Articles by Slashdot from December 2016

From a report on TorrentFreak: 2016 has been a memorable year for torrent users but not in a good way. Over a period of just a few months, several of the largest torrent sites vanished from the scene....

Waking up to your favorite music is always nice, but it becomes rather annoying when you can'' turn off said alarm. From a report on Engadget: That's exactly what Sonos users are experiencing and one ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: It seems that Lumia has reached the end of the line, as the Microsoft Store is no longer selling any of the company's Windows Phone 8.1 or Windows 10 M...

An anonymous reader writes: Video game developer Running With Scissors has announced that it is open sourcing the original version of its most popular title-Postal, which was released back in 1997. Ev...

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Atlantic: Many aspects of website design have improved to the point that nuances and flourishes formerly reserved for the printed page are feasible and pleasing. But t...

Consumer Reports took many by surprise last week -- certainly Apple -- when it said it doesn't recommend the company's new MacBook Pro models. The American magazine, which has garnered credibility ove...

Foxconn Electronics is automating production at its factories in China in three phases, aiming to fully automate entire factories eventually, according to general manager Dai Jia-peng for Foxconn's Au...

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla engineers have added a mechanism to Firefox 52 that prevents websites from fingerprinting users using system fonts. The user privacy protection system was borrowed ...

After a recent report revealed Seattle had the nation's hottest housing market for the second month running, it should come as no surprise that many of the most competitive neighborhoods in the countr...

From a CNBC report: If you're like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone. Then you probably roll over and check your work email. That's a dangerous way to start the day, acco...

Want a virtual assistant that means you won't lose anything ever again? A patent application filed by Microsoft hints at that future. From a report on CNET: The technology described in the patent fili...

China's cash-strapped LeEco said it is in talks to secure 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) from an unidentified strategic investor, but the announcement was seen as insufficient to dispel concern over t...

An anonymous reader writes: Governments around the world shut down the internet more than 50 times in 2016 -- suppressing elections, slowing economies and limiting free speech. In the worst cases inte...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FBI have released an analysis of the allegedly Russian government-sponsored hacking groups bla...

schwit1 quotes a report from The Sun: Scientists believe a massive object which could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. The huge and mysterious "anomaly" is thou...

Researchers from the University of Liverpool believe it is possible to detect cognitive decline in the paintings of famous artists by analyzing subtle changes in their brush strokes over time. The tec...

The website of Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources has been updated with new language and no longer says that humans and greenhouse emissions cause climate change. Instead, the site says that ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from International Business Times: According to a report from ProPublica, the world's largest social network knows far more about its users than just what they do o...

schwit1 quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Mining companies are rolling out autonomous trucks, drills, and trains, which will boost efficiency but also reduce the need for human employees. Ri...

The Washington State Attorney General's Office has charged a Seattle man for setting up a fake talent agency for adult entertainers in order to trick women into posing nude and having sex with him. NB...

bsharma quotes a report from Reuters: Faced with the prospect of a multibillion-dollar write-down that could wipe out its shareholders' equity, Japan's Toshiba is running out of fixes: It is burning c...

The National Security Agency (NSA) knew that the Russian government hacked the email account of a prominent journalist the year before she was killed in Moscow, documents published by The Intercept sh...

Likely in response to the 25-hour sit-in staged by Democrats earlier in 2016, protesting the lack of gun reform, House Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed new fines and ethics violations for House members ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Billboard: As Facebook continues to grapple with its role in proliferating "fake news" amidst the heated U.S. election this year, it has another showdown loomi...

Readers BrianFagioli writes: Some operating systems are targeted at a single use to minimize the overhead and maximize the power of the hardware. One such focused OS is OpenELEC. This Linux distributi...

Twitter is considering an edit function for tweets. In a seemingly impromptu chat on his platform Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave hope to those who have long advocated for the feature, telling ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: We've known about Amazon's drone delivery ambitions since 2013. But patent filings from Amazon, circulated today by CB Insights' Zoe Leavitt, revea...

Following its huge launch on iOS this month, Nintendo's Mario auto-runner, Super Mario Run, comes to Android in 2017. We still don't have a specific release date, but Nintendo has now announced that A...

In the past few years, Google has used its so-called "knowledge graph" to make search results far more useful than just a list of links -- you can get lots of info on a variety of topics right in Goog...

Dustin Volz and Joel Schectman, reporting for Reuters: The Obama administration plans to announce on Thursday a series of retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking into U.S. political institutio...

President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Sprint is moving 5,000 offshore jobs back to the United States and OneWeb, a satellite Internet startup, is adding 3,000 more jobs in the U.S. From a re...

An anonymous reader writes: Like loyalty to a political party or hometown sports team, smartphone users are extremely passionate about their choices -- a commitment that led many customers to stick wi...

Not long ago, the music industry was losing money left and right. Recession, rampant piracy, falling CD sales and a fear that "kids just don't buy music any more" had giant record labels, once oozing ...

Amazon is hoping to replicate the success of its online-only sales. It has announced a "Digital Day" sale on December 30, where it will offer discounts of up to 50 percent on apps, ebooks, games, movi...

From the beginning of next year, authorities will start collecting iris images from Singapore citizens and permanent residents (PRs) when they register or re-register for their NRIC, or apply for or r...

An anonymous reader writes: Windows 10 Insider builds will now feature Green Screen of Death (GSOD) instead of the classic Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error page we have all become accustomed to. The ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deutsche Welle: The truck that plowed into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12, came to a halt due an automatic braking system, according to German media rep...

In response to the California Department of Motor Vehicles ordering Uber's autonomous vehicles off the roads in San Francisco due to a lack of a permit, Florida state Sen. Jeff Brandes said he welcome...

schwit1 writes: Tracking data suggests that two Earth-observation satellites launched today by China's Long March 2D rocket were placed in the wrong orbits. Spaceflight Now reports: "The two SuperView...

randomErr quotes a report from Quartz: In the last 10 years, researchers have developed specific sniff tests for diagnosing tuberculosis, hypertension, cystic fibrosis, and even certain types of cance...

According to CNN, the Czech Republic is setting up a new counter-terrorism unit to combat the rise of fake news or "foreign disinformation campaigns." The counter-terrorism unit is called "The Center ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: It seems that some Pixel devices are affected by the same infamous shutdown bug that plagued the Nexus 6P where the device would prematurely...

Alastair Gee writes via The Guardian about Palo Alto's problem with homeless children. Palo Alto is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, yet "slightly more than one-third of students...

wiredmikey writes from a report via SecurityWeek: A recently discovered variant of the KillDisk malware encrypts files and holds them for ransom instead of deleting them. Since KillDisk has been used ...

dryriver writes: I got together with old computer nerd friends the other day. All of us have been at it since the 8-bit/1980s days of Amstrad, Atari, Commodore 64-type home computers. Everybody at the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Nevada's state government website has leaked the personal data on over 11,700 applicants for dispensing medical marijuana in the state. Each application...

A dash cam footage suggests a Tesla on Autopilot may have predicted a nearby freeway crash before it actually happened. A video showed that a Tesla car driving on a highway in the Netherlands started ...

Microsoft may have plans to improve gaming experience on Windows 10. The speculation comes after long time watcher @h0x0d found a new "gamemode.dll" in the latest Windows 10 developer build, reports G...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When you think of North Korea, the first thing that springs to mind is probably not a well-featured tablet PC. But that's just what researchers at...

Reader Mark Wilson writes: Earlier in the year, a huge DDoS attack was launched on Krebs on Security. Analysis showed that the attack pelted servers with 620 Gbps, and there were fears that the releas...

It turns out the $159 AirPods Bluetooth earphones are selling well, or so CEO Tim Cook would have us believed. Cook dropped by the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday while on vacation, and talked ab...

Alibaba Digital Media and Entertainment, part of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is planning to invest $7.2 billion in entertainment and media over the next three years. From a report on Vulture, su...

Toshiba's troubles keep piling up. From a report on CNN Money: The Japanese firm's shares plunged 20% on Wednesday, after the company warned it is expecting billions of dollars in losses from its take...

Security firms have been warning us for more than a year about the possibility of Android malware jumping from phones and tablets to other Android-powered devices, such smart TVs. The latest incident ...

Airline booking systems lack basic security checks that would stop attackers changing flight details or stealing rewards, warn experts. From a report on BBC: The problems emerge because the six-digit ...

An anonymous reader writes: Ahead of tradeshow CES 2017, Lenovo today announced major changes coming to its ThinkPad lineup of laptops and PCs. First, Lenovo has decided to ship 2017 ThinkPad models w...

South Korea's antitrust regulator has fined Qualcomm $854 million for what it called unfair business practices in patent licensing and modem chip sales, a decision the U.S. chipmaker said it will chal...

Chinese traders hacked into the computer systems of U.S. law firms that handle mergers, then used the data for insider trading that generated more than $4 million in illegal profits, federal prosecuto...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released its recommendations for how medical device manufacturers should maintain the security of internet-con...

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: If you've had any doubts of Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake processor's capabilities with respect to overclocking, don't fret. It's looking like even the most ...

China has revealed some ambitious plans for space domination in the 2020s. On Tuesday, China set out its plans to become the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon, in around 2018, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Apple's iPhone and iPad were the most popular mobile devices gifted during the holidays this year, according to new data shared by Yahoo-owned mobi...

As Amazon prepares its drone-based delivery service Prime Air for the United States, the company has been looking for ways to keep its drones safe while they're flying to and from their destinations. ...

Uber has launched a website for a service called Uber Freight. While there are little details about the company's expansion from ride-hailing, Uber Freight is meant to prepare the world for autonomous...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ValueWalk: A robot designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters which bear a striking resemblance to the military robots seen in the movie Avatar has ...

Mikkeles quotes a report from CBC.ca: Vera Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter, has died, her son said Monday. She was 88. Vera Rubin found that galaxies do...

Tulsa_Time quotes a report from CNET: Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot are in millions of homes now, with holiday sales more than quadrupling from 2015. Always listening for its wake word, the breakthrough ...

According to Reuters, Panasonic will invest more than $256 million (30 billion yen) in a New York production facility of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors to make photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules. Reuters r...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: A security flaw discovered in a common PHP class allows knowledgeable attackers to execute code on a website that uses a vulnerable versi...

Carrie Fisher, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the "Star Wars" film franchise, died o...

Samsung may only be in the planning stages for its Note7-disabling update in South Korea, but over in the U.S. things are in full swing. The company announced earlier this month that such an update wo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just before the Christmas holiday, Fitbit dropped a case it filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission claiming Jawbone had violated one ...

An anonymous reader writes: Every year, the US Department of Agriculture devotes millions of dollars to farmers in rural areas. The government is increasingly starting to offer assistance to urban far...

Fake news has plagued Facebook over the last year, and now even the social media giant is falling for it. From a report on CNET: The site's Safety Check feature has been crucial during terrorist attac...

It's getting harder for people who don't like paying for movies, music, and applications. Popular torrent website ExtraTorrent is suffering an outage Tuesday, the site confirmed. The site says it is o...

Last week, Cyanogen Inc announced it is shutting down all its services. A day later, CyanogenMod announced that it is going away too. Regardless of how you found Cyanogen's commercial operating system...

Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it is expanding its Prime Video on-demand video streaming service to over 200 countries and territories. But how good is the content catalogue? A report on Va...

China's top cybersecurity body reaffirmed its commitment to heightened cybersecurity surveillance on Tuesday, calling for increased scrutiny of local and foreign technology used in industries deemed c...

The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers. From a report on BBC: The report estimates that there are just 7,100 of the world's fas...

If you were rooting for fictitious chatacters Dolores and William to make it work on HBO's Westworld, just wait a few more decades and their relationship may be able to exist in real life. That's righ...

Turkey has been cracking down on internet activity at a frenetic pace ever since an attempted military coup in the summer, and it's now clear that there are a lot of people caught in the dragnet. From...

An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews article: If you have been looking for a new Chromebook with some modern specifications and features, I have some good news. An all-new convertible touchscreen ASU...

Sony Music Entertainment has apologised to Britney Spears fans after its Twitter account was hacked and fake statements saying that the pop music icon had died were posted online. From a report: Sony ...

Spotify is not only one of the world's most popular music services, it's also one that's proven particularly popular with both current and former pirates. From a report on TorrentFreak: Today Spotify ...

An anonymous reader writes from a BBC article: "I'm just a farmer's wife," says Christine Conder, modestly. But for 2,300 members of the rural communities of Lancashire she is also a revolutionary int...

When Apple said it would publish its artificial intelligence research, it raised at least a couple of big questions. When would we see the first paper? And would the public data be important, or would...

Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn could help the Redmond company become the first technology giant to reach a market value of $1 trillion, or so thinks a notable analyst. Analyst Micha...

For years, an "entrepreneurial spirit" kept several of abandoned articles on Wikipedia afloat. The WikiProject called Abandoned Articles, which sought to bring abandoned articles back to life, or "if ...

Last week, Consumer Reports concluded that it won't be recommending Apple's new MacBook Pro models. The American magazine published since 1936 by Consumers Union, a nonprofit organization, cited incon...

HandBrake, popular open source video transcoder, has finally hit version 1.0.0 affter spending roughly more than 13 years in development. HandBrake 1.0.0 brings tons of new presets and support for mor...

In less than a week after Nokia sued Apple for patent infringement in courts around the world, saying that Apple has refused to license its patents, Apple has pulled all Withings products from its sto...

Uber recently landed itself in hot water after a report claimed that its app was tracking the location of passengers even when they had not used the service for weeks. The company has responded to the...

The year is almost over. It's time we asked you about the books you read over the past few months. Which ones -- new or old -- were your favourite? Please share just one title name in the comments sec...

A dusty village on the outskirts of Ningde, a third-tier city in China's southeast, seems an unlikely place for the headquarters of a potential global leader in future automotive technology. Reuters w...

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft had last week said that it wouldn't be releasing a new Windows 10 build for insiders on Fast ring this year. But the supposed build has leaked online. The build 1...

An anonymous reader quotes Tech Times:Pixel owners have so far reported on camera issues, audio issues, LTE band 4 connectivity problems and others, but the random freezing remains among the most pers...

The Deseret News reports that Hollywood studios "aren't happy with VidAngel, saying in a statement Wednesday that the Utah-based streaming service 'continues to illegally stream our content without a ...

An anonymous reader quotes The Daily Mirror:Ireland has said it has received more than 100 inquiries from major firms looking to move from the UK because of Brexit. Martin Shanahan, the chief executiv...

Bufferbloat is that "undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data," according to the site foran ongoing project trying to address it. Now long-time S...

ComputerWorld reports:In early December, Carnival Corp. told about 200 IT employees that the company was transferring their work to Capgemini, a large IT outsourcing firm. The employees had a choice: ...

"The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that," reports the New York Times, citing a new paper by neuroscience researcher...

Slashdot reader rpavlicek writes, "Research done by MIT late this year has shown that light signals can improve the brain's neuron gamma frequency which can reverse the effects of Alzheimer's disease ...

Long-time Slashdot reader Jim Hall -- part of GNOME's board of directors -- has a Christmas gift. Since 1994 he's been overseeing an open source project that maintains a replacement for the MS-DOS ope...

Google.org gives nonprofits roughly $100 million each year. But now the Register argues that festive giving "has become a 'Googlicious' sales push." Among other things, The Register criticizes the $30...

Europe's Swarm constellation of satellites have documented bigger-than-expected changes that have been occurring in the Earth's magnetic field. Earlier this year SpaceWeather.com reported that the dat...

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch's report about Baidu's newest project:The search giant sometimes referred to as the 'Google of China' partnered with KFC to open a new "smart restaurant" in Beiji...

Six million homes already have an Amazon device with it Alexa voice assistant -- about 5% of all households. But Backchannel argues that Amazon is already dominating the race to become the operating s...

"if you sell one seat to two different people, and only one of them shows up, you get extra money," explains an article in Popular Mechanics shared by schwit1. Citing a recent TED-Ed video, they argue...

!Best-known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy and The Force Awakens, actress Carrie Fisher is recovering from a "cardiac event" Friday. An anonymous reader quotes ABC:Her brother, Tod...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN's report about an iPhone 7 "encased in solid gold, encrusted with diamonds and bearing the face of Donald Trump." Priced around $151,000, it's just one example of the mi...

"The federal government has not justified its excessive secrecy about the massive telephone surveillance program known as Hemisphere, a court ruled in an EFF Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on Thur...

Long-time Slashdot reader kruhft brings news about a new S-Expression based language transpiler that has the feel of C. This structure allows for the creation of code generation macros using the full ...

Long-time Slashdot reader Nemosoft Unv. writes: A very brief post onCyanogen's blog says it all really: "As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly b...

"Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest," reports a bipartisan committee in the U.S. Congress. Mark Wilson quotes Beta News: The Congressional Encryption Working Group...

"If you look at what our Congress is doing for tech, it's failing. It's putting all of us in danger," game developer Brianna Wu told CNN, adding "It's so imperative that people of my generation, nativ...

An anonymous reader quotes a CBS report about more bad news for Twitter:The microblogging service has acknowledged that it inadvertently overcharged some advertisers for video ads, capping off a year ...

On Friday, more than a year after Python 3.5, core developers Elvis Pranskevichus and Yury Selivanov announced the release of version 3.6. An anonymous reader writes:InfoWorld describes the changes as...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and ot...

Earlier this week, General Motors announced a partnership with Boston-area startup WiTricity to develop wireless charging pads for electric vehicles. Their goal is to develop a wireless "charging pad"...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to research published Thursday in Science, physicists at Princeton University have designed a device that allows a single electron to pa...

earlytime writes: Large scale account hacks such as the billion user Yahoo breach and targeted phishing hacks of gmail accounts during the U.S. election have made 2016 an infamous year for web securit...

schwit1 quotes a report from The New York Times: Social isolation is a growing epidemic (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- one that's increasingly recognized as having dire physical, men...

Krystalo writes: Mozilla today announced that it will continue to support Firefox for Windows XP and Windows Vista until September 2017. In March 2017, XP and Vista users will automatically be moved t...

The Dutch Consumer and Markets regulator ordered T-Mobile to shut down its zero-rated music streaming service because it violates the country's net neutrality rules. T-Mobile launched the Music Freedo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: BitTorrent has now done for live video what it did for file downloads: invented peer-to-peer technology that moves the burden of data transfer from...

schwit1 quotes a report from Politico: Since Tuesday, foreign travelers arriving in the United States on the visa waiver program have been presented with an "optional" request to "enter information as...

In an interview with Japan-based Kyoto NP, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima revealed that Super Mario Run is just the start of a new strategy for mobile gaming. From an article on MacWorld: The co...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: For months, YouTubers have complained that their view counts are down. New data from the third-party stat tracker SocialBlade confirms what YouTubers f...

The off-duty police officer who killed the Russian ambassador in Turkey was shot by Turkish special forces minutes after the crime. He had an iPhone 4S on him, and now, Haberturk, Turkish authorities ...

Reader MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's Pascal architecture has been wildly successful in the consumer space. The various GPUs that power the GeForce GTX 10 series are all highly competitive at their respecti...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The FBI is investigating how hackers infiltrated computers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for several years beginning in 2010 in a breac...

Holidays are the time when many of us get some extra time to catch up on all the good movies and TV shows that our friends wanted us to watch, but we never did. To make things enticing for people, Ama...

IBM wants to put the patent war in perspective. Big Blue said that it is poised to get the most U.S. patents of any tech company for the 24th year in a row. From a report on VentureBeat: In 2015, IBM ...

According to a study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, an experimental vaccine against the Ebola virus was found to be 100 percent effective. The results offer hope of better protec...

An Uber employee has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of misleading employees about their equity compensation. Uber "devised a fraudulent scheme to recruit highly sought software engineers," accor...

The US Government has listed some of the largest piracy websites and other copyright-infringing venues. The USTR calls on foreign countries to take action against popular piracy sites such as The Pira...

An anonymous reader writes: The entire Steam domain seems to be down for everyone. The websites and Steam clients won't connect. No word from Steam on Twitter or Reddit about the outage. The status pa...

A cargo plane emblazoned with "Prime Air" descended from an empty sky at Lehigh Valley International Airport on Tuesday, ninety minutes from the bustle of New York City, loaded with crates of goods du...

Half of the UK's electricity came from wind turbines, solar panels, wood burning and nuclear reactors between July and September, in a milestone first. From a report on The Guardian: Official figures ...

Gaming company Valve Corporation has been hit with a $3 million fine after the Federal Court found its online games site Steam breached Australian Consumer Laws. From a report: The court imposed the m...

It's no secret that Microsoft has been aggressively pushing Windows 10 to users. Over the past year and a half, we have seen users complain about Windows 10 automatically getting downloaded to their c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, we were sent a series of large, encrypted files purportedly belonging to a U.S. police department as a result of a leak at a law firm...

schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Back in April, Stanford University professor Oussama Khatib led a team of researchers on an underwater archaeological expedition, 30 kilometers off the sout...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Scientific American: Eating beef from an animal infected with mad cow disease can lead to an untreatable condition that attacks the brain and is universall...

Wikipedia has revealed its most edited articles of 2016. Believe it or not, the two most edited articles of the year were for Deaths in 2016, which was edited 18,230 times, and Donald Trump, with 8,93...

Consumer Reports has released its evaluation of the new MacBook Pro laptops, and it's not good. The 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to fail to receive a recommendation from the nonprofit organiz...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Uber is moving its self-driving pilot to Arizona, one day after the California Department of Motor Vehicles ordered the autonomous vehicles off the roa...

The world's first solar road has officially opened in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France. The road is 1 kilometer long and can generate enough electricity to power the street...

Niantic, the developers behind Pokemon Go, have finally launched the Apple Watch version of the game. The new smartwatch app will let you play Pokemon Go without having to constantly pull out your sma...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Before a recent update that is being gradually pushed to Tesla owners, the automaker allowed its Autopilot to be set at a higher speed than the speed...

schwit1 quotes a report from Reuters: A hacking group linked to the Russian government and high-profile cyber attacks against Democrats during the U.S. presidential election likely used a malware impl...

Despite its strong protectionism laws in place that require any automaker wanting to establish production capacity in the country to partner and share its technology with a local manufacturer, China i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Edward Snowden has been in contact with Russian intelligence officials since arriving in Russia in 2013, according to a new report from Congress. "Since S...

The Norwegian government aims to pass a law in the spring of next year to allow testing of self-driving vehicles on Norwegian roads, it said on Thursday. From a report: Norway is one of the largest ma...

Bitcoin, the digital currency that most people have never actually used, has hit a record value of $14 billion after jumping 5 percent on Thursday. From a report on The Guardian: The price of one bitc...

Last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company will be bringing free Wi-Fi to 100 railway stations in India by the end of 2016. The company began, what was the "the largest public Wi-Fi pro...

Google isn't giving up on its smartwatches. The company said today it will be launching two new flagship smartwatches in the first quarter of next year. These watches will run Android Wear 2.0 operati...

In case you wanted to ground your abstract TV FOMO in hard numbers, FX has data on the fact that, yes, there really is too much TV. An anonymous reader shares a report: The network, whose CEO John Lan...

Developers of the popular Signal secure messaging app have started to use Google's domain as a front to hide traffic to their service and to sidestep blocking attempts. Bypassing online censorship in ...

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: Apple has pushed back a deadline for developers to support a key transport security technology in apps submitted to the company's app stores. Officials said at the Apple Wo...

Mark Zuckerberg is still trying to explain what his company does. The Facebook CEO said in August that the social-networking giant had no ambitions of being a content provider, insisting that Facebook...

From a report on BetaNews: If you own a Raspberry Pi, you're probably familiar with PIXEL. The desktop environment is included in the Raspbian OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation describes PIXEL as the "G...

An anonymous shares a report on Engadget: Ice isn't just great for keeping your drinks cool at parties, it also helps keep our planet cool by reflecting some of the sun's heat away. But thanks to our ...

93 Escort Wagon writes: San Francisco bicyclists can breathe a sigh of relief now that Uber has suspended testing of its autonomous fleet in the city. The company announced the decision after the Cali...

According to a new SuperData Research report, the worldwide gaming market was worth a whopping $91 billion this year, with mobile gaming leading the way with a total estimated market value of $41 bill...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: The "reactionless" Electromagnetic Drive, or EmDrive for short, is an engine propelled solely by electromagnetic radiation confined in a micro...

schwit1 quotes a report from Phys.Org: U.S. drone delivery service Flirtey on Monday announced that its self-piloting flying machines have whisked flu medicine, hot food and more from 7-Eleven conveni...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Firefox 50, Mozilla has rolled out the first major piece of its new multi-process architecture. Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari ...

chicksdaddy quotes a report from The Security Ledger: With functional, quantum computers on the (distant?) horizon, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is asking the public for h...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Yahoo Inc's secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional prot...

New submitter jbwiebe quotes a report from CBC.ca: The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has declared broadband internet a basic telecommunications service. In a rulin...

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, WordPress security firm WordFence revealed it detected over 1.65 million brute-force attacks originating from an ISP in Ukraine that generated more malicious tra...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Data from the builds on PCPartPicker show an interesting trend among the buyers of AMD CPUs. Of the 25,780 builds on PCPartPicker from the last 31 months with a pr...

Before the new administration takes over next month, President Obama took new action Wednesday to place large sections of the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans off limits to oil drilling. NPR reports: Th...

Gandalf_the_Beardy quotes a report from The Register: The Register reports on the story of Jim Giercyk, an amateur radio enthusiast who had his copy of the popular Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) software revo...

Nokia today announced a number of patent infringement complaints against Apple in Europe and the U.S. courts. There are 32 patents in total that Nokia claims Apple infringed, covering technologies suc...

Facebook said Wednesday that government requests for user account data rose 27 percent in the first half of 2016, compared to the second half of last year, with U.S. law enforcement agencies topping t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Netflix, Marvel and various Marvel-affiliated Twitter accounts became the latest victims of hacker group OurMine on Wednesday. On Wednesday morning, t...

Twitter is "toast" as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service. From ...

An anonymous reader writes: A Google product manager has filed a lawsuit against the company for its confidentiality policies on the grounds they violate California labor laws. California labor laws g...

New submitter iampiti writes: The Document Foundation has announced a new user interface concept for LibreOffice. Users will be able to choose from several toolbar configurations including the "Notebo...

Microsoft has secured a massive $927m contract to provide technical support and consultation to the United States Department of Defense. This is the latest in a series of key deals that Microsoft has ...

Designer Ilya Birman writes: I understand why rendering a complicated layout may be slow. Or why executing a complicated script may be slow. Actually, browsers are rather fast doing these things. If y...

Nintendo's first Mario smartphone game has set a download record but gamers baulked at the one-time cost of unlocking content, prompting investors to push the Japanese game makers' stock to a one-mont...

The Sling TV team has inadvertently spilled the beans on its previously leaked media hub for cord cutters. Zatz Not Funny discovered a briefly available landing website for the AirTV Player, and it's ...

Even after two months of an official global recall for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, 10 percent of the units sold are still in use. From a report: Research firm Apteligent reports that the number of Gala...

"General and indiscriminate retention" of emails and electronic communications by governments is illegal, the EU's highest court has ruled, in a judgment that could trigger challenges against the UK's...

The White House has released a new report warning of a not-too-distant future where artificial intelligence and robotics will take the place of human labor. Recode highlights in its report the three k...

randomErr writes: Japan successfully launched a solid fuel rocket named Epsilon-2. The 26-meter-long rocket launched from the Uchinoura Space Center at about 8 p.m. local time. Japan Aerospace Explora...

In a press release, Crytek, the developer behind hits such as the Crysis and Far Cry shooters, announced that it will be closing five of its studios in an effort to "refocus on its core strengths." Th...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Daily Dot: The more social media you use, the higher the likelihood that you'll be anxious or depressed. At least according to the University of Pittsburgh Cen...

Federals agents have accused Brian Brundage, the former owner of Chicago-based electronics recycling company Intercon Solutions and current owner of EnviroGreen Processing, of fraud for failing to pro...

Long-time Slashdot reader emil writes about how ADUPS, an Android "firmware provisioning" company specializing in both big data collection of Android usage and hostile app installation and/or firmware...

the_newsbeagle writes: By showing that human cells naturally engulf minuscule silicon nanowires, a material scientist from the University of Chicago has opened the way to intracellular electronics. Ap...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, ATT introduced a new service for automated blocking of fraud or spam calls. Dubbed ATT Call Protect, the system identifies specific numbers b...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently demoed his homemade artificial intelligence assistant Jarvis for Fast Company, and while their report didn't mention anything specific about the assistant's synth...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The Obama administration has failed to renegotiate portions of an international arms control arrangement to make it easier to export tools related to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine mile route once a week. After the progr...

Russian hackers have used fake websites and bots to steal millions of dollars from advertisers. According to researchers, the fraud has siphoned more than $180 million from the online ad industry. CNN...

Reader msm1267 writes: Researchers at IOActive today disclosed vulnerabilities in Panasonic Avionics In-Flight Entertainment Systems that were reported to the manufacturer close to two years ago. The ...

An anonymous reader writes: Egypt has blocked its residents from accessing encrypted messaging app Signal, according to the application's developer. Mada Masr, an Egypt-based media organization, repor...

Last week, an unidentified Twitter user tweeted a seizure-inducing animation at Newsweek and Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald, who has epilepsy. Now, Eichenwald has taken the first step toward ident...

Uber has admitted that there is a "problem" with the way autonomous vehicles cross bike lanes, raising serious questions about the safety of cyclists days after the company announced it would openly d...

Apple CEO Tim Cook may have assured employees that the company is committed to Mac computers, but people working in the Mac team say the company now pays far less attention to the computer lineup, acc...

The Nintendo Switch -- the hybrid portable games console/tablet due for release in March 2017 -- will be powered by Nvidia's older Tegra X1 SoC and not its upcoming Tegra X2 "Parker" SoC as initially ...

Apple is in talks with India's government to explore making products locally, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, as the U.S. firm aims to make deeper inroads in the world's second-largest mo...

The European Commission has charged Facebook with providing misleading information during its takeover of the online messaging service WhatsApp, opening the company to a possible fine of 1 percent of ...

Apple CEO Tim Cook has assured the employees that the company is committed to the computer lineups and that a desktop computer is certainly on the way. From a report on TechCrunch: "Some folks in the ...

Google says it is "thinking deeply" about ways to improve search, after criticism over how some results -- including ones discussing the Holocaust -- were ranked. From a report on BBC: Searching for "...

According to a report from The Information (Warning: paywalled), Uber has lost more than $800 million in the third quarter. CNBC reports: The results, The Information reported, put Uber on pace to rec...

EzInKy writes: The BBC and others are reporting the results of a study that women's brains do in fact change during pregnancy. BBC reports: "Pregnancy reduces grey matter in specific parts of a woman'...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: Dutch film student Anthony van der Meer had the unfortunate pleasure of having his phone stolen while having lunch in Amsterdam. Unsatisfied wit...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. electric grid continued to transform in 2016. No new coal plants were added, and solar became the top new source of generating capacity....

For the first time, researchers from Indiana University were able to blast antimatter atoms with a laser to measure the light emitted from the anti-atoms. The researchers hope to answer one of the big...

mi writes: The drama is over, Donald J. Trump passed the 270 electoral votes necessary to become President. A few electors dissented, resulting in their prompt dismissal and replacement per their stat...

Artem Tashkinov writes: Waymo, what used to be a Google division and now is a new division in Alphabet, has revealed its first production ready fully autonomous car based on Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. ...

harrymcc writes: As Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2016, he built Jarvis -- a service similar to Alexa or Google Assistant, but built to do exactly the things he wants to do in his home, and...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook Messenger is launching its own split-screen group video chat feature. Six users can appear in split-screen at the time and don Snapchat-st...

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Google has released a new set of tests it uses to probe cryptographic libraries for vulnerabilities to known attacks. The tests can be used against most ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: People buying new computers and devices in South Carolina would be blocked from accessing porn under a newly proposed law. A bill, pre-filed earlier thi...

An anonymous reader writes: Adobe released today Flash Player 24 for Linux, after previously abandoning the application without explanation in 2012. The NPAPI architecture of Flash Player for Linux is...

Reader Presto Vivace shares a report on The Intercept: IBM employees are taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company's initial refusal to ru...

Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted. From a report: At least 23 cities iss...

Next month, the Finnish government is going to try something completely different to help its unemployed citizens: give them free money. From a report on The Outline: On Jan. 9, 2017, a randomly selec...

A 'mere' 10.8% phishing success rate has forced Los Angeles County to notify approximately 756,000 individuals that their personal information may have been compromised. The attack occurred on May 13,...

A bipartisan House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report released today urges Congress to pass legislation to regulate cell-site simulation surveillance devices like the Stingray. From a re...

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung seems to be doing everything within its power to avoid a repeat of the great Galaxy Note 7 battery crisis of 2016. That might even include buying in batteries from ...

A string of tweets put out by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Saturday hints that his entrepreneurial future may be a little "boring." USA Today reports: The Tesla and SpaceX founder got on Twit...

Microsoft is pushing hard for Windows 10 to become the operating system of choice for everyone across the world, but this isn't happening just yet, as Windows 7 keeps dominating the desktop market. Fr...

Apple has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, s...

People aren't loving Nintendo's newly released Super Mario Run. Nintendo's stock plunged 7.1% Monday, bringing its total drop since the game's release last week to more than 11%, Bloomberg reports. Th...

An anonymous reader writes: Turkey's President Erdogan and the ruling AKP party are increasingly bent on silencing online dissent, and that now affects you even if you're smart enough to evade typical...

Every year more than 10 million packages are stolen off doorsteps, according to a study by August Home Inc. -- a company which sells a "smart" door lock that's controlled by your cellphone so you can ...

BlackBerry's Unix-like OS, QNX, is already in millions of cars. But today they're expanding their facility in Ottawa "to focus on developing advanced driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technolog...

An anonymous reader quote InfoWorld:Two years ago Microsoft did the unthinkable: It declared it would open-source its .NET server-side cloud stack with the introduction of .NET Core... Thus far, the m...

"Over a century of fear and filing cabinets" at the FBI has been exposed through six years of Freedom of Information Act requests. And now MuckRock founder (and long-time Slashdot reader) v3rgEz write...

"If someone gave you a big chunk of change to build a small one- or two-room office, what would you do?" asks long-time Slashdot reader darkpixel2k, as he plans to build a small office out in his back...

An anonymous reader writes:The non-profit association that sponsors Linus Torvalds' work on Linux also offers self-paced online training and certification programs. And now through December 22, they'r...

Core evangelist Thibaut Rouffineau writes about the results of Ubuntu's survey of 2000 consumers about their Internet of Things devices:This survey revealed that, worryingly, only 31% of consumers tha...

It's the open source web version of the classic Linux strategy game, and now Slashdot reader Andreas(R) -- one of its developers -- has an announcement.Now the developers are working on bringing the g...

This week the FBI arrested a 26-year-old southern California man for launching a DDoS attack against online chat service Chatango at the end of 2014 and in early 2015 -- part of a new crackdown on the...

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American's Cross-Check blog:Two new posts on this website have me contemplating, once again, the terrible possibility that psychiatry is hurting more people than ...

Less then four weeks after Microsoft formally acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion, there's been a database breach.An anonymous reader writes:LinkedIn is sending emails to 9.5 million users of Lynda.com,...

Electronic Frontier Foundation has dispatched a team of technologists and lawyers to a protest site in Standing Rock, North Dakota, to investigate "several reports of potentially unlawful surveillance...

An anonymous reader writes:Apple has been ordered to cut a $2 million check for denying some of its retail workers meal breaks. The lawsuit was first filed in 2011 by four Apple employees in San Diego...

An anonymous reader quotes VOA News:Chinese researchers have identified broadly neutralizing human antibodies from a Zika patient that protected mice against infection with the mosquito-borne illness....

Long-time Slashdot reader ClickOnThis quotes CNN: Some scientists and academics are embarking on a frenzied mission to archive reams of scientific data on climate change, energized by a concern that a...

500,000 people signed up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk, one of several online microjobs platforms that "let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe," reports T...

Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not, and now Oracle "is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licenses," reports t...

"As companies tighten their purse strings, they're spreading out their hires -- this year, and for years to come," reports Backchannel, citing interviews with executives and other workplace analysts. ...

Friday the United Nations agreed to discuss a ban on "killer robots" in 2017. The 123 signatories to a long-standing conventional weapons pact "agreed to formalize their efforts next year to deal with...

msm1267 quotes ThreatPost: The amount of insecure software tied to reused third-party libraries and lingering in applications long after patches have been deployed is staggering. It's a habitual probl...

mask.of.sanity writes: A researcher has reported 10 vulnerabilities in McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise for Linux that when chained together result in root remote code execution. McAfee took six months t...

"Following a failed takedown attempt, changes made to the Mirai malware variant responsible for building one of today's biggest botnets of IoT devices will make it incredibly harder for authorities an...

Calling it "the next revolution in roadway safety," the U.S. Department of Transportation hopes to standardize "vehicle communications" technology. Slashdot reader coondoggie writes:The idea is to ena...

tomhath quotes the BBC: Dr Heimlich died at the age of 96. He invented the lifesaving technique, which uses abdominal thrusts to clear a person's airway, in 1974. In May he used the technique himself ...

At a bar in London, they're now testing the prototype for a self-driving beer tap, according to drunkdrone. Gizmodo UK reports:All you need to do is select your pint of choice on the touchscreen, pay ...

Long-time Slashdot reader paranoidd writes: GoboLinux announced Thursday the availability of a new major release. What's special about it is that it comes together with a container-free filesystem vir...

An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as co...

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:[President Obama] said he was weighing a mix of public and covert actions against the Russians in his last 34 days in office, actions that would increase ...

An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:China said Saturday it will return the unmanned U.S. drone it seized in the South China Sea, calling the issue "hyped up" by the U.S. "Upon confirming that the devi...

The Department of Homeland Security's CERT issued a warning last week that users should "strongly consider" not using some models of NetGear routers, and the list expanded this week to include 11 diff...

Tesla announced today that it will start charging owners a fee of $0.40 per minute if they fail to move their vehicles at a Supercharger station. If drivers don't move their cars within 5 minutes of t...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: German officials are stepping up their criticism of Facebook, saying the social network is doing too little to stop hate speech and could face stiff ...

schwit1 quotes a report from Behind The Black: A federal judge has ruled that NASA has no right to confiscate an Apollo 11 lunar rock sample bag that had been purchased legally, even though the sale i...

An international team of conservation scientists have released a new global map of roadless areas that shows that the Earth's surface is shattered by roads into more than 600,000 fragments. While road...

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: Today, Google announces that it has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member. This is yet another example of the search giant's open source focu...

New submitter rkagerer writes: Dropbox unleashed a tidal wave of user backlash yesterday when it announced plans to eradicate its Public folder feature in 2017. Criticism from users whose links will b...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The copyright violation notice is every pirate's worst nightmare, a clear legal sign that a major copyright holder knows what you've been torrenting...

ATT and Verizon have responded to the FCC's letters that argued the way the two companies handle the practice of exempting their own video apps from data caps on customers' smartphones can hurt compet...

whoever57 writes: The commission that is responsible for ensuring the integrity of voting machines was itself hacked. The hacker gained access to non-public reports on weaknesses in voting machines. T...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Asian Correspondent: YouTube has blocked North Korea's state television channel, purportedly to avoid breaching U.S. sanctions against the totalitarian state. ...

Strong sales for Nintendo's NES Classic Edition, a miniature version of its video game console from the 80s, could point to a new revenue stream for the Japanese games maker. From a report on CNBC: Th...

The BlackBerry smartphone is dead: Long live the BlackBerry smartphone. From a report on PCWorld: A week after it officially pulled out of the smartphone market, BlackBerry has agreed to license its b...

An anonymous reader writes: One of the biggest selling points of ATT's DirecTV Now service is that it streams video without counting against data caps on the ATT mobile network. But T-Mobile USA custo...

Apple is exploring the idea of having two SIM card slots in its iPhones. The Cupertino-based company has registered a patent for a dual-SIM card technology that involves two separate antennas. Though ...

Long time reader BrianFagioli writes: if you love Linux Mint and use it regularly, I have very good news -- version 18.1 'Serena' is finally here. There are two desktop environments from which to choo...

The Pentagon is demanding that China return an "unlawfully seized" underwater drone after a Chinese warship took the device from waters near a US oceanographic vessel. From a report on USA Today: A U....

Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a new service that would deepen its presence in the $800 billion trucking industry, a person with direct knowledge of the matter tol...

Though not much popular outside the technology circles, GitHub is very popular among coders around the world. The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, ...

Reader Andreas Kolbe writes: The fundraising banners on Wikipedia this year are so effective that halfway through its December fundraising campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has already exceeded its $...

Evernote has withdrawn planned changes to its privacy policy that would have permitted some employees to view the content of users' note, as the company works on new features that rely on machine-lear...

An anonymous reader writes: As if 2016 wasn't shitty enough for Yahoo -- which admitted to two separate breaches that saw 500 million users' and then 1 billion users' details stolen by hackers -- the ...

A transformation is happening in global energy markets that's worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity. From a report on ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Twitter has blocked federally funded "domestic spy centers" from using a powerful social media monitoring tool after public records revealed that...

An anonymous reader writes: It's the year of the Linux desktop getting pwned. Chris Evans (not the red white and blue one) has released a number of linux zero day exploits, the most recent of which em...

New submitter future guy quotes a report from New Atlas: The researchers examined around 4,200 blood samples from pregnant women and their children and discovered a link between autism and low levels ...

New submitter TheNinjaCoder writes: A new type of gene therapy is showing promise in reversing the aging process. The scientists are not claiming that aging can be eliminated, but say that in the fore...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: General Motors Co Chief Executive Mary Barra said on Thursday the automaker will expand testing of self-driving vehicles to Michigan, and will build i...

Apple's AirPods finally went on sale earlier this week after being announced in September and delayed in October. Now that people are able to actually purchase these wireless earphones for $159, many ...

An anonymous reader writes: Swedish hardware hacker Ulf Frisk has created a device that can extract Mac FileVault2 (Apple's disk encryption utility) passwords from a device's memory before macOS boots...

The White House is suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in a hacking operation aimed at interfering with the U.S. presidential election. BBC reports: Ben Rhodes, advi...

New submitter drunkdrone quotes a report from International Business Times: Samsung is reported to be equipping its upcoming Galaxy S8 flagship with all manner of technical marvels in its attempt to e...

Nintendo's first smartphone game "Super Mario Run" is now available in the App Store across the world. The game follows the success of Pokemon Go, which launched earlier this year. Nintendo owns a thi...

Verizon has just announced that it plans to roll out Samsung's upcoming Note 7 update, which permanently stops the recalled smartphone from charging and disables its wireless radios, on January 5th. O...

You can't build a good self-driving car without good maps. Microsoft seems to realize this, and it's teaming up with TomTom and Here to ensure the next generation of cars comes with some quality maps....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: A few months I wrote about the Consumer Review Fairness Act. In a nutshell, this offers legal protections to consumers who leave negative reviews...

Verizon is reconsidering its $4.8 billion purchase of Yahoo, according to Bloomberg. Citing a source, the publication claims that Wednesday's announcement by Yahoo -- theft of info from one billion us...

After weeks of criticism over its role in spreading fake news during and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Facebook said today it is taking concrete steps to halt the sharing of hoaxes on its...

Earlier this week, Fitbit announced that it was buying up the assets of smartwatch maker Pebble, and a lot of questions still exist around exactly how Pebble's existing products will work. Today a mem...

It appears that the rise of Snapchat and all its Spectacles fun have yet to slow Instagram's growth: the Facebook-owned company today announced that it has reached 600 million monthly active users, do...

Uber has a simple approach to business: Don't ask for permission, but be prepared to seek forgiveness. Its foray into self-driving cars in California is no different. From a report on CNET: Confirming...

China has shut down or "dealt with" thousands of websites for sharing "harmful" erotic or obscene content since April, the state's office for combating pornography and illegal publications announced o...

Cisco will abandon its InterCloud cloud-computing offering on March 31 and will move any InterCloud workloads to other, unnamed cloud providers, including "in some cases, public cloud." From a report ...

A confab of tech titans had a "productive" meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told CNBC, as Trump moved to mend fences with Silicon Valley bef...

Twitter spent more than a year building a stand-alone instant messaging app that never ended up seeing the light of day. The product -- which provided a single interface for tweets and instant message...

New submitter FatdogHaiku writes: Already getting over 25% of its electrical power from geothermal sources, Iceland hopes to break new ground using "supercritical steam" from a 5 km deep borehole. Is ...

The penis bone can be as long as a finger in a monkey and two feet long in a walrus, but the human male has lost it completely. According to a new report published in Proceedings of the Royal Society,...

New submitter AnonymousCube writes: The Federal Court has made a ruling that will result in internet access for Australians being censored. Five websites are to be blocked after being deemed to be cop...

According to Politico, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow ...

According to an IBM Security report released on December 14, 70 percent of businesses impacted by ransomware end up paying the attackers. The amount varies but a majority of business respondents said ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Malicious ads are serving exploit code to infect routers, instead of browsers, in order to insert ads in every site users are visiting. Unlik...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Shadow Brokers -- a hacker or group of hackers that stole computer exploits from the National Security Agency -- has been quiet for some time....

New submitter mirandakatz writes: Since India's prime minister banned 86 percent of the rupee notes in circulation last month, citizens have been waiting in hours-long lines for ATMs. But these circum...

An anonymous reader quotes a breaking report from ABC News: Yahoo says it believes hackers stole data from more than one billion user accounts in August 2013. The Sunnyvale, California, company says i...

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: When people think of the technology behind video games and movies, they often just focus on the visuals. True, when creating an immersive experience, the vi...

The company behind Ashley Madison, the adultery enabling website, has agreed to pay a $1.6 million settlement related to a major data breach last year that exposed account details of 36 million users....

Microsoft is following in the footsteps of other browser makers such as Apple, Google, and Mozilla, and says that upcoming Edge browser versions will favor HTML5 over Flash by default. From a report o...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Barely two weeks after ATT launched DirecTV Now, the online streaming service's customers have already been hit by multiple outages, unexpected b...

Amazon legally delivered its first Prime order in the United Kingdom last week and is preparing to enter a pilot testing period for drone delivery in rural areas in the country in the coming weeks. Fr...

Uber has launched an appeal against a landmark employment tribunal ruling that its minicab drivers should be classed as workers with access to the minimum wage, sick pay and paid holidays. From a repo...

Mark Wilson, reporting for BetaNews: Evernote has published an update to its Privacy Policy, revealing that as of 23 January 2017, employees will be able to access unencrypted notes. The change is bei...

Some of the world's leading photojournalists and filmmakers are calling on the manufacturers of the cameras they use to add encryption to their products, as the number of threats they face from having...

California regulators were poised on Wednesday to adopt the nation's first mandatory energy efficiency rules for computers and monitors -- devices that account for 3 percent of home electric bills and...

Microsoft has quietly fixed a software update it released last week, which effectively prevented Windows 10 users from connecting to the Internet or joining a local network. From a report on ArsTechni...

Uber is bringing a small number of self-driving cars to its ride-hailing service in San Francisco -- a move likely to excite the city's tech-savvy population and certain to antagonize California regul...

Amazon announced Wednesday it is expanding its on-demand video streaming service Prime Video to nearly every country and territory except China. Prime Video, home to popular shows such as "The Grand T...

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick have joined President-elect Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, which will regularly meet with the soon-president to advise on business issu...

Britain's National Infrastructure Commission has said in a major new report that the country's mobile phone coverage is worse than that in Albania, Panama, Peru and Romania, as users are able to conne...

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey interviewed Edward Snowden via Periscope about the wide world of technology. The NSA whistleblower "discussed the data that many online companies continue to collect about thei...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, energy company Deepwater Wind announced that its wind farm three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, has the all-clear ...

IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty has pledged to "hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States" as she and other technology executives prepared to meet with President-el...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google dropped a single National Security Letter into its most recent transparency report without much fanfare, but today the company published eig...

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: AMD has just officially unveiled that desktop variants of its Zen processor family will now be branded RYZEN. Zen-based processors will eventually target ...

The co-founder and CEO of Oculus, Brendan Iribe, is stepping down from the company he helped create with Palmer Luckey over four years ago in Irvine, California. Iribe writes in a statement to UploadV...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Microsoft is surging forward with its commitment to artificial intelligence (AI), formally announcing its latest chatbot, Zo. In a post outlin...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Obama administration released a long-awaited rule on Tuesday requiring all new vehicles to have communication technology that allows them to "tal...

A Florida appeals court has reversed a decision by a previous judge and ruled that a suspected voyeur can be made to reveal his iPhone passcode to police. "The defendant was arrested after a woman out...

tomhath quotes a report from The Hill: Last March, Podesta received an email purportedly from Google saying hackers had tried to infiltrate his Gmail account. When an aide emailed the campaign's IT st...

Google wants to put Android in the next wave of smart devices that'll be vying to fill up your home. It's launching a version of Android today called Android Things that can run on products like conne...

Uber is defending the scope of its privacy practices after a wide-ranging report alleged employees were tracking individual riders. From a CNBC report: "We have hundreds of security and privacy expert...

Apple has removed the "time remaining" battery life indicator with the new macOS Sierra update following complaints from several users of new MacBook Pro models. Apple says it stands by its 10-hour ba...

If you were holding out hope that Android and Chrome would one day merge into some kind of super OS that marries the desktop and mobile worlds once and for all, Google's senior vice president for Andr...

The Department of Energy said Tuesday it will reject the request by President-elect Donald Trump's transition team to name staffers who worked on climate change programs. Energy spokesman Eben Burnhan...

NASA says the first crewed test flight of SpaceX's Dragon vehicle has been delayed until May 2018. From a report on The Verge: In the wake of its September 1st rocket explosion, SpaceX has officially ...

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers have found malware hidden in the firmware of several low-end Android smartphones and tablets, malware which is used to show ads and install unwanted ap...

Following a lawsuit revealed back in October in which Apple exposed an issue with a large percentage of fake Apple adapters being marketed as "genuine" online, today the company has posted an official...

China may have been hoping to attract tech talent to its nation, but it is unlikely that people in the tech industry will move there. A columnist at Bloomberg explains why: The biggest problem is gove...

Cyber attacks targeting the global bank transfer system have succeeded in stealing funds since February's heist of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank as hackers have become more sophisticate...

Microsoft plans to add Cortana support to Windows 10 IoT Core devices with screens as part of its Windows 10 Creators Update release. ZDNet adds: That's according to information Microsoft officials pr...

Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers. From an article on TechCrunch: The Information re...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A security research firm has released details of a "critical" flaw in a security tool, despite being threatened with legal threats. The advisory said th...

Quest Diagnostics has said in a statement that a hack of an internet application on its network has exposed the personal health information of nearly 34,000 people. "Quest Diagnostics has notified aff...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane have surged in the past decade, threatening to thwart global attempts to combat climate change. ...

Google has signed a deal with the Cuban government on Monday that will grant internet users in the Communist-run country quicker access to its branded content. Google plans to install servers on the i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electronic Frontier Foundation: No one should have to fear losing their internet connection because of unfounded accusations. But some rights holders want to u...

dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: After Disney IT workers were told in October 2014 of the plan to use offshore outsourcing firms, employees said the workplace changed. The number of South A...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A little over a year ago, it was big news that thousands of people and hundreds of institutions controlling more than $2.6 trillion in total asset...

Microsoft has released its Xbox One streaming app to the Oculus Store today, allowing Xbox One owners to stream games to their Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset via a Windows 10 PC. The Verge report...

An anonymous reader writes: To protect Tor users from FBI hacking tools that include all sorts of Firefox zero-days, the Tor Project started working on a sandboxed version of the Tor Browser in Septem...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (Warning: paywalled; alternate source) that Panasonic is "introducing convenience-store checkout machines that can scan and bag items on their own, joining Amazon....

Uber employees are able to customer trip information, and many of them are using it to spy on ex-girlfriends and celebrities like Beyonce, according to a former employee. From a report on BusinessInsi...

The most anxious day of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's life, he says, was showing up to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving this year. The week before, he had thrown the company into a minor political c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's latest price hikes include a significant increase in the company's widely despised "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees. T...

Microsoft will start bundling drivers with Windows Store games to improve the performance of the game once downloaded. A report on Thurrott adds: This will work by the game download trigging Windows U...

Ruma Paul, reporting for Reuters: Some Bangladesh central bank officials deliberately exposed its computer systems and enabled hackers to steal $81 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank...

Starting in January, the financial services giant will expand its paid parental leave policy for mothers and fathers to 20 weeks at full pay, plus another six to eight weeks for women who give birth a...

Reader BrianFagioli writes: One of the best way to digest and present data is with visualizations and dashboards. Not everyone is a data scientist, so how you tell a story matters. Today, Google is ma...

Microsoft has added the ability to use Skype Translator on calls to mobiles and landlines to its latest Skype Preview app. From a report on ZDNet: Up until now, Skype Translator was available to indiv...

An anonymous reader writes: You'd think striking it suddenly rich would be the ultimate ticket to freedom. Without money worries, the world would be your oyster. Perhaps you'd champion a worthy cause,...

Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, reports 9to5Mac, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets...

Jeremy Clarkson's new motoring show has become the most illegally downloaded television programme in history, figures suggest. Amazon paid a reported $160 million for three series of The Grand Tour, w...

Microsoft has been targeting Mac users with its Surface commercials recently, and it appears they might be paying off. From a report on The Verge: The software giant claims that November was the "best...

Reader MojoKid writes: AMD is announcing a new series of Radeon-branded products today, targeted at machine intelligence and deep learning enterprise applications, called Radeon Instinct. As its name ...

And "he's got several billionaire pals on board." An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Nearly two dozen of the world's most successful business leaders, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists will inve...

MalwareHunterTeam has discovered "Popcorn Time," a new in-development ransomware with a twist. Gumbercules!! writes:"With Popcorn Time, not only can a victim pay a ransom to get their files back, but ...

The controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership can't go into effect without U.S. approval, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has acknowledged. Yet despite president-elect Trump's promise to withdraw from...

"Supercomputing has another use," writes Slashdot reader rmdingler, sharing a story that quotes David Kenny, the General Manager of IBM Watson:"There's a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the Uni...

What floats 249 miles in the sky, stretches 2,300 feet, and took over 10 years to develop?An anonymous reader quotes Phys.org:Japan launched a cargo ship Friday bound for the International Space Stati...

An anonymous reader quotes Recode: Technology that replaces food service workers is already here. Sushi restaurants have been using machines to roll rice in nori for years, an otherwise monotonous and...

An anonymous reader quotes BuzzFeed:On Saturday evening, Twitter reinstated -- with verification -- the account of Richard Spencer, a leading figure of the so-called alt-right movement, and the head o...

"The Japanese city of Iruma has introduced scannable adhesive barcodes to tag fingernails of senior citizens with dementia who are prone to getting lost as a way to help concerned families find missin...

"As expected, today, December 11, 2016, Linus Torvalds unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel," reports Softpedia. prisoninmate shares their article:Linux kernel 4.9 en...

"By convincing a user to visit a specially crafted web site, a remote attacker may execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on affected routers," warns a new vulnerability notice from Carnegie ...

"The Associated Press reports that on Monday Eric Schmidt will be in Havana to sign a deal bringing Google Global Cache to Cuba," writes lpress. Here's some details from the AP's report on the deal.Cu...

schwit1 quotes CyberScoop: Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency's most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander...

"[A]fter a particularly critical report earlier this week, the notoriously secretive company appears to be in damage control mode," writes Mashable. An anonymous reader summarizes their report:Thursda...

The U.K.'s newly-based Investigatory Powers Act (the Snoopers' Charter) "allows the State to tell lies in court," according to The Register, saying it enshrines into law "the practice where prosecutor...

Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes the New York Times:The remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer, after treatment with cells from her own immune system, may lead to new options for thou...

An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Finance's David Pogue:You know this tip, don't you? When you tap the Space bar, the web page you're reading scrolls up exactly one screenful... But in recent years, so...

In 2011 the Thiel Fellowship "was created to prove that a college degree doesn't matter," writes Backchannel, saying it's now evolved into something much more Silicon Valley. mirandakatz quotes their ...

Everyone's suggesting gifts to teach the next generation of geeks about science, technology, engineering, and math. Slashdot reader theodp writes:In "My Guide to Holiday Gifts," Melinda Gates presents...

An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money:Apple's latest deal in China doesn't have anything to do with smartphones. The tech giant is investing in the Chinese wind power industry, turning to the world's m...

"At least three tents have been spotted in woodland beside the online retail giant's base," reports a Scottish newspaper -- hidden behind trees, but within sight of Amazon's warehouse, and right next ...

mirandakatz writes: When the NYPD rolled out its Twitter presence a couple years back, it didn't go so smoothly: the @NYPDNews account tweeted a request: 'Do you have a photo with a member of the NYPD...

An anonymous reader writes: Analysts at VisionMobile have begun conducting this year's "State of the Developer" Survey -- their perennial assessment of salaries, skills, and tools -- but this time wit...

Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: A Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files on a figure at the center of dozens of 20th century conspiracy theories reveals a rare glimpse into the Bure...

BrianFagioli writes:If you want to use Fedora but do not want to spend time manually installing packages and repos, there is a solid alternative -- Korora. Despite the funny-sounding name, it is a gre...

There's a new reason you can be stopped by airport security: because the security officer who flagged you "was being secretly paid by the government...to uncover evidence of drug smuggling." schwit1 q...

Security firm Forcepoint has discovered a DDoS competition which requires participants install a DDoS software which contains a backdoor. An anonymous reader quotes CSO: A hacker in Turkey has been tr...

Ride-sharers have been using Uber and Lyft "carpool" apps to meet dates -- and now Uber's trying to stop it. An anonymous reader quotes SFGate:This week Uber updated their community guidelines to disc...

msm1267 quotes Kaspersky Lab's ThreatPost: A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the opera...

New submitter mikehusky quotes a report from The Register: Washington D.C. think tank the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology is calling for regulation on "negligence" in the design of in...

Some Windows 10 PCs are now experiencing sudden drops in their Wi-Fi connections, with the Network Diagnostics tool reporting "Wi-Fi doesn't have a valid IP configuration." An anonymous reader quotes ...

Tekla Perry writes: An autonomous shuttle from Auro Robotics is picking up and dropping off students, faculty, and visitors at the Santa Clara University Campus seven days a week. It doesn't go fast, ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion re...

Google announced in a blog post today that it will be rolling out a feature over the next few months that starts disabling Flash and displaying HTML5 content instead on certain websites. Google notes,...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New York Post: Radiation from Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has apparently traveled across the Pacific. Researchers reported that radioactive matter ...

Jonathan Coleman's research group at Trinity College Dublin discovered that Silly Putty "becomes an incredibly sensitive strain detector that can track blood pressure, heart rate, and even a spider's ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: AirPods were originally slated to launch in October, but the wireless earphones were later delayed. Apple said it needed "a little more time" befor...

Bose has launched a new pair of earbuds called Hearphones that augment the sounds of the world around you, letting you select what kinds of outside noises you'd like to listen to. "Hearphones users ca...

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: The security protocol that governs how virtual machines share data on a host system powered by AMD Zen processors has been found to be in...

Uber treats its drivers as Victorian-style "sweated labor", with some taking home less than the minimum wage, according to a report into its working conditions based on the testimony of dozens of driv...

Google has confirmed to Search Engine Land that it is testing a feature allowing users to rate movies or TV shows directly in the search results interface. "We're currently experimenting with the feat...

Digital currency bitcoin hit its highest levels in almost three years on Friday, extending gains since India sparked a cash shortage by removing high-denomination bank notes from circulation a month a...

Police have now one less tool to monitor users on Twitter. The Daily Dot is reporting that Twitter has cut ties with a third-party social network surveillance firm, citing company policies intended to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CyberScoop: Georgia's secretary of state has claimed the Department of Homeland Security tried to breach his office's firewall and has issued a letter to Homel...

Companies can now test self-driving cars on Michigan public roads without a driver or steering wheel under new laws that could push the state to the forefront of autonomous vehicle development. From a...

Samsung confirmed on Friday that it will indeed release an update to Galaxy Note7 smartphones in the United States to "prevent US Galaxy Note7 devices from charging and will eliminate their ability to...

The employee perks at Google are legendary, and they've always included an over-the-top holiday gift for every employee. In the past, the company has surprised its 70,000 employees with Nexus phones, ...

New submitter drunkdrone writes: Magic Leap's coveted mixed reality technology has been the subject of intense speculation since it broke ground in 2014. Having secured billions of dollars in funding ...

An anonymous reader shares an article on MarketingLand: For the third time since September, Facebook is disclosing new measurement errors. The two new errors affected the reaction counts Facebook repo...

President Barack Obama has ordered a full review of hacking activities aimed at disrupting last month's presidential election, media outlets reported Friday citing a top White House official. The resu...

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's legendary game designer, and his fellow developers were tinkering with a "one-button control scheme" for Mario, where all a player can do is make Mario jump. This dead sim...

The White House said on Thursday that it raised concerns about China's new cyber security law during a meeting with a Chinese official after the latest round of talks between the two countries on cybe...

Mars One says its project to start a human colony on the Red Planet will be delayed by five years. The Dutch company says it will send its first crews to Mars in 2031 instead of its previous target da...

Those who are still clinging on to their Galaxy Note 7, even after Samsung recalled the devices due to faulty batteries in mid-September, may want to seriously reconsider returning them to the Korean ...

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Malware gangs, like sad wedding bands bands, love to play the hits. And one of the hits they keep running back over and over is the Zeus banking Trojan, ...

Google today announced it will open up Home to third-party developers, allowing all developers to start bringing their applications and services to the Google Assistant. Developers can start building ...

What may come as no surprise to Facebook users, the social media company announced in a blog post that the U.S. presidential election was the most "talked about" topic on Facebook in 2016. Phys.Org hi...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) --...

The Center for Digital Democracy has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission warning of security and privacy holes associated with a pair of smart toys designed for children. Mashable repo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Yik Yak has laid off 60 percent of employees amid a downturn in the app's growth prospects, The Verge has learned. The three-year-old anonymous soci...

Yesterday, France's Le Monde newspaper issued a report, citing documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that says American and British spies have since 2005 been working on intercepting phone ...

Congress passed a bill yesterday that will make it illegal for people to use software bots to buy concert tickets. Ars Technica reports: The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act makes it illegal to b...

AI will soon help programmers improve development, says Diego Lo Giudice, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, in an article published on ZDNet today. He isn't saying that programmers will be out of...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: Some 2.7 million ATT customers will share $88 million in compensation for having had unauthorized third-party charges added to their mobile bill...

Audi says its cars can now tell drivers how many seconds remain until the traffic light turns green. It's the first commercial offering of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in the United States,...

An anonymous reader shares an ArsTechnica report: Apple has received at least $6 per American taxpayer over the last five years in the form of interest payments on billions' worth of United States Tre...

BenBoy writes: John Herschel Glenn Jr. (July 18, 1921 -- December 8, 2016) was an American aviator, engineer, astronaut, and United States Senator from Ohio. He was one of the "Mercury Seven" group of...

It appears many major stakeholders in the movie industry want to bring new titles to you within days, if not hours, as they hit cinemas. Earlier this year, we learned that Sean Parker is working on a ...

Microsoft's Windows PowerShell configuration management framework continues to be abused by cyber attackers, according to researchers at Symantec, who have seen a surge in associated threats. From a r...

The tail of a beautiful, feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. It is a huge breakthrough that could help open a new window on the biology of a group that dominat...

Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD is launching an update for its Radeon graphics drivers that will help PC gamers enjoy more power-efficient gameplay during the holiday season. Radeon Software Crimson Re...

Yahoo says it has fixed a severe security vulnerability in its email service that allowed an attacker to read a victim's email inbox. From a report on ZDNet: The cross-site scripting (XSS) attack only...

When Google launched Cloud Print, it removed a lot of the hassle from using a printer. Instead of a printer only printing documents from the PC it was connected to, Cloud Print allowed any device, be ...

Microsoft is aiming to enable the installation of non-removable programmable SIM cards and data radios in PCs and Windows tablets. In the company's vision, users will then be able to purchase cellular...

After getting its final European Commission approvals earlier this week, Microsoft and LinkedIn today announced that Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the social networking site, has ...

Samsung may have big plans to overcome the whammy of its disastrous Galaxy Note7 this year. The company is reportedly planning to push the boundaries of design with the next flagship smartphone, dubbe...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: Today at Microsoft's WinHEC event in Shenzhen, China, the company announced that it's working with Qualcomm to bring the full Windows 10 experience ...

CanadianRealist writes: Larger babies delivered by cesarean section may be affecting human evolution. Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 i...

Researchers at Durham University and the UK's Nautical Almanac Office compiled nearly 3,000 years of celestial records and found that with every passing century, the day on Earth lengthens by two mill...

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Vulnerabilities in Flash and Internet Explorer dominated the exploit kit landscape in the last year, with a high-profile bug in Flash being found in seve...

Paris has barred some cars from its streets and has made public transportation free as it suffers from the worst and most prolonged winter pollution for at least 10 years, the Airparif agency said on ...

Mickeycaskill writes: Nintendo will pay up to $20,000 for system and software vulnerabilities in the Nintendo 3DS family of handheld gaming consoles. The company is looking to prevent activities such ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: American and British spies have since 2005 been working on intercepting phone calls and data transfers made from aircraft, France's Le Monde newspaper...

Apple is talking with Hollywood studios to try and get iTunes rentals of movies that are still playing on the big screen. According to a report from Bloomberg, "some studio executives have been pushin...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: T-Mobile just revealed its answer to ATT's NumberSync technology, which lets customers use one phone number across all their connected devices. T-Mo...

Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony and Acer have teamed up to form the Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) in an effort to reduce fragmentation and failure in the industry. GVRA aims to "unlock ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Qualcomm and its Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies subsidiary announced today that the company has already begun sampling its first 10nm server ...

Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group announces the official adoption of the previously-announced Bluetooth 5. In other words, it is officially the next major version...

Google today confirmed that it is removing "In the news" section from the top of desktop search, and replacing it with a carousel of "Top stories," similar to what exists on mobile. From a new report ...

About 20 percent of American adults feel the burden of information overload, with that figure at least doubling among those from poorer or less educated backgrounds, Pew Research Center said in a new ...

An Oregon District Court has sided with a wrongfully accused man who was sued for allegedly downloading a pirated copy of the Adam Sandler movie "The Cobbler." According to the court's recommendations...

YouTube said Tuesday that it has paid the music industry over one billion dollars in advertising revenue in the past 12 months. The music industry thinks that sum is not enough. From a report on BBC: ...

Reader phorm writes: In a notice to Kickstarter backers, pebble has stated that -- following the acquisition by Fitbit (official now) -- they will no longer promote, manufacture, or sell devices. Furt...

The price of Bitcoin could hit more than $2,000 in 2017 driven by expectations that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump may introduce economic stimulus policies, which could send inflation soaring and p...

Google says it has found and implemented a new way to make app updates on Android smaller. From a report on Engadget: They're introducing a new approach to app updates that promises to radically shrin...

Many network security cameras made by Sony could be taken over by hackers and infected with botnet malware if their firmware is not updated to the latest version. Researchers from SEC Consult have fou...

Foxconn, the biggest assembler of Apple devices, is in preliminary discussions to make an investment that would expand the company's U.S. operations. From a report on Bloomberg: The disclosure came ho...

Sony today shared sales figures of the PlayStation 4, saying the gaming console surpassed 50 million units as of this week. The console was launched in November 2013, and hit 40 million sales mark in ...

Because many businesses are wary of new software updates, let alone a new operating system, Microsoft could see a significant surge in Windows 10 install base and sales in the New Year. From a report ...

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: The Nintendo NES Classic is quite an amazing console. True, it is not as powerful as modern game systems like Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but it comes pre-l...

Eloking writes: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Twitter account lit up today with a message all too familiar to many indie devs: Mr. Trudeau has made a video game, and he'd like everyone to p...

Satellites cost millions of dollars to be launched into space and there's no guarantee that they will work without electrical or mechanical problems once in orbit. NASA has recently announced that it ...

theodp writes: If you never got around to reading Dave Eggers' novel The Circle, the tale of a powerful tech company that bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Google (and has an Apple spaceship-li...

Breitbart.com published an article last week that erroneously claims global warming is coming to an end, claiming "global land temperatures have plummeted by 1 degree Celsius since the middle of the y...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft polled 17 women working in its research organization about the technology advances they expect to see in 2017, as well as a decade later i...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists have developed a mind-controlled robotic hand that allows people with certain types of spinal injuries to perform everyday tasks such as u...

A team of former Samsung engineers have developed a smart umbrella, dubbed Opus One, that tells its owner if it's going to rain with the shake of the handle. International Business Times reports: Deve...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: For the past two months, a new exploit kit has been serving malicious code hidden in the pixels of banner ads via a malvertising campaign tha...

Apple has launched Single Sign-on, a service designed to make logging into TV apps much less annoying. It "allows cable subscribers to sign in once with their cable credentials to gain access to all c...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TmoNews: T-Mobile CFO Braxton Carter spoke at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York City, and he touched a bit on President-elect Dona...

In what is a major deviation in its strategy, Apple will allow its artificial intelligence teams to publish research papers for the first time. From a report on Bloomberg: When Apple introduced its Si...

Last month, Apple announced a repair program for a "small number" of iPhone 6s phones that suffer from faulty batteries. The phones that were affected by this fault were manufactured between September...

Sales of vinyl outstripped those of downloaded music for the first time since the advent of digital downloads last week in the UK. From a report on AdWeek: The U.K.-based Entertainment Retailers Assoc...

Some headphones marketed for children may not restrict enough noise for young ears. From a report on ABC: The Wirecutter, a technology products review website (owned by the New York Times), tried out ...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with Samsung in its high-profile patent dispute with Apple over design of the iPhone. The justices said Samsung may not be required to pay all the profits it earned ...

YouTube, the music industry's enemy No. 1 earlier this year, said Tuesday it has paid more than $1 billion in advertising revenue to artists, labels and publishers in the last 12 months. From a report...

Samsung is planning to ditch headphone jack in its next flagship smartphone, called the Samsung Galaxy S8, reports SamMobile, a Samsung-focused blog that has a pretty good track record with these thin...

Security experts consider the aging FTP and Telnet protocols unsafe, and HP has decided to clamp down on access to networked printers through the remote-access tools. From a report on PCWorld: Some of...

Google said today it will power 100 percent of its sprawling data centers and offices with renewable energy starting next year. The company said today it has bought enough wind and solar power to acco...

The US Supreme Court today will take up a case that will determine how much help an overseas manufacturer can get from the U.S. without running afoul of US patent laws. From a report on ArsTechnica: T...

Though several companies are struggling to sell their smartwatches, Apple CEO Tim Cook says sales of Apple Watch set a record during the first week of holiday shopping. Cook added that the current qua...

Two of the most common issues people have with Netflix is: the movie catalog is shrinking, and the quality of the movies aren't that great anymore. Netflix says it is aware of those issues, and it thi...

China is trying to capitalize on President-elect Donald Trump's hardline immigration stance and vow to clamp down on a foreign worker visa program that has been used to recruit thousands from overseas...

bongey writes: Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft are teaming up to create a common database to flag extremist videos and pictures. The database is set to go live in 2017. The system will not au...

theodp writes: "2016 as a year of action builds on a decade of national, state, and grassroots activity to revitalize K-12 computer science education," reads the upbeat White House blog post kicking o...

Facebook is finally cracking down on the fake news stories that run rampant on its site and many other social media sites across the web. The company is rolling out a new feature in the form of a surv...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A rifle-wielding North Carolina man was arrested Sunday in Washington, DC for carrying his weapon into a pizzeria that sits at the center of the ...

Microsoft's response to the Amazon Echo and Google Home is Home Hub, a software update for Windows 10's Cortana personal assistant that turns any Windows PC into a smart speaker of sorts. Mashable rep...

Engineers with manufacturing technology company Instrumental tore apart a Galaxy Note 7 to try and figure out what may have caused some devices to overheat and explode, causing Samsung to recall and e...

OLED panels have always been known to have higher contrast ratios than LCD panels, but that may be about to change with Panasonic's recently announced LCD IPS display. The display boasts a 1,000,000:1...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Google engineers are working on an improved version of the reCAPTCHA system that uses a computer algorithm to distinguish between automated b...

Google is rolling out Android 7.1.1 for Pixel and Nexus smartphones, including the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus Player, Pixel C and General Mobile 4G (Android One). You...

Millions of accounts associated with video sharing site Dailymotion, one of the biggest video platforms in the world, have been stolen. From a ZDNet report: A hacker extracted 85.2 million unique emai...

According to a survey conducted by Jesse Collins, a senior at Purdue University and former Yelp intern, interns at tech companies make much more money on an annualized basis than workers in the vast m...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broa...

For the first time, Apple has said that it is indeed working on technology to develop self-driving cars. The company confirmed late last week its previously secret initiative in a statement to the U.S...

A new survey by Thuurz Sports, a company that works with TV providers to increase the size of sports viewing audiences, finds that 84.1 percent of DVR owners record live sports, many of them as a "bac...

An anonymous reader shares a report on BetaNews:Although artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other emerging technologies may reshape the world as we know it, a new global study has revealed tha...

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: Google has spent a lot of time and money on security over the last few years, developing new technologies and systems to protect users' devices. One of the newer technologi...

Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don't weigh a lo...

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers around the world will soon be able to use DeepMind's "flagship" platform to develop innovative computer systems that can learn and think for themselves. From a...

The appeal court of Rome has overturned one of the 152 website blocks another court imposed last month, and ruled that embedding does not constitute a copyright infringement. From an ArsTechnica repor...

Earlier this month, Opera announced a new interesting feature with Opera 43 developer that predicts the website you're about to go to. The company explains: There are two ways we can predict what page...

Amazon announced Monday it has built a convenience store in downtown Seattle that deploys a gaggle of technologies similar to those used in self-driving cars to allow shoppers to come in, grab items a...

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:On Sunday, the European Commission warned Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Microsoft that if the companies do not address their hate speech problems, the EU wi...

An anonymous reader quotes CNET:Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was tryi...

Tonight at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Morgan Freeman emceed a glamorous, Oscars-style celebration that recognizes scientific achievements with money from tech billionaires.An anony...

In 1962, 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming, publishing three volumes by 1973, with volume 4 arriving in 2005. (Volume 4A appeared in 2011, with new paperback fasci...

jader3rd shares an article from PC World arguing that Windows 10's data collection "trades your privacy for Microsoft's security."[Anonymized] usage data lets Microsoft beef up threat protection, says...

An anonymous reader quotes OStatic's update on Canonical's lawsuit against a cloud provider:Canonical posted Thursday that they've been in a dispute with "a European cloud provider" over the use of th...

BrianFagioli shares his story on Beta News: Feeling fatigued by Windows 10 and its constant updates and privacy concerns? Can't afford one of those beautiful new MacBook Pro laptops? Don't forget, Lin...

In June a California woman successfully sued Microsoft for $10,000 over forced Windows 10 upgrades, and she's now written a 58-page ebook about her battle (which she's selling for $9.99). But an anony...

America's Transportation Security Administration has been making some surprising announcements on social media. An anonymous reader writes:A TSA spokesperson says 70 laptops were left behind in just o...

Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia's state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device -- and it's not...

After being let go over a series of "personal issues" with his employer, things got worse for 26-year-old network administrator Dariusz J. Prugar, who will now have to spend two years in prison for ha...

The "Snoopers' Charter" passed in the U.K. greatly expands the government's surveillance power. But before they'd enact the new Investigatory Powers Act, Britain's elected officials first voted to mak...

MyFirstNameIsPaul was one of several readers who spotted this disturbing instance of fake news about fake news. An anonymous reader writes:Last week the Washington Post described "independent research...

Mark Wilson shares his article on Beta News:Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has made calls for technology companies and social media to do more to tackle the problems of cyberbullying, online intimidatio...

Remember that story about the "artificial leaf" solar cells? Long-time Slashdot readermanagerialslime quotes the Chicago Tribune: University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have developed a way to ...

schwit1 quotes The Independent: Criminals can work out the card number, expiration date, and security code for a Visa debit or credit card in as little as six seconds using guesswork, researchers have...

Bre PettisâS once said MakerBot gave you a superpower -- "You can make anything you need." But four years later, mirandakatz writes that though MakerBot promised to revolutionize society, "That n...

Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes, "For all the systemd haters who want a modern distro feel free to rejoice. The Debian fork called Devuan is almost done, completing a daunting task of st...

An anonymous reader quotes ComputerWorld:Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as...

Long-Time Slashdot reader sconeu is finally replacing his 10-year-old Toshiba Satellite laptop, and needs suggestions on the best current laptops for running Linux.I'm looking to run some flavor of Li...

"The brain's basic computational algorithm is organized by power-of-two-based logic," reports Sci-News, citing a neuroscientist at Augusta University's Medical College.hackingbear writes:He and his co...

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post:Congressional negotiators on Wednesday approved an initiative to track and combat foreign propaganda amid growing concerns that Russian efforts to spread...

An anonymous reader writes:This week saw the first proof of concept for Node.js API (or NAPI for short), "making module maintainers' lives easier by defining a stable module API that is independent fr...

An anonymous reader writes: Congress has passed a law protecting the right of U.S. consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from companies. The bipartisan Consumer Review ...

AnonymousCube shares this quote about China's new 'Social Credit Score' law from an insurance industry magazine:"Companies are also required to give government investigators complete access to their d...

An anonymous reader writes:The organization team for a regional Drupal event apologized Thursday for distributing copies of Playboy to attendees. The magazines were distributed in welcome bags, accord...

Coisiche found a disturbing article from The Register about the U.K.'s new "Snoopers' Charter" law that has implications for tech companies around the world:Among the many unpleasant things in the Inv...

An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this y...

An anonymous reader writes:Thursday brought this year's first new posts on the Perl Advent Calendar, a geeky tradition first started back in 2000. Friday's post described Santa's need for fast, effici...

On the campaign trail last year, President-elect Donald Trump said he would consider requiring Muslim-Americans to register with a government database. While he has back-stepped on a number of campaig...

First Round Capital conducted a poll of 700 tech company founders and found Elon Musk to be the most admired leader in the technology industry. Elon Musk received 23 percent of the votes; 10 percent s...

sciencehabit writes: There's an abundant new swath of cosmic real estate that life could call home -- and the views would be spectacular. Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps...

The mayors of four major global cities -- Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens -- announced plans to stop the use of all diesel-powered cars and trucks by 2025. The leaders made their commitments in ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ValueWalk: Nikola Motor Company just unveiled a huge class 8 truck which will run on hydrogen fuel cells. Nikola claimed that the truck's operational range wil...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Mercedes has just announced a conceptual new set of lamps that can not only adapt their light distribution to cater to the environment, but can proj...

The Bank of Russia has confirmed Friday that hackers have stolen 2 billion rubles ($31 million) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank. Central bank security executive Artiom Sychev s...

New submitter npslider writes: The "USB Killer," a USB stick that fries almost everything that it is plugged into, has been mass produced -- available online for about $50. Ars Technica first wrote ab...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a column in The Guardian, the world-famous physicist wrote that "the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional man...

A Taiwanese Foxconn manager faces a stiff prison sentence after he stole 5,700 iPhones from his employer, and went to sell them for $1.56 million. The Next Web reports: Foxconn is a tech manufacturing...

Reuters has built an algorithm called News Tracer that flags and verifies breaking news on Twitter. The algorithm weeds through all 500 million tweets that are posted on a daily basis to "sort real ne...

Citing military experts, The Guardian is reporting that if the rise in global warming is held under 2 degrees Celsius, there still could be a major humanitarian crisis to sort out. From the report: Cl...

U.S. regulators are calling out AT&T and Verizon for exempting their own video apps from data caps on customers' smartphones. The FCC has sent letters to the country's biggest wireless carriers sa...

20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, after she was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. She didn't know how to navigate her car insurance and prove damag...

Investigators have warned consumers they face potentially fatal risks after 99% of fake Apple chargers failed a basic safety test. From a report on BBC: Trading Standards, which commissioned the check...

New research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that online piracy is not the only worry for TV distributors. Based on Downton Abbey streaming and sales data provided by PBS, as reported by Torrent...

Facebook wants to be a better corporate citizen, which is perhaps why on Friday it announced a partnership with local community organizations near its headquarters in which it will initially commit $2...

Canonical isn't pleased with cloud providers who are publishing broken, insecure images of Ubuntu despite being notified several times. In a blogpost, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, and the...

Facebook is gathering information about the shows Roku and Apple TV owners are streaming. The company then uses the Facebook profile linked to the same IP addresses to tailor the commercials that are ...

Russia said on Friday it had uncovered a plot by foreign spy agencies to sow chaos in Russia's banking system via a coordinated wave of cyber attacks and fake social media reports about banks going bu...

The U.S. economy added 178,000 jobs in November, while the unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent from 4.9 percent the previous month, according to new government data released (Editor's note: the link...

Scientists have updated the periodic table to add four new elements, namely: Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson. The super-heavy elements discovered by scientists from Japan, Russia, and Am...

More than 100,000 people in the UK have had their internet access cut after a string of service providers were hit by what is believed to be a coordinated cyber-attack, taking the number affected in E...

AirDroid is a popular Android application that allows users to send and receive text messages and transfer files and see notifications from their computer. Zimperium, a mobile security company, recent...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A new study from The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, reveals that censorship on WeChat occurs primarily in group chats rath...

shadowknot writes: The New York Times is reporting (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) that Erich Bloch who helped to develop the IBM Mainframe has died at the age of 91 as a result of compl...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: An unmanned cargo rocket bound for the International Space Station was destroyed after takeoff on Thursday. The Russian rocket took off as planned from Ba...

According to French media, a court in the department of Ardeche on Tuesday sentenced a 32-year-old man in France to two years in prison for repeatedly visiting pro-ISIS websites -- even though there w...

plover writes: Investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, Eurojust, Europol, and other global partners announced the takedown of a massive botnet named "Avalanche," estimated to have ...

Security researchers have warned of flaws in medical implants in what they say could have fatal consequences. The flaws were found in the radio-based communications used to update implants, including ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple plans to use drones and new indoor navigation features to improve its Maps service and catch longtime leader Google (Warning: source may be pa...

Nestle and its scientists have discovered how to "structure sugar differently" to reduce the amount of sugar in some of its products by 40%. What's more is that it can be done reportedly without compr...

State-sponsored hackers have conducted a series of destructive attacks on Saudi Arabia over the last two weeks, erasing data and wreaking havoc in the computer banks of the agency running the country'...

The central bank in South Korea, one of the world's most technologically advanced and integrated nations, is taking a major step in getting rid of coins in the nation in what is an attempt to become a...

Back in February, researchers at UC Berkeley released an app called MyShake that detects strong earthquakes seconds before the damaging seismic waves arrive. Several months have passed since its relea...

Last month, instead of asking for data relating to specific individuals suspected of a crime, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanded America's largest Bitcoin service, Coinbase, to provide the id...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Lenovo Moto today confirmed that it will not be releasing a new smartwatch for the launch of Android Wear 2.0, due early next year. The company had ...

bulled writes: In the middle of a press release discussing the move of employees from Seattle to California, Cyanogen Inc notes that it has parted ways with Steve Kondik. It is unclear what this means...

Beginning next year, internet service providers in the UK will send email notifications to subscribers whose connections have been allegedly used to download copyright infringing content. In what is a...

Microsoft has moved Windows 10 August update to the Current Branch for Business release track, putting the "Anniversary Update" in the queue for automatic downloads and installation on enterprise PCs....

Facebook is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the compan...

Plex and Kodi, two popular home theater apps, can get both of them together. Plex has announced its new Kodi add-on so you can include your Plex library in Kodi (provided you're a Pass user). From a r...

Product Hunt, an online community of tech product enthusiasts, is no longer going at it alone. The three-year-old San Francisco startup said Thursday it is being acquired by AngelList, a popular crowd...

Stephen Shankland, writing for CNET: Mozilla is marshaling public support for political positions, like backing net neutrality, defending encryption and keeping government surveillance from getting ou...

Nokia said Thursday mobile phones carrying its brand will make a comeback via a new venture that will reunite the Nokia brand with veteran Nokia execs who aim to move into smartphones capitalizing on ...

Google says it has built support for the leap second into the time servers that regulate all Google services. An anonymous reader shares a blogpost by Google:No commonly used operating system is able ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Thursday morning that it will provide a "humanitarian medical evacuation flight" from the South Pole for an "ailing" Buzz Aldrin. BusinessInsider adds: ...

According to a report from The Information, Fitbit is buying smartwatch maker Pebble for a "small amount" of money. One source says Fitbit is paying between $34 and $40 million for the company and is ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved the first large-scale, phase 3 clinical trial of ecstasy in patients suffering from post-tra...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: This morning, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno unveiled a new website that allows satellite makers to figure out what it will really cost to la...

Google has partnered with TIME to release an improved version of Google Earth Timelapse that provides animated satellite imagery covering the past 32 years, from 1984 to 2016. In 2013, Google and TIME...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computerworld: A Firefox zero-day being used in the wild to target Tor users is using code that is nearly identical to what the FBI used in 2013 to unmask Tor-...

Twitter has made a serious effort as of late to limit hate speech on its social media site, especially after Election Day where "biased graffiti, assaults and other incidents have been reported in the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children's show Tiswas and Th...

Shortly after it officially launched in August on PlayStation and Windows, No Man's Sky -- the game that sees the protagonist explore space and experience uncertain places -- was accused of false adve...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Social media website Reddit, known for its commitment to free speech, will crack down on online harassment by banning or suspending users who target o...

Last week, President-elect Donald Trump appointed two new advisers to his transition team that will oversee his FCC and telecommunications policy agenda. Trump has added a third adviser today who, lik...

At a meeting with shareholders Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked numerous times what the company is doing about Windows Phones, and why do they keep hearing that Microsoft is abandoning...

With the most recent update to Uber's ride-hailing app, the company has begun requesting users if they are willing to share their location data with Uber app even while the app is not in use. The comp...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Seagate and Amazon have partnered up on a $99 1TB external hard drive that automatically backs up everything stored on it to the cloud. The Seagate ...

PC shipments will continue to decline in 2016, according to a new IDC forecast, but the drop will be slightly lower than previously expected. What's more, things will improve even more in 2017. BetaNe...

President-elect Donald Trump will have access to a system which can send unblockable texts to every phone in the United States once he becomes the president. From a report on NYMag: These 90-character...

A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the U.S. government's hacking powers failed Wednesday, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy righ...

Photo-filter app Prisma, the popular program which makes pictures and video look like painterly art, had its access to Facebook's Live Video API revoked this month. From a report on NYMag:According to...

Reader Joe_NoOne writes: Like TV, social media now increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it c...

Reader Trailrunner7 writes: A new version of an existing piece of malware has emerged in some third-party Android app stores and researchers say it has infected more than a million devices around the ...

SourceForge announced on Wednesday that it is introducing HTTPS for all project websites on its platform. Once a project has been moved to HTTPS, old domain will automatically redirect to their new co...

GoPro has announced that it will lay off more than 200 employees and freeze hiring, amounting to a reduction of about 15% of its workforce. As part of the restructuring, the company is also shutting d...

For years, people asked Netflix to give them the ability to download movies and TV episodes. Though this might not seem like that big of a deal in many regions where internet connectivity is cheap and...

Speculations have turned out be true. The Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens' social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used ...

cold fjord writes: State level marijuana legalization efforts across the U.S. have been gaining traction driven by the folk wisdom that marijuana is both a harmless recreational drug and a useful medi...

mspohr writes: The Guardian has a news article about a recently published journal entry proposing a way to test the theory that the speed of light was infinite at the birth of the universe: "The newbo...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Engineers in San Francisco have tunneled underground to try and understand the sinking of the 58-story Millennium Tower. Now comes an analysis from spa...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The attacker who infected servers and desktop computers at the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Agency (SFMTA) with ransomware on November 25 a...

Kamuthi in Tamil Nadu, India is now home to the world's largest solar plant that adds 648 MW to the country's generating capacity. Previously, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which was completed t...

Facebook is launching Instant Games, "a new HTML5 cross-platform gaming experience" that is available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed for both mobile and web users. Since they're built on the HTML...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Windows security expert and infrastructure trainer Sami Laiho says that by holding SHIFT + F10 while a Windows 10 computer is installing a ne...

A new study published in the journal Social Neuroscience finds through functional MRI scans that religious and spiritual experiences can trigger reward systems like love and drugs. "These are areas of...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and Volkswagen have entered into a partnership to create a network of high-speed charging stations for electric vehicle...

BrianFagioli writes from a report via BetaNews: Diabetic eye disease is caused by retinopathy. Affected diabetics can have small tears inside the eye, causing bleeding. Over time, they can lose vision...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Congress has passed a law protecting the right of U.S. consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from companies. The ...