MirageOS, a unikernel or "virtual library-based operating sys...

gthuang88 writes: Virtual digital assistants are gaining popularity with the rise of Siri, Google Now, and Facebook's M service. Now startups are using related artificial intelligence techniques to so...

dcblogs writes: MIT is offering an online course about the Internet of Things, and this is what you need to know up front: It's going to require, perhaps, six to eight hours of study time a week, whic...

Trailrunner7 writes with this except from On The Wire: A week after a New York legislator introduced a bill that would require smartphone vendors to be able to decrypt users' phones on demand from law...

alphadogg writes: Verizon says it will have the first 5G network in the U.S., a promise it probably can't fulfill until 2020 but will start working at this year. Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran S...

An anonymous reader writes: A new spam campaign is targeting Facebook users. It uses the same approach as the recent one aimed at WhatsApp users, and Comodo researchers believe that the authors of bot...

DeveloperTech reports that a group of GitHub developers have posted an open letter, with nearly 1300 signatures, expressing dissatisfaction with GitHub's processes and policies, and in particular the ...

HughPickens.com writes: Violence has always been part of human behavior, but the origins of war are hotly debated. Some experts see it as deeply rooted in evolution, pointing to violent confrontations...

An anonymous reader writes: According to game historian Jon Peterson, Gary Gygax's Chainmail fantasy wargame (which became the basis for Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and later Dungeons & Dragons) borr...

The Linux Foundation, though it's straightforwardly not a grassroots organization along the lines of the FSF or EFF, has long had a degree of non-corporate involvement by way of community-elected memb...

An anonymous reader writes: A hidden backdoor account was discovered embedded in the firmware of devices deployed at the White House and in various US Military strategic centers, more precisely in AMX...

An anonymous reader writes: I've spent nine years working in teams which religiously follow pair programming. I'm used to working that way and appreciate the benefits it brings. We didn't have the lux...

Hallie Siegel writes: Autonomous car expert Brad Templeton argues that we're in for a period of about 5 years in electric cars where each year's new model is a lot better, and that could be a problem ...

MarkWhittington writes: Quietly, the Russians appear to be forming a space alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to a story in Sputnik. Not only is Russia in talks to launch Iranian sa...

An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Graham Cluley says he has been forwarded a blackmail letter, sent to a member of the controversial Ashley Madison adultery website. In the letter the bl...

An anonymous reader writes: R3CEV, a startup dedicated to bringing blockchain technology to traditional finance, yesterday ran a successful test of transactions between 11 of the world's largest finan...

An anonymous reader writes: Everyone possesses their own writing style, which may be used to identify authors even if they wish to remain anonymous: linguists employ stylometry to settle disputes over...

rudy_wayne writes: Former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has launched a new Chromium-based browser called Brave. "Brave blocks everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic adv...

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, the team of Pluto-killer Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin announced that they had found evidence of a ninth planet in our Solar System beyond the orbit of P...

New submitter AnneMackay451 writes with news that the Nielsen media audience measuring company will now include social media buzz into its ratings. From the article: "Nielsen wants to know what TV sho...

An anonymous reader writes: An upcoming report by the Higher Education Commission, a UK group of MPs, business and academic professionals, will paint a picture of a higher education system that, thank...

New submitter Incadenza writes: 10 people were arrested in the Netherlands today according to the Public Prosecution Service (In Dutch). The arrests were said to be part of an international investigat...

Nerval's Lobster writes: For years, security experts have told people they need better passwords protecting their online accounts: no more '123456' or 'qwerty' or 'password.' Based on SplashData's fif...

An anonymous reader writes with news about a Homeland Security memo concerning potential technological attacks during the Super Bowl. The forthcoming Super Bowl event on 7th February could be at risk ...

v3rgEz writes: When the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) announced the upcoming launch of their NROL-39 mission back in December 2013, they didn't get quite the response they hoped. That might hav...

An anonymous reader writes: Spam filters have come a long way over the past two decades — but spammers have, too. Though email providers are better than ever at blocking spam, it's still big bus...

vikingpower writes: Earth's 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adm...

Mr.Intel writes with bad news for those of you champing at the bit to see the next Star Wars movie. Engadget reports: "You'll have to wait a bit longer to see what the heck is up with Luke Skywalker. ...

schwit1 points out that a record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year. Leading the accident count is the Reaper which has seen a number of sudden electrical failures. The Wa...

Mark Wilson writes: Back towards the end of 2014, Facebook unveiled a new .onion address that allowed Tor users to visit the social network securely. Following on from this, the company is now giving ...

An anonymous reader writes with this story about Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen and his talk with the Royal Institute of International Affairs about stopping terrorists online. Cohen contends th...

merbs writes: Throughout the early 90s, a team of Russian astronomers and engineers were hellbent on literally turning night into day. By shining a giant mirror onto the earth from space, they figured...

Steve Hasselbach is a Senior Solutions Architect (AKA Marketing Guy -- but he's also a serious techie) for Peak 10, a datacenter company. In his work he deals with his clients' security problems, and ...

An anonymous reader writes: Adblock Plus has been uninvited to the upcoming IAB Leadership Summit and is having its registration fee refunded. The company was informed of the cancellation in an email ...

Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind...

itwbennett writes: The flaw in a utility that helps users download the latest drivers for their Intel hardware components stems from the tool using unencrypted HTTP connections to check for driver upd...

sciencehabit writes: The solar system may have a new ninth planet. Today, two scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune — but as yet unseen — orbits the sun ever...

schwit1 tips a piece at the NY Times about the most entrenched companies in consumer technology: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. The article makes the case that these five have a such ...

An anonymous reader writes: A coalition of rights groups has sent a letter to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission asking for tougher privacy regulations on providers of broadband internet servi...

AmiMoJo writes: A 10-year-old Muslim boy who mistakenly wrote that he lived in a "terrorist house" during an English lesson at school has been investigated by police. The pupil, who attends a primary ...

iONiUM send word of a new study into fishing practices around the world that found official reports have dramatically underestimated the number of fish caught over the past several decades. According ...

Patrick O'Neill writes: A senior Homeland Security official recently argued that Internet anonymity should outlawed in the same way that driving a car without a license plate is against the law. "When...

ckwu writes: Last year, the news broke that in the U.S. almost 600,000 Volkswagen diesel vehicles, model years 2009 to 2015, contain software that altered engine performance and lowered emissions of t...

An anonymous reader writes: Jim Salter has posted an article explaining why it can be a good idea to build your own router, and how he put his together. Quoting: "In the consumer world, routers mostly...

New submitter mtapman writes: I'm looking for suggestions on introductory software engineering projects for a high school level student. Assume the student can do basic math (up through Algebra I or S...

An anonymous reader writes: Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker, has detected a new threat against Linux users: the Linux.Ekoms.1 trojan. It includes functionality that allows it to take screenshots and...

Kekke sends this report from El Reg:The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that mass surveillance is illegal, in a little-noticed case in Hungary. In a judgment last week, the court ruled...

Dave Knott writes: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new largest known prime number, 2^74,207,281-1, having 22,338,618 digits. The same GIMPS software recently uncovere...

prisoninmate writes: Canonical has been working on expanding the capabilities of Ubuntu Touch for a long time now, and it appears the company will reportedly unveil the first dedicated Ubuntu tablet d...

MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD's Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GP...

Trailrunner7 writes: The U.K. government's standard for encrypted voice communications, which already is in use in intelligence and other sectors and could be mandated for use in critical infrastructu...

An anonymous reader writes: The major automakers have several new technologies to fear, ridesharing services and self-driving technology chief among them. Both of these could dramatically affect how c...

New submitter Kekke writes with news that researchers from Amherst College and Aalto University have figured out a way to create knotted solitary waves in a quantum-mechanical field. They call their c...

An anonymous reader writes: A new report at Phoronix looks at the OpenGL performance of 27 graphics cards from the GeForce 8 through GeForce 900 series. Various Ubuntu OpenGL games were tested on thes...

itwbennett writes: Researchers from Rapid7 have discovered a vulnerability in serial-to-IP gateway devices from Advantech that would allow the Internet-connected industrial devices to be accessible to...

sciencehabit writes: Roughly half of Americans use marijuana at some point in their lives, and many start as teenagers. Although some studies suggest the drug could harm the maturing adolescent brain,...

An anonymous reader writes: Amnesty International has accused Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other tech companies of failing to do basic checks to ensure minerals used in their products are not mined by ch...

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo! has fixed a cross-site scripting bug that would have allowed attackers to fully compromise email accounts just by sending a malicious email. To lose control over the...

v3rgEz writes: If you search the FBI website for details the Tracking Technology Unit, nothing shows up: They have no official home page, their leadership is not mentioned, and the few public mentions...

szczys writes: Rick Wesson has been working on a solution to identify the same piece of malware that has been altered through polymorphism (a common method of escaping detection). While the bits are s...

HughPickens.com writes: BBC reports that according to Stephen Hawking most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, including nuclear war, global warming and geneti...

mrspoonsi writes with Business Insider's report that presidential candidate Donald Trump says he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other c...

prisoninmate writes: Fedora contributor and NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel explains how your devices are being identified on a network by a unique number that most of us know by the name of M...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced that it will release an educational version of the Minecraft video game after acquiring the minecraft,edu domain and IP. The classroom version of Mi...

Gr8Apes writes: How many people does it take to fix a tractor? When the repair involves a tractor's computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. govern...

An anonymous reader writes: Pakistan has allowed access to a localized version of the video sharing website YouTube on company assurances that country-specific filters would be added to remove objecti...

msm1267 writes: A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at sta...

chicksdaddy writes: The world's governments are on notice that their critical infrastructure is vulnerable after an apparent cyberattack darkened 80,000 households in three regions of Ukraine last mon...

mdsolar writes with news about the launch of the "Great Green Fleet," part of a Navy plan to use 50% alternative fuels by 2020. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports: "This Wednesday, there surely will ...

An anonymous reader writes: Belgian public broadcasting station VRT has discovered that GM Opel dealerships in Belgium seem to be updating engine management code when Zafira cars equipped with the 1.6...

Bruce66423 writes: The Diary of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager killed by the Nazis whose writing survived in the Amsterdam building where she had hidden, is causing problems. It has been 70 years since...

HughPickens.com writes: Reuters reports that the Pentagon is quietly building up a small airstrip in a remote region of east Africa that is a complex microcosm of how Washington runs military operatio...

theodp writes: Just days after it came under fire for dismissing a call for diversity as "unduly burdensome and not necessary," Apple quietly released its 2015 EEO-1 diversity report (dated 10/6/2015,...

speedplane writes: The popular messaging service, Whatsapp, will soon become free (they previously charged $0.99 per year after the first). The troubling news is that to compensate for the lost revenu...

An anonymous reader writes: Three science papers that had suggested that genetically modified crops were harmful to animals and have been used by activist groups to argue for their ban have been found...

MojoKid writes: AMD is making a stink about SYSMark, a popular benchmarking program that's been around for many years, and one the chip designer says is not reliable. Rather than provide meaningful re...

szczys writes: You have the choice of buying a wrench made in the USA and one made in China. Which one should you buy? The question is not a straightforward one. Tools are judged by their ability to d...

An anonymous reader writes: Silicon-based electronic circuits that operate flawlessly in the body for some number of days--soon weeks--and then harmlessly dissolve: they're what University of Illinois...

An anonymous reader writes: You may have heard recently of the Remix OS, a fork of Android that targets desktop computing. The operating system, which was created by former Google employees and featur...

samzenpus writes: David J. Peterson is a language creator and author. He created the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for HBO's Game of Thrones, and more recently has created languages for the CW's The...

An anonymous reader writes: Airbus is teaming up with Uber to provide on-demand helicopter rides, due to debut at the Sundance Film Festival which opens in Utah this month. The flight service will emp...

An anonymous reader writes: In a new interview, Amazon has revealed details of the drone delivery program they're building out. VP Paul Misener said, "Prime Air is a future delivery service that will ...

An anonymous reader writes: For the past several years, Japan has been trying to encourage development of hydrogen fuel cell technology for cars. Now it seems some German manufacturers are getting int...

An anonymous reader writes: At the Democratic presidential debate last night, Marques Brownlee asked the candidates a pointed question about whether the government should require tech companies to imp...

An anonymous reader writes: This weekend, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly posted a picture of the first flower to bloom in space. The International Space Station has been home to the Veggie plant growth fa...

An anonymous reader writes: Viewership numbers are vital within the TV industry. For years, the networks have relied upon ratings to make money — higher numbers mean higher ad revenue. The most ...

Zothecula writes: In a development that could lead to improved understanding of memory formation and epilepsy, scientists have discovered a new way information may be traveling throughout the brain. T...

destinyland writes: Tuesday's State of the Union address included a shout-out to Katherine Johnson, the pioneering African American mathematician and physicist who calculated the trajectory of Alan Sh...

MarkWhittington writes: While it is unclear what, if any, implications the recent successful landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9 first stage means for the future of space travel, planetary scie...

mdsolar writes with news that Belgium's decision to restart a reactor at its Tihange nuclear power plant and its aging Doel plant have some of its European neighbors uneasy. Phys.org reports: "As the ...

schwit1 sends the latest news about KIC 8462852, the star that that led many to learn what a Dyson Sphere is. New Scientist reports: "The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, i...

An anonymous reader writes: Security researcher Sean Cassidy has developed a fairly trivial attack on the LastPass password management service that allows attackers an easy method for collecting the v...

An anonymous reader writes with news that the NYPD charged a local television station $36k to view police body camera footage. Ars reports: "As body cams continue to flourish in police departments acr...

StartsWithABang writes: As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe's history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today came to be. ...

New submitter moriarty1972 writes: More details about Microsoft's HoloLens have come out. The device will offer roughly five to five and a half hours of battery life when working on Word documents or ...

tiltowait writes: Slashdot readers should be familiar with most if not all of these, but the list of 20 Hollow Copyright Claims is a somber reminder of the current sorry state of intellectual property...

An anonymous reader writes: one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way....

An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket today carrying the Jason-3 ocean monitoring satellite. "Jason-3 data will be used for monitoring global sea level rise, resea...

New submitter Kenneth Stephen writes: Astronomers have always wanted bigger and better telescopes. Building such telescopes today come with many challenges that require high precision work to resolve....

An anonymous reader writes: US casino chain Affinity Games is suing Trustwave Holdings, a cyber-security vendor that was brought in to investigate a card breach but failed to detect and stop a malware...

An anonymous reader writes: Chinese web services company Baidu has released a new artificial intelligence software called WARP-CTC. The code is apparently capable of speech recognition, particularly f...

jones_supa writes: Legendary game developer John Romero took to Twitter to spread the word that he has made a comeback to the world of Doom by designing an all new level. Romero's return to the game t...

theodp writes: The very first proposal President Obama put forth in his final State of the Union address Tuesday night for his remaining year in office was "helping students learn to write computer co...

HughPickens.com writes: Over 80 percent of college students are plagued by procrastination, requiring epic all-nighters to finish papers and prepare for tests. Roughly 20 percent of adults report bein...

An anonymous reader writes: Iran has shipped most of its nuclear fuel out of the country, destroyed the innards of a plutonium-producing reactor and mothballed more than 12,000 centrifuges. This compl...

schwit1 writes: Newly published research into a supernova under observation since June has found it to be the most powerful known to modern science. "This one, called ASASSN-15lh, is about 3.8 billion...

An anonymous reader writes: Despite all the time we've spent studying the moon, nobody has ever deployed a probe to its far side. Now, China has announced that it plans to land a probe there in 2018. ...

prisoninmate writes: As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system t...

New submitter kynthelig writes: There are a hundred reasons why 3D printed cars might not work. But that's true of almost any great idea in tech. A few automotive entrepreneurs have developed a vision...

An anonymous reader writes: AMD has confirmed that their Vulkan Linux driver will only work with the new AMDGPU kernel driver, meaning that for right now on the desktop, Vulkan will just work on the R...

An anonymous reader writes: In an unassuming building at Johnson Space Center, NASA maintains clean rooms and employs curators to support its collection of rocks and other matter from elsewhere in the...

theodp writes: A year after its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, Microsoft announced a slew of R-related product offerings, and noted that Revolution R Open is giving up her maiden name and will h...

An anonymous reader writes: The tech community has spoken: we don't want the NSA or any other government agency running bulk surveillance on us, and we don't want tech companies to help them. But Bruc...

An anonymous reader writes: Build quality is a characteristic many people value in laptop design, but one that often goes unrepresented on a spec sheet. Over at Make, Kurt Mottweiler took build qualit...

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," is reportedly in talks with Netflix about creating a new animated series. According to Variety, details about the n...

Joe_Dragon sends news from Microsoft about how the company will support Windows now and in the future. The company says PCs built with Intel's Skylake chip, and other new architectures in the future, ...

Robotron23 writes: An investigation by the EU Commission may make Apple liable for up to $8 billion in back taxes. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates Apple has paid only 1.8% tax on profits between 2004...

HughPickens.com writes: Perry Stein writes in the Washington Post that the fight against noisy leaf blowers is gaining momentum, in part, because residents are framing it as a public health issue. Two...

v3rgEz writes: In 1981, Walt Disney World was getting ready to unveil a new gem in its crown of amusement parks, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. Revolving around a massive ...

An anonymous reader writes: They might seems small and relatively insignificant, but cheap wireless web cams deployed in houses and offices (and connected to home and office networks) might just be th...

An anonymous reader writes: If Netflix's promise to invigilate users' IP addresses and block VPNs is more than a placatory sop to the lawyers, and if the studios would rather return to fighting piracy...

An anonymous reader writes: Cryptsy, a website for trading Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other smaller crypto-currencies, announced a security incident, accusing the developer of Lucky7Coin of stealing 13,00...

MojoKid writes: Netgear recently launched the Nighthawk X8 router, which is part of a new round of second-gen wireless AC devices dubbed "Wave 2", carrying the AC5300 moniker. Instead of using a 3x3 c...

sciencehabit writes: The "hobbit" had neighbors. Back in 2004, researchers announced the discovery of this tiny, ancient human, which apparently hunted dwarf elephants with stone tools on the Indonesi...

An anonymous reader writes: An American woman named Tamara Fields has sued Twitter in U.S. federal court, saying the social network gave the Islamic State a voice to spread its propaganda. Fields's hu...

An anonymous reader writes: Steven Levy reports on his trip to the facility where Google tests is autonomous vehicles (here's a map). The company apparently has a four-week program to certify people t...

Joey Amanchukwu is co-founder and CEO of Transforia, a company that leases computers pre-loaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- a distro choice that may have been made at least partly because Joey us...

An anonymous reader writes: A pair of legislators in California have introduced separate pieces of legislation aimed at further regulating the nascent drone industry in the name of safety. Assemblyman...

StartsWithABang writes: Geoff Marcy. Tim Slater. Christian Ott. And a great many more who are just waiting to be publicly exposed for what they've done (and in many cases, are still doing). Does it me...

An anonymous reader writes: Just hours after the World Health Organization declared an end to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, officials from Sierra Leone confirmed a death from the virus. The count...

itwbennett writes: This weekend, Apple security expert Patrick Wardle will detail a vulnerability in Apple's Gatekeeper that makes it possible to bypass the anti-malware defense. This is the same vuln...

jones_supa writes: One person is brain dead and five others are seriously ill after taking part in a phase one drug trial for an unnamed pharmaceutical firm at the Biotrial clinic in France. In medici...

mdsolar writes: Twenty nations with significant atomic stockpiles or nuclear power plants have no government regulations requiring minimal protection of those facilities against cyberattacks, accordin...

schnell writes: While many lament the seeming lack of quality, in-depth journalism today, a Gawker article argues that the inescapable problem is that you need a paying (in some form) audience (of a l...

TheCoop1984 writes: A blog post by ex-Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has highlighted dysfunctional management right at the top of Bitcoin development. He says it is clear Bitcoin is on the verge of coll...

An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever used Stack Overflow to answer a question about some code you're working on? Most people who write code on a regular basis have done so, and this sometimes inv...

An anonymous reader writes: A casual survey of candidates' reactions to the interview processes of the biggest tech companies in the world shows Google as having one of the most grueling hiring gauntl...

An anonymous reader writes: The Obama Administration has unveiled a proposal for a 10-year, $4 billion investment in the adoption of autonomous car technology. The money would fund pilot projects to, ...

HughPickens.com writes: Somini Sengupta writes in the NY Times that a new report from the World Bank concludes that the vast changes wrought by Internet technology have not expanded economic opportuni...

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix have announced they'll be taking further steps to ensure users are not circumventing geo-restrictions. David Fullagar, Vice President of Content Delivery and Archit...

An anonymous reader writes: The DDoSing outfit that spawned the trend of "DDoS-for-Bitcoin" has been arrested by Europol in Bosnia Herzegovina last month. DD4BC first appeared in September 2015, when ...

New submitter Dan Drollette writes: The solution to producing energy without contributing to global warming may be to go fly a kite. Literally. Researchers in Switzerland and Italy — high-altitu...

MarkWhittington writes: The Verge reported that NASA has awarded the second round of contracts for the commercial resupply program. Two companies, SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences, which have been hauling...

An anonymous reader writes: The Urban Death Project utilizes the process of composting to safely and gently turn our deceased into soil-building material, creating a meaningful, equitable and ecologic...

An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo Labs has released a record-breaking dataset containing 110 billion interactions from 20 million Yahoo News users in 1.5tb of zipped data. The anonymized data is inten...

sciencehabit points out this story which may rewrite the early history of humans in North America. From the Sciencemag story: "In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a froz...

prisoninmate writes: A zero-day vulnerability in the FFmpeg open-source multimedia framework, which is currently used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems and software applications, also f...

itwbennett writes: Researchers from FireEye first documented the SlemBunk Android Trojan that targets mobile banking users in December. Once installed, it starts monitoring the processes running on th...

msm1267 writes: OpenSSH today released a patch for a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to force a client to leak private cryptographic keys. The attacker would have to cont...

jones_supa writes: More people in Europe are dying than are being born, according to a new report co-authored by a Texas A&M University demographer. In contrast, births exceed deaths, by significa...

1sockchuck writes: Colocation and content delivery specialist EdgeConneX is operating unmanned "lights out" data centers in 20 markets across the United States, marking the most ambitious use to date ...

DesertNomad points out this article at The Register "about a fairly aged Pentium-based server that lasted 18+ years without much in the way of service. Reminds me that I have a pair of working, occasi...

TigerPlish writes to note Variety's report on the death of actor Alan Rickman, who died after a short bout with cancer, and was surrounded by friends and family when he went. Rickman may be most famil...

colinneagle writes: One month after promising to release the JavaScript engine of its Edge browser, Microsoft has proven good for its word and then some. Not only is it releasing the code, it's planni...

MojoKid writes: AMD is adding a new family of Opterons to its enterprise processor line-up today called the Opteron A1100 series. Unlike AMD's previous enterprise offerings, however, these new additio...

Nerval's Lobster writes: Technical debt arises for many reasons—whether moving goal posts, pressure to get code tested and released, high programmer turnover, and lack of documentation. Over tim...

An anonymous reader writes: A recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights has granted EU companies the right to monitor and log private conversations that employees have at work while using th...

MarkWhittington writes: NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its annual report on various space agency programs. The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars p...

An anonymous reader writes: Google-owned smart homeware company Nest has asked users to reset their connected thermostats after a software bug forced controllers offline and left owners unable to heat...

cold fjord writes: Thelocal.se reports that Sweden's state prosecutor's office said today that it has formally asked Ecuador in writing for permission to interrogate Julian Assange. They don't know wh...

SlappingOysters writes: Netflix's surprise large-scale global rollout to over 100 countries last week saw the company's huge entertainment offering appear in homes across the world overnight, however,...

An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Microsoft has open-sourced the core components of Chakra, the company's JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. The project, dubbed Cha...

An anonymous reader writes with this story at The Washington Post about the life and death of Ann Caracristi. From the article: "Ann Caracristi, who became one of the highest ranking and most honored ...

An anonymous reader points out this story at VentureBeat about a bug in Chrome's incognito mode that might be a cause for concern for some Apple users. From the story: "If you use Google Chrome's inco...

itwbennett writes: Researchers from Arbor Networks have discovered a new remote access Trojan, dubbed Trochilus, whose detection rate was very low among antivirus products. The malware was discovered ...

Mark Wilson writes: Trend Micro may still be smarting from the revelation that there was a serious vulnerability in its Password Manager tool, but today the security company warns of the dangers of sh...

Lucas123 writes: Seagate has finally adopted helium as an inert gas in its data center drives and has used it to produce a 10TB HDD for cloud-based data centers. Seagate had relied on its shingled mag...

An anonymous reader writes: Universal Music Group has agreed to license its music to online audio platform SoundCloud – a major step for the popular startup, which has struggled to receive legit...

The biggest shift in wearables that Alfred Poor saw at CES was from consumer wearables to wearables designed to serve corporate goals, especially cutting health care costs. He says that when it comes ...

waspleg writes: Executives of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) held a meeting at 2 p.m. Eastern Time to tell their employees that the company is terminating all news and digital operations in the U.S. as of ...

An anonymous reader writes: NASA has set up a new Planetary Defense Coordination Office to detect and track near-Earth objects. CNN reports: "The department, which includes the position of Planetary D...

HughPickens.com writes: Valentina Zarya writes at Fortune Magazine that the top 2016 prediction for David Marcus,Facebook's vice president of messaging products, is the disappearance of the phone numb...

1sockchuck writes: Connected cars generate a lot of data. That's translating into big business for data center providers, as evidenced by a major data center expansion by Uber, which needs more storag...

Trailrunner7 sends word about New York Assemblyman Matthew Titone's bill that forbids the sale of smartphones that can't be cracked by their manufacturers. On the Wire reports: "A bill that is making ...

szczys writes: To say Richard Stallman had a profound effect on free software is not a bold enough statement. The power of the GPL, and his advocacy for software freedom have changed the world. But th...

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix's chief product officer Neil Hunt has admitted that the company has 'no magic solution' to subscribers who use VPNs to access content not licensed for their geograp...

jones_supa writes: Allan Day has written a blog post today about some of the improvements that are being worked on for GNOME's settings area. The new GNOME Settings area is working toward a model that...

Blacklaw writes: The BBC has announced that Robot Wars, the classic metal-mashing amateur robotics competition, is returning for a new series. They are building an all-new battle arena — followi...

gollum123 writes: More employers, from Whole Foods Market, with 91,000 employees, to smaller companies such as SumAll and Squaremouth, are opening up companywide salary information to all employees. T...

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has now joined the CIA's John Brennan in having his personal online accounts hacked. A teenage hacker known as 'C...

schwit1 writes: Police in two countries have claimed that they can read encrypted data from BlackBerry devices that are being marketed as having "military-grade security." The story originally broke w...

itwbennett writes: In a lawsuit in Northern California that was dismissed in 2014, Falun Gong practitioners alleged that Cisco Systems built a security system, dubbed "Golden Shield," for the Chinese ...

coondoggie writes: Many consumers expect self-driving cars to become common in the not-too-distant future -- cars that diagnose problems without human intervention, cars that adapt to a particular dri...

HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that the Pentagon has been developing the B61 Model 12, the nation's first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, the Model 12 was desig...

schwit1 writes with news that cosmologist Lawrence Krauss has set the scientific community abuzz by confirming a rumor floating around for the past several months that the LIGO experiment may have dis...

Dangerous_Minds writes: New Zealand officials are hoping that the TPP signing ceremony is to take place in February in Auckland, New Zealand. According to the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs a...

An anonymous reader sends this report from Motherboard: Computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an algorithmic framework for conducting targeted surveillance of individual...

An anonymous reader writes: One of the hot areas of semiconductor research right now is the creation of so-called neuromorphic chips — processors whose transistors are networked in such a way to...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today ended support for old versions of Internet Explorer, including IE8, IE9, and IE10, as well as Windows 8. For the browsers, the company has also released a f...

An anonymous reader writes: Spamhaus, an international non-profit organization that hunts down spammers, is accusing Verizon of indifference and facilitation of cybercrime because it failed for the pa...

An anonymous reader writes: The IT community was shaken a few weeks ago when Juniper Networks firewalls were found to contain "unauthorized code" that seemed to enable a backdoor. Now, Fortinet firewa...

An anonymous reader writes: A research team from the BBC has done a series of tests to confirm earlier computations showing a ~50% savings in bit rate for H.265/HEVC compared to video using H.264/AVC ...

An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports on one of the wonders of the underwater world: the extensive web of volcanoes and hydrothermal vents present where tectonic plates meet and grind again...

An anonymous reader writes: A Kentucky state representative is developing an unusual piece of legislation. It would impose a delay on people posting about an event on social media if the event resulte...

theodp writes: After India's telecom regulator asked a local company to temporarily stop Facebook's Free Basics service amid questions about whether it violates net neutrality, Facebook launched a con...

itwbennett writes: Trend Micro has released an automatic update fixing the problems in its antivirus product that Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy discovered could allow "anyone on the internet ...

An anonymous reader writes: You can add terrorist-controlled drones to the list of dangers we need to be prepared for, says the Oxford Research Group. Its new report contains information about over 20...

nbauman writes: The administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told an investors' conference that they will be backing off the unpopular requirement that doctors show "meaningf...

v3rgEz writes: Last summer, Seattleites noticed that utility polls around town were showing some odd growths: A raft of surveillance cameras that, under Seattle's strict surveillance equipment laws, s...

szczys writes: Deep in a gold mine in South Dakota the Large Underground Xenon experiment waits in the darkness for a tiny flash of light that signals that dark matter actually exists. So far we theor...

An anonymous reader writes: In a 10-way Linux distribution battle including OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and others, one of the fastest out-of-the-box performers was a surprising contender: Intel...

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have designed a lithium-ion battery that self-regulates according to temperature, to prevent itself from overheating. Reaching extreme temperatures, the battery ...

Zane C. writes: The 100,000 Genomes project, an organization dedicated to diagnosing and researching rare genetic disorders, has just diagnosed its first 2 patients. After painstakingly analyzing abou...

An anonymous reader writes: A researcher has developed a smartwatch app that can interpret hand motions and translate the movements to specific keystrokes on 12-keys keypads, as the ones used for ATM ...

Patrick O'Neill writes: The U.S. military will closely review the NSA's security measures as concerns mount that foreign adversaries and independent hackers are targeting the American government in cy...

Patrick O'Neill writes: The French parliament this week will examine a bill that would require tech manufacturers of computers, phones, and tablets to build backdoors into any encryption on the device...

An anonymous reader writes: There's some good news for "free-range" parents and fans of children being allowed to walk places on their own. A recently approved federal education law will allow student...

Nerval's Lobster writes: Despite some concerns over the stock market and whether the so-called "unicorns" will survive the year, it's apparently still a good time to get into tech: New data from Rober...

coondoggie writes: It may be time for the United States to rethink how the smallest parts of its monetary system — the penny, nickel and dime – are made. According to a report this week fr...

msm1267 writes: Juniper Networks has removed the backdoored Dual_EC DRBG algorithm from its ScreenOS operating system, but new developments show Juniper deployed Dual_EC long after it was known to be ...

MarkWhittington writes: Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace opened his new Twitter account with the suggestion that Donald Trump, the mercurial businessman who is running for president, might just giv...

An anonymous reader writes: Transit tech firm TransLoc has agreed to partner with global ride-sharing giant Uber, to help public transport users plan their routes and schedule rides to reach their fin...

Koreantoast writes: It's no secret that governments across the globe have been taking advantage of new technologies to create stronger surveillance systems on citizens. While many have focused on the ...

chicksdaddy writes: The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has announced that it will treat identity theft protection as a non-taxable, non-reportable benefit that companies can offer — even when the...

Zothecula writes: If one is going to get into the asteroid mining business, one needs to prove that you can do something with what's brought back. That seems to be the thinking behind Planetary Resour...

sciencehabit writes: Thomas Edison would be pleased. Researchers have come up with a way to dramatically improve the efficiency of his signature invention, the incandescent light bulb. The approach us...

chalsall writes: Intel has confirmed an in-the-wild bug that can freeze its Skylake processors. The company is pushing out a BIOS fix. Ars reports: "No reason has been given as to why the bug occurs, ...

jones_supa writes: North Korea has expanded its own loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border as a counteraction to South Korea's retaliatory broadcasts critical of the communist nation, so...

New submitter Zane C. writes: A new study once again shows vaccines have no link with yet another batch of medical disorders. The vaccine in question is a relatively new HPV vaccine called Gardasil, m...

szczys writes: Hackers" — people who non-maliciously test the limits of technology — have a very different societal standing depending on the country they live in. To illustrate the concep...

v3rgEz writes: When a dolphin died in New Jersey's South River last year, Carly Sitrin wanted to know what killed it. So she filed a public record request to the NJ Department of Agriculture in order ...

Patrick O'Neill writes: The debate over surveillance hit the 2016 race for the White House again on Sunday when Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said he wants to add to American surveilla...

LichtSpektren writes: As you may recall, Microsoft has delivered KB3035583 as a 'recommended update' to users of Windows 7 and 8.1. What this update does is install GWX ("Get Windows 10"), a program w...

An anonymous reader writes: Nvidia GPUs don't clear out memory that was previously allocated, and neither does Chrome before releasing memory back to the shared memory pool. When a user recently fired...

itwbennett writes: A new study of a recent cyberattack against Ukrainian power companies suggests malware didn't directly cause the outages that affected at least 80,000 customers. While malware was u...

An anonymous reader writes: Five years after AT&T discontinued its unlimited mobile data plan, the company is bringing it back with a catch: users must be subscribed to DirecTV or U-verse TV as we...

theodp writes: When President Obama delivers his final State of the Union address on Tuesday, the White House reports that the inspiring individuals seated with the First Lady will include Microsoft C...

echo-e writes: Renowned singer David Bowie has died after an 18-month battle with cancer. His latest album, Blackstar, was only just released on Friday — his birthday. His last live show was in ...

Trailrunner7 writes: Perhaps because smart lightbulbs that refuse firmware updates and refrigerators with blue screens of death aren't enough fun on their own, a new WiFi protocol designed specificall...

joabj writes: For years, PostgreSQL users would ask when their favorite open source database system would get the UPSERT operator, which can either insert an entry or update it if a previous version a...

prisoninmate writes: January 10, 2016, will enter in the Linux history books as the day when the Linux kernel 4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) has been officially released by Linus Torvalds and his team of...

An anonymous reader writes: Shortly after the death of Debian founder Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens, who succeeded Murdock as Debian Project Leader in 1996 and was also Murdock's employer for a period of ...

Jalopnik reports that Elon Musk's predicted window for being able (for Tesla owners, that is) to call up your autonomous car and have it find its own way from New York to California, or vice versa, is...

New submitter acm writes: RouteBuilder has been using the Google Maps API to help people share their routes (bicycling, hiking, etc) for a decade. Last week, Google sent an email demanding Routebuilde...

An anonymous reader writes: A few years back I discovered that even a person of limited soldering skills can create a nifty surround-sound system with the magic of a passive matrix decoder system; the...

mdsolar writes: Climatologist James Hansen argued last month, "Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change." He is wrong. As the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and International En...

chicksdaddy writes with this news: General Motors (GM) has become the latest "old economy" firm to launch a program to entice white hat hackers and other experts to delve into the inner workings of it...

An anonymous reader writes: Why is it that kids these days spend days upon days watching people play video games on Youtube and Twitch when they could spend those days playing games themselves? While ...

An anonymous reader writes: The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined a software vendor for lying about its product's encryption capabilities, despite being publicly warned by US Computer Emerge...

An anonymous reader writes: David Chaum, father of many encryption protocols, has revealed a new anonymity network concept called PrivaTegrity. Chaum, on who's work the Onion protocol was based, creat...

HughPickens.com writes Rebecca Rosen has an interesting essay at The Atlantic on economist John Maynard Keynes' prediction in 1930 that with increased productivity, over the next 100 years the economy...

MojoKid writes: Solid State Drive technology continues to make strides in performance, reliability and cost. At the CES 2016 show there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their...

An anonymous reader writes: OAuth 2.0 is one of the most used single sign-on systems on the web: it is used by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, GitHub and other big Internet companies. A group of research...

Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year's "Forbes 30 Under 30" list came out , "it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their...

An anonymous reader writes: Apple's first disclosed acquisition of 2016 is software company Emotient, which specializes in reading users' expressions while they operate computers. Emotient uses AI sof...

Deathlizard writes with a report at Engadget that when this year's "Forbes 30 Under 30" list came out , "it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their...

An anonymous reader writes with a lnk to this article at Boy Genius Report about a software upgrade now hitting Tesla owners, which begins: Tesla earlier today began pushing out version 7.1 of its sof...

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and t...

itwbennett writes: Since June, researchers have found and reported several dozen serious flaws in antivirus products from vendors such as Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Avast, AVG Technologies, Intel Security (...

An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation is conducting a survey to gather feedback on where they should be focusing their efforts over the next five years. Should they concentrate on I...

hypnosec writes: In a first kind of discovery in decades, researchers have created a new class of hybrid sound waves that are gentle enough to be used in biomedical devices. Known as "surface reflecte...

theodp writes: While past U.S. Presidents have had to contend with radio propaganda, President Obama also has to worry about online propaganda. On Friday, U.S. national security officials met with lea...

As manufacturing gets more distributed, it gets more anonymous in some ways: the parts for one computer might have been made in several countries, and even the assembly might have been split between m...

An anonymous reader writes: Cisco's Talos research team has managed to identify and partially shut down a cyber-criminal group that is using the RIG exploit kit to infect users with spambots via a mal...

An anonymous reader writes: Breaking the Enigma code is rightfully assessed to have significantly shortened World War Two by as much as two years. The genius of Alan Turing played a large role in buil...

StartsWithABang writes: With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe — gamma rays — all over the sky, to unpreced...

jones_supa writes: Men have been advised to drink no more than seven pints of beer a week – the same as the maximum limit for women – in the first new drinking guidelines to be released by...

An anonymous reader writes: A project called 'Gridstrike' found that free and publicly available information can be used to determine the most critical electric substations in the US, which if attacke...

New submitter mmiscool writes: ESP8266 Basic is a project less than 6 moths old. It is open source and designed specifically for the internet of things. The ESP8266 microcontroller costs less than $3,...

prisoninmate writes: Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4 is an important engineering effort and introduces performance improvements and enhancements for some of the most essential c...

Lucas123 writes: A federal judge has denied a motion by Shutterfly to dismiss a civil case against it claiming it violated privacy laws by collecting and scanning face geometries from uploaded images ...

An anonymous reader writes: The X.Org domain predates the X.Org Foundation. It was used in the '90s as a destination by The Open Group around the X Window System. While many are expecting Mir and Wayl...

sciencehabit writes: Researchers have created the first heat-reactive polymer material that can not only remember its current shape but also memorize new ones. The material—which currently requi...

An anonymous reader writes: HughPickens.com writes NPR reports that a Hellfire missile that was supposedly shipped to Europe for military exercises in 2014 somehow ended up in Cuba. It's still a myste...

Layzej writes: With only a few stations left to report, 2015 is virtually certain to beat 2014's record as the planet's warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. The new record was caused by th...

An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg has posted a data visualization for a very important subject: how much, how often, and to what effect The Force is used in Star Wars movies. As you may expect, we...

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's database management system has seen the biggest rise in terms of popularity in the past year. Oracle didn't only see a rise in the number of deployed instances, jo...

szczys writes: The FAA can regulate the skies, but they don't own the airspace inside of buildings. There are many ways to get your flying fix indoors. Perhaps the most obvious is flying tiny quadcopt...

An anonymous reader writes: KDE's Plasma 5 desktop received a lot of early heat for being unstable, missing functionality compared to the older Plasma 4, and other changes that irritated Linux desktop...

Trailrunner7 writes: A new twist on the fake tech support scam has arisen that has victims wondering whether Dell has been hacked.There has been a recent rash of calls to Dell customers in which the c...

Lucas123 writes: Smart gun developers have faced pushback from opponents who fear adoption will lead to mandates. But this week, President Obama embraced the technology, creating the biggest customer ...

An anonymous reader writes: Hackers have set up a clever new clickjacking campaign taking advantage of pop-up alerts that European users are (by now) accustomed to see: the "EU Cookie Law" notificatio...

theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons declared computer coding class the nation's latest educational fad (script). Proving Principal Skinner's point, K12CS.org on Thursday announced a New Framework t...

Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, o...

mitcheli writes: If you're hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren't yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science...

prisoninmate writes: An SBC called Chirimen was designed from the outset to use web browser technologies in various science projects by extending the I2C and GPIO WebAPIs to control devices powered by...

schnell writes: Engadget reports that a few recent top-tier video game releases using updated DRM technology have gone uncracked for more than a month and left DRM hackers stymied thus far. The games ...

Press2ToContinue writes: Google and Lenovo announced plans Thursday night in Las Vegas for the first Project Tango phone to be released this summer for less than $500. Project Tango is Google's vision...

itwbennett writes: Uber has agreed to pay a penalty of $20,000 in a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman for delaying telling drivers about the data breach of their personal ...

Mark Wilson writes: The Investigatory Powers Bill may only be in draft form at the moment, but the UK government has already received criticism for its plans. Today, scores of pieces of written eviden...

wiredmikey writes: According to a Pentagon memo due out today, the US military will create a new way to recognize drone operators and other service members who contribute to America's fighting efforts...

chicksdaddy writes: Data breaches have become so common that they've taken on a kind of formality. One of the phrases that often accompany such incidents goes something like this: "[Company X] has no ...

LichtSpektren writes: BlackBerry Ltd. launched its first Android smartphone in October 2015, the BlackBerry Priv. CEO John Chen has commented "so far, so good" on the Priv's sales, two months in. Also...

An anonymous reader writes: The Drupal CMS, a favorite with large enterprises, has a few bugs in its update process, affecting both the Drupal core update and its modules. The biggest flaw of the thre...

MojoKid writes: Intel is taking another stab at the PC-in-your-pocket form factor with their next gen Compute Sticks. These over-sized thumbstick devices plug into the HDMI port of any TV or monitor a...

lpress writes: Cuba has little Internet infrastructure, but they have a well-organized sneaker net called El Paquete Semanal (the weekly packet). El Paquete distributes a terabyte of digital entertain...

An anonymous reader writes: Smart TVs running older versions of the Android operating system are being infected with malware that was specifically built to target smart TVs. Infections occur via appli...

Nerval's Lobster writes: What was the most popular programming language of 2015? According to the people behind the TIOBE Index, Java took that coveted spot, winning out over C, Python, PHP, and other...

An anonymous reader writes: Since now you're going to either register your drone or have to be flying your [small drone] indoors anyway in the USA, you might as well celebrate the one freedom you stil...

Lasrick writes: Seismologist Jeffrey Park has done an initial analysis of the seismic data from North Korea's reported nuclear weapon test and found 'an uncanny resemblance to the signals recorded for...

MarkWhittington writes: When Russia decided to abandon its drive to land cosmonauts on the moon, the reasons were not so much political than they were fiscal. The low price of oil and the costs of Vla...

Press2ToContinue writes: A German carpenter has invented a valve which he claims will revolutionize contraception, by allowing a man to turn the flow of sperm from his testicles on and off at the flic...

On December 28, 2015, Larry Seltzer wrote an article for Ars Technica provocatively titled (by Ars editors), The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? A link to this article was p...

itwbennett writes: Time Warner Cable said on Wednesday that up to 320,000 customers have had their accounts compromised. 'We have not yet determined how the information was obtained, but there are no ...

conner_bw writes: For the entire careers of most practicing computer scientists, a fundamental observation has consistently held true: CPUs are significantly more performant and more expensive than I/...

iamvego writes: Later than the typical release cadence, PostgreSQL 9.5 has finally been released, and brings with it a slew of new features including UPSERT functionality, row-level security, and some...

itwbennett writes: On Wednesday, Trend Micro wrote that it discovered a cyberattack on Dec. 21 that was designed to install banking malware on computers. The cybercriminals had compromised a legitimat...

jones_supa writes: South Korea has said that it will resume anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker broadcasts this week along the heavily fortified border with North Korea in retaliation of Pyongyang's claimed hy...

itwbennett writes: A couple of years ago, Facebook revealed it was using Blu-ray disks as a cost-efficient way to archive the billions of images that users uploaded to its service. When Facebook users...

Lucas123 writes: Indiegogo announced at CES today that is now has a crowdfunding site exclusively for big businesses, which often have hundreds of internal R&D projects or ideas that never see the...

wiredmikey writes: Rafal Los raises an interesting point about new Internet of Things (IoT) devices that may be coming into the office after Christmas, and the possible security risks associated. He u...

HughPickens.com writes: Mark Scott reports at the NY Times that Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe but some of Uber's fiercest opposition has come in Europe, where ...

msm1267 writes: Silent Circle, makers of the security and privacy focused Blackphone, have patched a vulnerability that could allow a malicious mobile application or remote attacker to access the devi...

Okian Warrior writes: Long term readers may recall the Free State Project, a plan to gather 20,000 liberty-minded participants and move to a low-populated state, as covered here on Slashdot. The proje...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has started giving third-party developers unannounced access to a new development tools kit which allows them to build their own Messenger bots. The Chat Software ...

v3rgEz writes: In a wide ranging interview, IT Pro talks with Microsoft's Javier Soltero about his plans to help Redmond get its groove back when it comes to email, walking a fine line between keeping...

campuscodi writes: Dutch security researcher Guido Vranken has published a paper [PDF] in which he details a new attack on TLS/SSL-encrypted traffic, one that can potentially allow attackers to extrac...

MarkWhittington writes: One of the privileges of landing on the moon is that the country that does so gets to name the landing site. For example, the International Astronomical Union has officially re...

coondoggie writes: The Airbus anti-drone system employs infrared cameras, radar technology and sensors to spot and track drones over six miles away, the company says. If the incoming drone is consider...

jyosim writes: College students always pay attention in class and do all the readings, right? Ok, they probably never did, but today's professors can actually find out how much each student pays atten...

operator_error writes: Verizon has now chosen to reverse "its strategy to expand in hosting and colocation services after it acquired data center operator Terremark Worldwide Inc in 2011 for $1.4 bill...

dcblogs writes: A 16-year effort by the Communication Workers of America to organize IBM employees into a union is ending. The union's local, the Alliance@IBM, is suspending 'organizing' efforts, and ...

Api.ai makes an Android voice-controlled utility called Assistant. I have it on my Android phone. It is one of many simiar apps, and I have been trying them a little at a time. Are any of them as good...

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced at CES that the service had gone live in 130 additional countries including India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. He called the expansion "th...

New submitter jerome writes: Pre-orders have just started for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. The $600 price tag is higher than most people were expecting — and that doesn't even accoun...

UnknowingFool writes: In the popular sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, Penny has sung "Soft Kitty" to the difficult Sheldon Cooper on numerous occasions as a lullaby and to comfort him. These scenes are su...

szczys writes: It's that time of year again, the Consumer Electronics Show leaks out of every media crevice. Although we've passed peak 3D Printing hype for the general public, the 3D Printer offering...

derekmead writes: In order to fight what it has called one of the largest child pornography sites on the dark web, the FBI hacked over a thousand computers, according to court documents reviewed by Mo...

An anonymous reader writes: Smart payments startup Coin has announced it will team up with MasterCard to use its electronic card technology to help companies integrate payment services into their wear...

An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, January 12, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 will officially reach their end of life. A new patch going live soon will add a notification that nags user...

New submitter n0w4k writes: Researchers at the University of Groningen have developed a self-replicating system able to not only pass hereditary information from one generation to another, but also mu...

itwbennett writes: Google released over-the-air firmware updates for its Nexus devices Monday and will publish the patches to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository by Wednesday, fixing a n...

sciencehabit writes: Most, if not all, galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers surrounded by dense clouds of stars. Now, researchers have found one that seems to have lost almost its e...

An anonymous reader writes: Cyrus Farivar writes about what's being called a new era in policing: the era of body-worn cameras. They're gaining a foothold in departments around the U.S. after a year o...

HughPickens.com writes: North Korea announced it has detonated its first hydrogen bomb, dramatically escalating the nuclear challenge from one of the world's most isolated and dangerous states. "This ...

An anonymous reader sends this news from Nature: For researchers who code, academic norms for tracking the value of their work seem grossly unfair. They can spend hours contributing to software that u...

Nerval's Lobster writes: Ford and Chinese technology company DJI (which manufactures drones that specialize in aerial photography) used the spotlight of this year's CES to announce a developer challen...

hackingbear writes: Following similar path of the 19th century America, China has advanced from being copycats to innovators. After its middle class has risen from 4% of population to 2/3 in the last ...

An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10,000 characters, though ...

An anonymous reader writes: Today U.S. President Barack Obama rolled out a set of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence. The most controversial of the provisions requires licenses for those...

An anonymous reader writes: Today Microsoft announced partnerships with several companies to bring Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure to cars. Volvo is having their Call Universal App integrate with Wi...

In the past, Los Alamos National Laboratory has done some of the United States' most crucial research and development. Lately, the lab has been dealing with accidents and management problems. Reader D...

New submitter qmrq sends news that Linode, a major provider of virtual private servers, has been compromised again. In a blog post, they said, "A security investigation into the unauthorized login of ...

sciencehabit writes: Lumos Labs, the company that produces the popular 'brain-training' program Lumosity, yesterday agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for runn...

StartsWithABang writes: In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just e...

HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian reports that Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, plans to release his new novel, a historical drama set in London during the 1840s, in installments via an a...

An anonymous reader writes: Zerodium, the company that buys zero-day bugs from security researchers and then sells them forward to government intelligence agencies, has put out a new bounty, this one ...

Press2ToContinue writes: When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. To make matters worse, about 30 of the disks...

Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secure...

bricko notes a report on what appears to be the first power outage known to have been caused by hackers:Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine le...

An anonymous reader writes: There were a lot of stories told about the future in 2015. More than usual, maybe. Big budget blockbusters, hefty, idea-rich novels, and epic, dystopian video games—t...

An anonymous reader writes: Cloud-based file hosting giant Dropbox has patented a new synchronization technology which could allow users to use a peer-to-peer network to securely share and collaborate...

alphadogg writes: A new wireless standard that extends Wi-Fi's reach down into the 900MHz band will keep the 802.11 family at the center of the developing Internet of Things, the Wi-Fi Alliance announ...

onedobb writes: Tests confirm that when Binge On is enabled, T-Mobile throttles all HTML5 video streams to around 1.5Mps, even when the phone is capable of downloading at higher speeds, and regardless...

itwbennett writes: A cyberespionage group known in the security community as Sandworm or BlackEnergy, after its primary malware tool, has recently updated its arsenal with a destructive data-wiping co...

szczys writes: You take tape for granted, but it's truly an engineering wonder. For instance, Scotch Magic tape exhibits triboluminescence; it will generate a bit of bluish light when coming off the r...

Advocatus Diaboli sends a report from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept about the NSA's efforts to subvert encryption. Back in 2013, several major publications reported that the NSA was able to crack e...

iONiUM writes: According to an article at Discover, "Authorities in Brazil have recently issued an unusual and unprecedented announcement to women: don't get pregnant, at least not just yet. Amidst an...

itwbennett writes: Researchers at Rapid7 have disclosed vulnerabilities in Comcast's Xfinity Home Security offerings that prevent the system from alerting homeowners to unsecured doors or windows and ...

the_newsbeagle writes: Now that it's easy and cheap to build strands of DNA, what kinds of strange new organisms will scientists and start-ups build? That's the question raised as synthetic biology co...

Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Upd...

HughPickens.com writes: Lawyers have been described as the canaries in the coal mine in the face of a wave of automation now beginning to displace highly skilled white-collar workers as the increasing...

An anonymous reader writes: IEEE researchers are proposing new standards for haptic codecs over software-defined 5G networks in order to achieve the ambitious 1ms latency and reliability required for ...

RoccamOccam writes: Mozilla developers have discussed a plan to implement support for a subset of non-standard CSS prefixes used in WebKit. Mozilla developer Daniel Holbert says: "A good chunk of the ...

blottsie writes: The Netherlands government issued a strong statement on Monday against weakening encryption for the purposes of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The move comes as government...

Christine Hall is FOSS Force's founder, publisher, chief editor, and everything else. She started the site about five years ago, but it has only started to attract notice in the last year. Christine b...

anderzole writes with news about Samsung's latest and greatest refrigerator unveiled at CES. Engadget reports: "One of the highlights of CES is always the wacky new appliance tech (and associated bick...

An anonymous reader writes: Amjad Masad, a programmer who works at Facebook, has put up a post about intuition and programming. It's based on a series of experiments (PDF) into how the presentation of...

szczys writes: Arduino has driven a tidal wave of embedded development over the last decade. But last year a rift formed in the shape of two companies — Arduino LLC and Arduino SRL — who a...

itwbennett writes: Last week, a database containing 191 million voter records was exposed because of a misconfigured database that no on wants to claim ownership of. Around the same time, a second, sm...

An anonymous reader writes: Ars notes that the RFC for IPv6 was published just over 20 years ago, and the protocol has finally reached the 10% deployment milestone. This is an increase from ~6% a year...

AmiMoJo writes: It looks likely that the UK will try to require ISPs to collect metadata on behalf of its security services, and various other agencies will have access to this vast, privacy- and secu...

An anonymous reader writes: General Motors has invested $500 million in ride-sharing service Lyft, and also committed resources to develop an on-demand network of autonomous cars. "GM will also work w...

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is planning on building his own personal assistant AI, recreating a system similar to that of the Jarvis butler featured in Marvel's Ir...

HughPickens.com writes: Volkswagen persuaded consumers it had created a new generation of so-called clean diesel cars — until investigators discovered that phony testing concealed that its vehic...

schwit1 writes with news that scientists have used a new gene-editing technique called CRISPR to treat mice with defective dystrophin genes. This is the first time that such a method has successfully ...

physburn writes: The Guardian reports that four new elements, with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118, have been formally added to the periodic table. The International Union of Pure and Applied Ch...

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter shut down Politwoops, a network of deleted tweets from politicians, this summer with the statement: "Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – twee...

An anonymous reader writes: The British government has announced that it will create a marine reserve slightly smaller than the UK in the waters off Ascension Island. The South Atlantic reserve totals...

New submitter gomezedward40 writes: Through her unconventional focus on addressing poverty, Superintendent Tiffany Anderson has been credited with rapidly improving the school district of Jennings, Mo...

New submitter Cbhihe writes: I want to edit an e-book, a scientific textbook to be distributed on the Kindle tablet to be exact. The book is written. For that I used LibreOffice.It comes complete with...

An anonymous reader writes: Ph.D. candidates Aisen Caro Chacin and Takeshi Ozu at Japan's Tsukuba University have created a haptic sonar glove that allows wearers to "feel" objects that are out of rea...

An anonymous reader writes: I'm inclined to agree with the suggestion that people make that the web is like the Wild West, but that's not to say that we have reached the same conclusion for the same r...

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have used a 3-D printer to make specialized ceramic parts that have overcome one of the biggest problems with ceramic objects: their tendency to crack. This new...

An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher from Emsisoft has discovered a new ransomware family coded via NW.js (formerly Node-WebKit). Why is it unique? Because it is the first of its kind to ...

HughPickens.com writes: Adolf Hitler's Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf was originally printed in 1925 — eight years before Hitler came to power. After Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, the Allied for...

theodp writes: For Mohamed Shugaa, the scariest Jurassic World creature is perhaps Apple CEO Tim Cook, not the Indominus Rex. That's because Shugaa discovered his 7-year-old son had managed to rack up...

An anonymous reader writes: LG Electronics will be showing off a new line of 4K Ultra-HD television sets at CES this week and a 98-inch 8K Super UHD giant. Digital Trends reports: "The UH9500 (screen ...

New submitter Fiona_OHanlon writes: According to an article at Ars Technica, researchers injected enzymes into ant larvae brains, causing genetically identical ants from different castes to behave as ...

schwit1 writes: "When you touch something, you are doing more than sensing the surface of that object. You're also changing it, however subtly. Your finger emits heat, and no matter how gentle you are...

HughPickens.com writes:CNN reports that a judge dismissed DUI charges against a woman in upstate New York after being presented with evidence the woman suffers from "auto-brewery syndrome" even though...

McGruber writes: Amechi Colvis Amuegbunam, 28, a Nigerian man living in the U.S. on a student visa, faces federal wire fraud charges in connection with a sophisticated email phishing scam targeting bu...

An anonymous reader writes: Programmers, raise your hand if you've been on a project where bugs keep piling up, management doesn't dedicate time to fix them, and the whole thing eventually bogs down. ...

An anonymous reader writes: At the end of November, BlackBerry announced it would pull its operations out of Pakistan after the country's government demanded access to BlackBerry's user data. The Paki...

An anonymous reader writes: UC Literature Professor Jackson Bliss puts into words something many of you have probably experienced: the evolution of the internet and mobile devices has changed how we r...

An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our tec...

schwit1 sends news about the effects of flexible working schedules on the people who try them. Research has found that many employees fall into a "grazing" pattern for work — constantly being in...

An anonymous reader writes: Major League Gaming (MLG) is one of the biggest e-sports operations out there. Or it was, until Activision Blizzard purchased most of its assets for $46 million. MLG's CEO ...

An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers have developed a new technique to measure the surface gravity on distant stars. Earlier techniques relied on measuring the amount of light coming from the star,...

New submitter shilly writes: The BBC is reporting that all its websites were taken offline on New Year's Eve for several hours, and the attack appears to be from a group calling itself New World Hacki...

An anonymous reader writes: Ok folks, it's been ten years since we've done this. What are your tech/science/nerd/misc predictions for 2016? Is VR going to be the bombshell it's being hyped as? Are wea...

An anonymous reader writes: Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society blog has put together a post about all of the space missions set to return data from planets, moons, and other bodies in the solar...

An anonymous reader writes: Iranian writer Hossein Derakhshan has a unique perspective on the internet. He got into blogging early on, and sparked the spread of blogs across the Iranian internet. In 2...

An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica takes a look at the history and development of the European Space agency. Getting things done at the ESA has an extra layer of difficulty compared to most othe...

An anonymous reader writes: A new poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research gathered opinions on the U.S. government's surveillance of internet communicati...

hol writes: Linode has been getting hit with DDoS attacks since Christmas Day, and it looks like their pain is set to continue. The attackers are rotating DDoS traffic through various regions of Linod...

theodp writes: The Education Revolution will be patented. USPTO records show that Khan Academy is seeking a patent for Systems and Methods for Split Testing Educational Videos. From the patent applica...

An anonymous reader writes: When Apple made its Swift programming language open source in early December, it opened the floodgates for suggestions and requests from developers. But the project's maint...

An anonymous reader writes: You may recall a company called CarrierIQ from when it angered tech-savvy internet users four years ago. They developed software that allowed explicit monitoring of anythin...

An anonymous reader writes: A bunch of Facebook users received mysterious messages yesterday congratulating them on 46 years of being friends with somebody on Facebook. An astute observer may note tha...

An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News:The State Department on Thursday released 5,500 more pages of Hillary Clinton's emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 8...

An anonymous reader writes: Two years after the PlayStation 4 was released, and two weeks after it was jailbroken, a group of hackers has now successfully installed Linux on it. "...it appears that th...

Bruce Perens writes: There's no shortage of stories of horrible treatment of women in Open Source projects. But how did we get here? How did we ever get a community where a vocal minority of males beh...

An anonymous reader writes: Which software had the most publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in 2015? According to a site called CVE Details, which organizes data provided by the National Vulnerability ...

An anonymous reader writes: If you've studied C++ any time in the past 25 years, you've probably read something by Scott Meyers. He wrote Effective C++, regarded by many as one of the top two books fo...

An anonymous reader writes: This year, we've seen some incredible price/performance breakthroughs in low-cost single board computers. LinuxGizmos has put together a compilation of 64 low-cost, hacker ...

TigerNut writes: CBC is running a story on the upcoming closest approach of Comet Catalina. While the headline makes it sound like a one-night deal for the morning of January 1, the best viewing may a...

An anonymous reader writes: A new year, with old systems. It is time to break bad old habits and develop good new ones. This list talks about new years resolutions for Linux and Unix sysadmins. List i...

An anonymous reader writes: 2015 was an undeniably huge year in Virtual Reality, breaking down the doors and setting the stage for an all-out 2016 consumer VR frenzy. The adoption of VR is not simply ...

MojoKid writes: Now that we're a few years removed from the introduction of the original Surface and Surface Pro, it's clear that Microsoft's vision had merit, and virtually all of the company's major...

An anonymous reader writes: When the Sun emits a flare or a mass ejection in the direction of Earth, these fast moving particles are when Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere are of the utmost importa...

szczys writes: We have reached a turning point in personal CNC Tools like mills and laser cutters. Up until now, your options were to drop some serious cash (businesses) or spend time to build them yo...

An anonymous reader writes with this Vice article about the power of crowds when it comes to solving complex problems. "Forget artificial intelligence: The key to solving the world's most complex prob...

An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study 58 million trees are dead or dying due to the California drought and hundreds of millions could die if the conditions persist. The LA Times reports...

An anonymous reader writes: Oculus has announced that a second game, Lucky's Tale, will come bundled with their virtual reality headset. The system will also come with another free virtual reality gam...

An anonymous reader writes: A $5 million lawsuit filed in New York federal court alleges that Apple's iOS 9 mobile operating software significantly slows down the iPhone 4S. According to the complaint...

An anonymous reader writes: Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has unveiled an intelligent robot receptionist called Nadine. Modeled after and built by Nadia Thalmann, the director of the I...

HughPickens.com writes: Researchers Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on the topic of open collaboration systems about how Wikipedia's reaction to its popularity is causing its decl...

An anonymous reader writes: Few devices have been around this long, have had cameo appearances in Star Trek, and remain in use today. The current E6-B looks almost exactly the same as the first one ma...

schwit1 writes with news about a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board about your right to record conversations at work. The Huffington Post reports: "If you're looking to catch your boss break...

An anonymous reader writes with this update about Derby who was born with a congenital deformity that deprived him of front paws and was outfitted with a pair of 3-D-printed prosthetics. According to ...

RogueyWon writes: While many critics have responded positively to JJ Abrams's take on Star Wars, one particular industry figure seems rather less impressed. George Lucas has criticized the "retro" ton...

nojayuk writes: The world's last operatingMagnoxnuclear reactor, Wylfa 1 in Anglesey, Wales was closed yesterdayafter providing carbon-free power for over 40 years. Wylfa1 was originally scheduled to ...

New submitter Nanmillerp sends word about Microsoft Garage's newest app which aims to take the best selfies possible. The Verge reports: "Microsoft's newest app for iOS isn't a piece of productivity s...

An anonymous reader writes: A panel of experts at the BBC discuss the possibility of re-purposing the Sahara Desert. Instead of having over 9 million square kilometers of barren sand, we could start a...

An anonymous reader writes: A pair of articles about the tech industry serve to highlight a growing trend. First, Om Malik writes in The New Yorker about the failure of ride-sharing company Sidecar, b...

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, Yahoo became the latest company promising to alert users who it suspected were being targeted by state-sponsored attacks (excepting Microsoft, who made a similar...

An anonymous reader writes: Seismometers have been deployed throughout the world. Scientists need a big web of them to gather data about earthquakes, and the network has expanded widely over the past ...

Advocatus Diaboli sends this report from Glen Greenwald:The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NSA under President Obama targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his top aid...

An anonymous reader writes: In a new interview, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig shared his view of the future of privacy in this age of data breaches. "The average cost per user of a data breach...

An anonymous reader writes: Workers in New York City have begun installing the city's first LinkNYC kiosks. The kiosks are free, public Wi-Fi access points, which are taking the spots formerly occupie...

saizai writes: I just filed my reply to the TSA's opposition to an emergency motion for preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order (PI/TRO) against the TSA's new policy that arbitrarily ma...

szczys writes: One thing the human brain still does a lot better than computers is to recognize patterns within noise. That's why CAPTCHA uses distorted images to prove you're human, and random number...