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Articles by Slashdot from February 2017

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10:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Twitch Will Begin Selling Games You're Watching Later This Year
Twitch, home to millions of people who go to the site to watch games being player, is adding an e-commerce element to its game streaming platform. The Amazon-owned company announced today that it will...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot In Twenty, Fifty Years, 'We May Be Entertaining AI', Says Netflix CEO
"If you are starting to look ahead what do you see?" a journalist asked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the Mobile World Congress. An anonymous reader shares a report: Hastings cited the work of Charlie ...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Mozilla Acquires Pocket and Its More Than 10 Million Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, is buying Pocket, the read-it-later service, for an undisclosed amount. Pocket, which is described...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot AT&T Undercuts Verizon, T-Mobile With New Unlimited Plan
Roger Cheng, writing for CNET: AT&T just fired the latest salvo in the unlimited data wars. The Dallas telecommunications giant unveiled two new unlimited data plans. The first is Unlimited Choice...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Canada's Top Mountie Issues Blistering Memo On IT Failures
Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson has levelled a blistering memo obtained by the CBC on how critical IT failures have increased by 129 per cent since Shared Services Canada ...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Scraping By On Six Figures? Tech Workers Feel Poor in Silicon Valley's Wealth Bubble
Big tech companies pay some of the country's best salaries. But workers claim the high cost of living in the Bay Area has them feeling financially strained, reports The Guardian. One Twitter employee ...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft To Introduce a New Feature In Windows 10 Which Will Allow Users To Block Installation of Desktop Apps
Microsoft is planning to introduce a new feature to Windows 10 that will allow a user to prevent installation of desktop apps. The latest Windows Insider build comes with an option that allows users t...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Google Assistant To Be Available On Older Versions of Android Soon
Matthew Miller, writing for ZDNet: Google has announced that Google Assistant is coming to smartphones running Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 6.0 Marshmallow, starting this week. The Google Assistant ...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Supersmart Robots Will Outnumber Humans Within 30 Years, Says SoftBank CEO
Computers running artificial intelligence programs will exceed human intelligence within three decades, Masayoshi Son, founder of the Japanese technology and telecommunications conglomerate SoftBank G...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Indian State Saves $45 Million As Schools Switch To Open Source Software
From a report: The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore ($45 million) through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a ...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors
Less than a week after AMD announced the first line up of Ryzen processors, Intel is apparently fighting back by dropping the price of several of its processors. Rob Williams, writing for HotHardware:...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Sony Launches Phone With World's First 4K HDR Screen; Nokia Brings Back the 3310 Handset
Rumors were true. Nokia did launch its 3310 handset at MWC. It's been almost 17 years since the 3310 first came out. In that time the Nokia brand has been bought, sold, and stripped for parts. From a ...
02:00 pm - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Questioning The Privacy Policies Of Data-Collecting Cars
Remember when Vizio's televisions started collecting data about what shows people were watching? One transportation reporter is more worried about all the data being collected by cars. schwit1 quotes ...
10:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Would You Use A Cellphone With A Kill Code?
Slashdot reader gordo3000 writes:Given all the recent headlines about border patrol getting up close and personal with phones, I've been wondering why phone manufacturers don't offer a second emergenc...
06:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot How To Get Back To the Moon In 4 Years -- This Time To Stay
Scientific American describes "a way to get to the Moon and to stay there permanently...to begin this process immediately and to achieve moon landings in less than four years." It starts by abandoning...
04:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Can Streaming Companies Replace Hollywood Studios?
"Movie-theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion," reports Vanity Fair, arguing that traditional studios should feel threatened by nimble streaming...
02:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot 'Uber Is Doomed', Argues Transportation Reporter
When an Uber self-driving car ran a red light last year, they blamed and suspended the car's driver, even though it was the car's software that malfunctioned, according to two former employees, ultima...
12:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Science Fiction Actor Bill Paxton Dies At Age 61
Bill Paxton died Saturday at the age of 61 after complications from surgery. An anonymous reader remembers Paxton's work with some YouTube clips: Bill Paxton starred in a surprising number of cult sci...
12:00 am - Mon, February 27, 2017
Slashdot Is Google's Comment Filtering Tool 'Vanishing' Legitimate Comments?
Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein writes:Google has announced (with considerable fanfare) public access to their new "Perspective" comment filtering system API, which uses Google's machine learning/AI ...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Apache Subversion Fails SHA-1 Collision Test, Exploit Moves Into The Wild
WebKit's bug-tracker now includes a comment from Friday noting "the bots all are red" on their git-svn mirror site, reporting an error message about a checksum mismatch for shattered-2.pdf. "In some c...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Google Discloses Yet Another New Unpatched Microsoft Vulnerability In Edge/IE
An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer:Google has gone public with details of a second unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft products, this time in Edge and Internet Explorer, after last week they...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot 94% of Microsoft Vulnerabilities Can Be Mitigated By Turning Off Admin Rights
An anonymous reader quotes Computerworld: If you want to shut out the overwhelming majority of vulnerabilities in Microsoft products, turn off admin rights on the PC. That's the conclusion from global...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Open Source Car-Hacking Tool Successfully Crowdfunded
An anonymous reader writes:Two geeks are crowdfunding an open source car hacking tool that will allow builders to experiment with diagnostics, telematics, security, and prototyping. "Cars have become ...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Did Silicon Valley Lose The Race To Build Self-Driving Cars?
schwit1 quotes Autoblog:Up until very recently the talk in Silicon Valley was about how the tech industry was going to broom Detroit into the dustbin of history. Companies such as Apple, Google, and U...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot The US Department Of Defense Announces An Open Source Code Repository
"The Pentagon is the latest government entity to join the open-source movement," writes NextGov. An anonymous reader quotes their report:The Defense Department this week launched Code.mil, a public si...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot UK Police Arrest Suspect Behind Mirai Malware Attacks On Deutsche Telekom
An anonymous reader writes: "German police announced Thursday that fellow UK police officers have arrested a suspect behind a serious cyber-attack that crippled German ISP Deutsche Telekom at the end ...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Professors Claim Passive Cooling Breakthrough Via Plastic Film
What if you could cool buildings without using electricity? charlesj68 brings word of "the development of a plastic film by two professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder that provides a pass...
02:00 pm - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Slooh Observatory Is Webcasting Today's Rare 'Ring of Fire' Eclipse
An anonymous reader quotes Space.com A solar eclipse and its spectacular "ring of fire" will be visible from the Southern Hemisphere this Sunday morning, but no matter what side of the equator you're ...
06:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot How Cable Monopolies Hurt ISP Customers
"New York subscribers have had to overpay month after month for services that Spectrum deliberately didn't provide," reports Backchannel -- noting these practices are significant because together Comc...
06:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot The Videogame Industry Is Fighting 'Right To Repair' Laws
An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:The video game industry is lobbying against legislation that would make it easier for gamers to repair their consoles and for consumers to repair all electronics...
04:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot GitHub Invites Contributions To 'Open Source Guides'
An anonymous reader quotes InfoQ:GitHub has recently launched its Open Source Guides, a collection of resources addressing the most common scenarios and best practices for both contributors and mainta...
02:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: How Are You Responding To Cloudbleed?
An anonymous IT geek writes:Cloudflare-hosted web sites have been leaking data as far back as September, according to Gizmodo, which reports that at least Cloudflare "acted fast" when the leak was dis...
12:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Linus Torvalds On Git's Use Of SHA-1: 'The Sky Isn't Falling'
Google's researchers specifically cited Git when they announced a new SHA-1 attack vector, according to ZDNet. "The researchers highlight that Linus Torvald's code version-control system Git 'strongly...
12:00 am - Sun, February 26, 2017
Slashdot Machine-Learning AI Now Beats Humans At Super Smash Bros. Melee
"The AI is definitely godlike," one professional player told Quartz. "I am not sure if anyone could beat it." An anonymous reader quotes their report about an AI's showdown with the best players of Su...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Garmin Engineer Shot And Killed By Man Yelling 'Get Out Of My Country!'
lxw56 writes: Garmin engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot and killed at a local bar in Olathe, Kansas, the U.S. headquarters of Garmin. Co-worker Alok Madasani was also injured along with bystander ...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Seven Film Studios Want 41 Web Sites Blocked By Australian ISPs
angry tapir writes: A group of film studios is undertaking what is set to be the most significant use so far of Australia's anti-piracy laws, which allow rights holders to apply for court orders that ...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Severe IE 11 Bug Allows 'Persistent JavaScript' Attacks
An anonymous reader writes: New research published today shows how a malicious website owner could show a constant stream of popups, even after the user has left his site, or even worse, execute any k...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot FAA Warns More Drones Are Flying Near Airports
Between February and September of 2016, there were 1,274 reports of drones near airports -- versus just 874 for the same period in 2015, according to newly-released FAA research. "The report detailed ...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Are Your Slack Conversations Really Private and Secure?
An anonymous reader writes:"Chats that seem to be more ephemeral than email are still being recorded on a server somewhere," reports Fast Company, noting that Slack's Data Request Policy says the comp...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot $10K Package Of Super Nintendo Games Finally Found By Post Office
A project to preserve (and validate) every Super Nintendo game ROM had been derailed when the post office lost a package containing 100 games from the PAL region. But now Byuu, the creator of the Higa...
04:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Java and Python FTP Attacks Can Punch Holes Through Firewalls
"The Java and Python runtimes fail to properly validate FTP URLs, which can potentially allow attackers to punch holes through firewalls to access local networks," reports CSO Online. itwbennett write...
02:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Al Gore Sells $29.5 Million In Apple Stock
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday reveals Apple board member Al Gore this week sold 215,437 shares of Apple stock (APPL)...
12:00 pm - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Arizona Bill Would Make Students In Grades 4-12 Participate Once In An Hour of Code
theodp writes: Christopher Silavong of Cronkite News reports: "A bill, introduced by [Arizona State] Sen. John Kavanagh [R-Fountain Hills] would mandate that public and charter schools provide one hou...
08:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Teach Bees How To Play Soccer
Clint Perry, a biologist who studies the evolution of cognition in insects at Queen Mary University of London, and his colleagues have released the results of a creative new experiment in which they e...
04:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Appeals Court: You Have the Right To Film the Police
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A divided federal appeals court is ruling for the First Amendment, saying the public has a right to film the police. But the 5th U.S. Circuit Cou...
04:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Fasting Diet 'Regenerates Diabetic Pancreas'
According to a new study published in the journal Cell, a certain type of fasting diet can trigger the pancreas to regenerate itself. Of course, the researchers advise people not to try this without m...
02:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot World's Largest Spam Botnet Adds DDoS Feature
An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: Necurs, the world's largest spam botnet with nearly five million infected bots, of which one million are active each day, has added a new...
02:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: Are Curved TVs Worth It?
New submitter cherishjoo shares a report written by David Katzmaier via CNET: When the first curved TVs appeared more than three years ago I asked whether they were a gimmick. As a TV reviewer I had t...
02:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot ZeniMax Files Injunction To Stop Oculus From Selling VR Headsets
ZeniMax, the parent company of Fallout and Skyrim developer Bethesda, has filed for an injunction against virtual-reality company Oculus over the recent stolen technology case. The company had accused...
12:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Security Lapse Exposed New York Airport's Critical Servers For a Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A security lapse at a New York international airport left its server backups exposed on the open internet for almost a year, ZDNet has found. The intern...
12:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot Toshiba Plans To Ship a 1TB Flash Chip To Manufacturers This Spring
Lucas123 writes: Toshiba has begun shipping samples of its third-generation 3D NAND memory product, a chip with 64 stacked flash cells that it said will enable a 1TB chip shipping later this spring. T...
12:00 am - Sat, February 25, 2017
Slashdot FCC To Halt Rule That Protects Your Private Data From Security Breaches
According to Ars Technica, "The Federal Communications Commission plans to halt implementation of a privacy rule that requires ISPs to protect the security of its customers' personal information." Fro...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Google Renames Messenger To Android Messages as the Company Pushes RCS
We have come a long way from the age of flip phones and nine-key texting. Even as if group messaging and instant messengers took over, the SMS has largely retained its core standard over the years. Go...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Boeing and Airbus Can't Make Enough Airplanes To Keep Up With Demand
From a report on Axios: Aerospace manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus cannot produce airplanes fast enough to meet demand despite what the Wall Street Journal calls "one of the industry's steepest pr...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Studios Push for $50 Early Home Movie Rentals
As many as five major Hollywood studios have been working with cinema owners to shrink the traditional release window and allow consumers to rent movies on-demand in as little as 17 days after they hi...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot With No Fair Use, It's More Difficult to Innovate, Says Google
Unlike the United States where 'fair use' exemptions are entrenched in law, Australia has only a limited "fair dealing" arrangement. This led head of copyright at Google to conclude that Australia wou...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Tesla Is So Sure Its Cars Are Safe That It Now Offers Insurance For Life
In the self-driving future envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, car owners might be saying "goodbye" to a whole lot more than steering wheels. From a Mashable report: Musk is so sure of the safety featu...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Americans Believe Robots Will Take Everyone Else's Job, But Theirs Will Be Safe, Study Says
An anonymous reader shares a CNBC report: You may accept, by now, that robots will take over lots of jobs currently held by human workers. But you probably believe they won't be taking yours. Though o...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Panasonic Wants Employees To Relax, Limits Work Days To 11 hours
Japan is notorious for its long working hours, which have been blamed for a national health crisis known as "karoshi" -- death from overwork. From a report on CNET: Panasonic hopes to curb this, instr...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Treasure Trove of Internal Apple Memos Discovered in Thrift Store
An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: Peeking inside a book bin at a Seattle Goodwill, Redditor vadermeer caught an interesting, unexpected glimpse into the early days of Apple: a cache of inte...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot LG's Latest Battery Is Also a Phone
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: The problem with having a smartphone that you want to use all the damn time is that you'll spend a big chunk of your day wedded to an outlet. LG believes...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Founder of India's $4 Smartphone Firm Arrested on Allegations of Fraud
Remember the $4 smartphone from India? Yeah, things haven't really materialized. Reuters reports: The founder of an Indian tech firm that shot to prominence by offering a $4 smartphone has been arrest...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot New iOS Update Fixes Unexpected Shutdown Issue On iPhone 6, iPhone 6s
Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch: Over the past couple of iPhone versions users have complained of "unexpected" shutdowns of their devices. Some iPhone 6, 6S, 6 Plus and 6S Plus devices could...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Samsung's First Exynos 9 Chip is Faster, Uses Less Power, and Supports Gigabit LTE
Samsung is taking a big step forward on both processing and LTE speeds with its next mobile system on a chip. From a report on The Verge: The chip, called the Exynos 9 Series 8895, is supposed to perf...
02:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Alphabet's Waymo Sues Uber For Allegedly Stealing Self-Driving Secrets
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It took Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo seven years to design and build a laser-scanning system to guide its self-driving cars. Uber Technologies Inc. alleged...
12:00 pm - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Cloudflare Leaks Sensitive User Data Across the Web
ShaunC writes: In a bug that's been christened "Cloudbleed," Cloudflare disclosed today that some of their products accidentally exposed private user information from a number of websites. Similar to ...
08:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Life Expectancy Set To Hit 90 In South Korea, Study Predicts
According to a study published in the journal The Lancet, researchers have predicted that South Korea will likely become the first country where the average life expectancy will exceed 90 years. The r...
04:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Self-Driving Cars Should Be Liable For Accidents, Not the Passengers: UK Government
"Electric charging points at all major motorway services and petrol stations, and the occupants of a self-driving car aren't liable in the case of an accident -- those are two of the measures proposed...
02:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot World's Only Sample of Metallic Hydrogen Has Been Lost
New submitter drunkdrone quotes a report from International Business Times: A piece of rare meta poised to revolutionize modern technology and take humans into deep space has been lost in a laboratory...
02:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Study Reveals Bot-On-Bot Editing Wars Raging On Wikipedia's Pages
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikip...
12:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Website Builder Wix Acquires Art Community DeviantArt For $36 Million
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Wix.com has made another acquisition to build out the tools that it provides to users to build and administer websites: it has acquired DeviantArt,...
12:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Valve Releases SteamVR For Linux
New submitter JustNiz quotes a report from GamingOnLinux: Valve has launched SteamVR for Linux officially in beta form and they are keen to stress that this is a development release. You will need to ...
12:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Cellebrite Can Now Unlock Apple iPhone 6, 6 Plus
Patrick O'Neill writes: A year after the battle between the FBI and Apple over unlocking an iPhone 5s used by a shooter in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, smartphone cracking company Cellebrite a...
12:00 am - Fri, February 24, 2017
Slashdot Judge Rules Against Forced Fingerprinting
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: A federal judge in Chicago has ruled against a government request which would require forced fingerprinting of private citizens in order to open a s...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Amazon Argues That Alexa Is Protected By the First Amendment in a Murder Trial
Amazon is sticking to its guns in the fight to protect customer data. The ecommerce giant has filed a motion to quash the search warrant for recordings from an Amazon Echo in the trial of James Andrew...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane
Deena Shanker, writing for Bloomberg: If you pull out your phone to check Twitter while waiting for the light to change, or read e-mails while brushing your teeth, you might be what the American Psych...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot FCC Votes To Lift Net Neutrality Transparency Rules For Smaller Internet Providers
The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lift transparency requirements for smaller internet providers. According to The Verge, "Internet providers with fewer than 250,000 subscribers will...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Google Has Demonstrated a Successful Practical Attack Against SHA-1
Reader Artem Tashkinov writes: Ten years after of SHA-1 was first introduced, Google has announced the first practical technique for generating an SHA-1 collision. It required two years of research be...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Google Says Almost Every Recent 'Trusted' DMCA Notices Were Bogus
Reader AmiMoJo writes: In comments submitted to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation, Google has given the DMCA a vote of support, despite widespread abuse. Noting that the law allows for innovation a...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Tech Reporting Is More Negative Now Than in the Past
Wayne Williams, writing for BetaNews: A new study finds that tech reporting is generally more pessimistic now than in the past, and for two very different reasons. The new report from the Information ...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture
Excerpts from Mike Isaac's report for the New York Times: Interviews with more than 30 current and former Uber employees, as well as reviews of internal emails, chat logs and tape-recorded meetings, p...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Creates Skype Lite Especially For India
There's a new Skype app in town, and it is made just for India. According to a report on CNET: Microsoft is the latest US tech giant to help keep Indians connected. Skype Lite is a new version of the ...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot 'Social Media Needs A Travel Mode'
Maciej CegÅowski, a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, and social critic, writes on a blog post: We need a 'trip mode' for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history t...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Google Releases an AI Tool For Publishers To Spot and Weed Out Toxic Comments
Google today launched a new technology to help news organizations and online platforms identify and swiftly remove abusive comments on their websites. The technology, called Perspective, will review c...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Tech Breakthroughs Take a Backseat in Upcoming Apple iPhone Launch
Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: The new iPhone is expected to include new features such as high-resolution displays, wireless charging and 3-D sensors. Rather than representing major breakthrou...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Most Scientists 'Can't Replicate Studies By Their Peers'
Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. From a report: This is fru...
02:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Research Developing An AI To Put Coders Out of a Job
jmcbain writes: Are you a software programmer who voted in a recent Slashdot poll that a robot/AI would never take your job? Unfortunately, you're wrong. Microsoft, in collaboration with the Universit...
12:00 pm - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Discover a Way To Get Every Last Drop of Ketchup Out of the Bottle
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report from BBC: Scientists in Boston have found a way to get every last drop of ketchup out of the bottle. They have developed a coating that makes bottle interiors s...
08:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot NASA Scientists Propose New Definition of Planets, and Pluto Could Soon Be Back
Rei writes: After several years of publicly complaining about the "bullshit" decision at the IAU redefining what comprises a planet, New Horizons program head Alan Stern and fellow planetary geologist...
04:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Judge Blocks California Law Limiting Publication of Actor's Ages
mi writes: IMDb has a reason to rejoice. Politico reports: "A federal judge has barred the State of California from enforcing a new law limiting online publication of actors' ages. Acting in a case br...
02:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot T-Mobile Promises Big LTE Boost From 5GHz Wi-Fi Frequencies
"T-Mobile USA is ready to deploy a new LTE technology over the same 5GHz frequencies used by Wi-Fi following U.S. government approval of the first 'LTE-U' devices," reports Ars Technica. "The Federal ...
02:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Owning a Cat Does Not Lead To Mental Illness, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Cats host a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that other research has linked to various mental illnesses. So, for some time, people have wondered wh...
02:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Paralyzed Man Uses Brain Implant To Type Eight Words Per Minute
A study published in the journal eLife describes three participants that broke new ground in the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by people with paralysis. One of the participants, a 64-year-ol...
12:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Sony Unveils World's Fastest SD Card
At CP+2017, Sony announced the SF-G UHS-II SD card that features read and write speeds of 300MB/s and 299 MB/s, respectively, which makes it the fastest SD card in the world. Amateur Photographer repo...
12:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Disney Develops Room With 'Ubiquitous Wireless' Charging
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The scientific and tech arm of the entertainment giant Disney has built a prototype room with "ubiquitous wireless power delivery" that allows several de...
12:00 am - Thu, February 23, 2017
Slashdot Tesla Posts Earnings Loss But Claims Model 3 Production Will Start In July
An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report from BGR: Tesla on Wednesday released its earnings report (PDF) for the company's recent fourth quarter. When the dust settled, Tesla posted revenue of $2....
10:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Americans at Risk of Identity Theft as They File their Tax Returns
Ian Barker, writing for BetaNews: As we move into the tax return season a new study reveals that attitudes to identity theft and a pattern of poor practices are leaving much of the public vulnerable. ...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Apple's New Spaceship Campus Gets a Name, Lifts Off In April
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has been building its giant new "spaceship" campus in the company's hometown of Cupertino, California, since December of 2013, and since th...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Software Vendor Who Hid 'Supply Chain' Breach Outed
tsu doh nimh writes: Researchers at RSA released a startling report last week that detailed a so-called "supply chain" malware campaign that piggybacked on a popular piece of software used by system a...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot HP Is Advertising Its Real, Modern Printers on This Fake, Awkward '80s Computer Show
T.L. Stanley, writing for AdWeek: It's a fine line between effective '80s homage and clumsy retro spoof, with the latter usually involving a lot of overplayed visual gags like brick-sized cell phones ...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Thrilling Discovery of Seven Earth-Sized Planets Orbiting Nearby Star
At a press conference on Wednesday, NASA scientists announced that they have spotted seven Earth-sized planets orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. The star is 39 light years away. From a...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot iPhone Owners in US Spent $40 Each on Apps in 2016
Zoey Chong, writing for CNET: iPhone users in the US are spending more and more on apps and in-app purchases. Spending climbed to an average of $40 per person last year, according to research released...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot US Homeland Security Employees Locked Out of Computer Networks
Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Some U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees in the Washington area and Philadelphia were unable to access some agency computer networks on Tuesday, accordin...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Verizon To Begin 5G User Trials in 11 Markets by Middle of Year
Verizon will test faster fifth-generation (5G) mobile broadband service in 11 markets in the first half of this year as the nation's largest wireless carrier tries to take the lead in the 5G race. Fro...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot GE, Intel, and AT&T Are Putting Cameras and Sensors All Over San Diego
An anonymous reader shares a Fortune report: General Electric will put cameras, microphones, and sensors on 3,200 street lights in San Diego this year, marking the first large-scale use of "smart city...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Uber's Self-Driving Cars Are Now Picking Up Passengers in Arizona
Almost two months to the day after Uber loaded its fleet of self-driving SUVs into the trailer of a self-driving truck and stormed off to Arizona in a self-driving huff, the company is preparing to la...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot AMD Launches Ryzen, Claims To Beat Intel's Core i7 Offering At Half the Price
Reader MojoKid writes: AMD CEO, Dr. Lisu Su took to the stage at AMD's Ryzen tech day yesterday and opened the event with official speeds, feeds, pricing, and benchmark scores for the company's upcomi...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Tinder Wants AI To Set You Up On a Date
Dave Lee, writing for BBC: Tinder is growing up. It's now a serious technology company tackling one of life's most important matters, and is by far the most popular dating app worldwide. After a lot o...
02:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Google Releases Open Source File Sharing Project 'Upspin' On GitHub
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: Today, Google unveiled yet another way to share files. Called "Upspin," the open source project aims to make sharing easier for home users. With that said, ...
12:00 pm - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Studies Show Testosterone Offers Little Benefits To Aging Men
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In decades of research, scientists have found only one medical condition that's clearly and effectively treated with testosterone supplements: pa...
08:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Cellphones As a Fifth-Order Elaboration of Maxwell's Theory
schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum that reflects on the "Stages of Electronics" based on James Clerk Maxwell's theory: Now that the world has become addicted to portable electronics, billions ...
04:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot College Senior Turns His Honda Civic Into a Self-Driving Car Using Free Hardware, Software
holy_calamity writes: University of Nebraska student Brevan Jorgenson swapped the rear-view mirror in his 2016 Honda Civic for a home-built device called a Neo, which can steer the vehicle and follow ...
04:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe
ColdWetDog writes: The Atlantic has an interesting article on how societies have decreased economic equality. From the report: "Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequa...
02:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot 'We Won't Block Pirate Bay,' Swedish Telecoms Giant Says
Last week, a Swedish Patent and Market Court of Appeal ordered The Pirate Bay and streaming portal Swefilmer to be blocked by internet service provider Bredbandsbolaget for the next three years. The o...
02:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Samsung To Sell Refurbished Galaxy Note 7 With a Smaller Battery, Says Report
According to a report via The Korean Economic Daily, Samsung is said to be putting refurbished Galaxy Note 7 handsets on sale with new batteries following the cancellation of the device late last year...
02:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Valve's Gabe Newell Says Only 30 SteamVR Apps Have Made $250,000
New submitter rentarno writes: According to Valve President, Gabe Newell, only 30 virtual-reality apps on Steam (of some 1,000) have made more than $250,000. But that isn't stopping the company from t...
12:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot PHP Becomes First Programming Language To Add 'Modern' Cryptography Library In Its Core
An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: The PHP team has unanimously voted to integrate the Libsodium library in the PHP core, and by doing so, becoming the first programming la...
12:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot UPS Develops 'Rolling Warehouse' System In Which Drones Are Launched From Atop Trucks
mi writes: A Bloomberg article describes a test conducted by UPS on Monday, "launching an unmanned aerial vehicle from the roof of a UPS truck about a quarter-mile to a blueberry farm outside Tampa, F...
12:00 am - Wed, February 22, 2017
Slashdot Wyden To Introduce Bill To Prohibit Warrantless Phone Searches At Border
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: A senator from Oregon who has a long track record of involvement on security and privacy issues says he plans to introduce a bill soon that would prevent...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Intel Supercharges Atom Chips With 16 Cores and Pro Level Features
Agam Shah, writing for PCWorld: Intel's Atom was mostly known as a low-end chip for mobile devices that underperformed. That may not be the case anymore. The latest Atom C3000 chips announced on Tuesd...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Computer Glasses Claim To Protect Eyesight Are Selling Like Hotcakes, But They Probably Aren't Useful
People are increasingly concerned that bright light -- especially "blue light" from computer screens -- is causing harm, making it a potentially dangerous public health issue. Eyewear and screen prote...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Health Apps Could Be Doing More Harm Than Good, Warn Scientists
According to several scientists, fitness apps might be doing more harm than good because they don't work but force people to focus on ambitious goals that they will never reach. Some are so appalled b...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot GlobalSign Supports Billions of Device Identities In an Effort To Secure the IoT
Reader broknstrngz writes: GlobalSign, a WebTrust certified CA and identity services provider, has released its high volume managed PKI platform, taking a stab at the current authentication and securi...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Netflix Just Announced a User Focused Security Application
Moving beyond movies and TV shows (and their DVDs), Netflix announced on Tuesday Stethoscope, its "first project following a User Focused Security approach." From a company's blog post: The notion of ...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Online Piracy Can Boost Comic Book Sales, Research Finds
A number of studies show that piracy helps movies, TV shows, and music albums find a much wider audience, which in turn, often times, help in boosting their revenue. But what about comic books? A new ...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot TransferWise Launches International Money Transfers Via Facebook
Money transfer company TransferWise has launched a new service that allows users to send money internationally through Facebook's Messenger, as competition in the digital payments landscape intensifie...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Confirms Another 2017 Update After Windows 10 Creators Update
Mark Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Windows 10 Creators Update is due to arrive in the spring, and at Microsoft Ignite in Australia, the company confirmed that a second major update is on the way later...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot University Offers Course To Help Sniff Out and Refute 'Bullshit'
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: There's now a course at the University of Washington, "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data" that helps you find bad information and show others why i...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Verizon Revises Its Deal With Yahoo, Reduces Price Of Acquisition By $350M
Ingrid Lunden, writing for TechCrunch: After the disclosure of two massive data breaches last year, today Yahoo and Verizon finally confirmed new terms for the sale of Yahoo to Verizon: Verizon will p...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Gemalto Launches eSIM Technology for Windows 10 Devices
An anonymous reader shares a report: Global digital security firm Gemalto on Tuesday announced it will make available its on-demand connectivity and eSIM technology for Microsoft's Windows 10 devices....
04:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot China's Millennials Are Hustling For Part-Time Gigs Instead of Traditional Jobs
Bloomberg has a report today in which it underscores a growing trend among millennials in China who are looking for part-time jobs. From the article: Hopping from one short-term stint to another isn't...
02:00 pm - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot How is The New York Times Really Doing?
Wired magazine did a profile on The New York Times in its this month's issue. Talking about the paper's transition from print to more digital-focus than ever, author Gabriel Snyder wrote, "It's to tra...
10:00 am - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot New Zealand May Be the Tip of a Submerged Continent
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Outline: A group of geologists believe it is time to name a new continent. A paper published in the March/April edition of GSA Today, the journal for the Geo...
08:00 am - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Why Astronauts Are Banned From Getting Drunk in Space
Bryan Lufkin, writing for BBC: "Alcohol is not permitted onboard the International Space Station for consumption," says Daniel G Huot, spokesperson for Nasa's Johnson Space Center. "Use of alcohol and...
04:00 am - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot Apple Files 14-Point Appeal Against European Commission's $14 Billion Tax Edict
An anonymous reader shares an AppleInsider report: Apple has filed its appeal with the European court of appeals, all declaring that the European Commission's decision to levy $14 billion in taxes on ...
02:00 am - Tue, February 21, 2017
Slashdot EU Privacy Watchdogs Say Windows 10 Settings Still Raise Concerns
Julia Fioretti, reporting for Reuters: European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system despite t...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Amazon Quietly Lowered Its Free Shipping Minimum to $35
Retailers have been busy over the weekend with Presidents Day promotions and sales, but Amazon had a significant surprise discount of its own. From a report: In a blink-and-miss-it move, the online re...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot The Death of the Click
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: For the past 10 years, we've operated on the premise that the most important digital metric is the click that refers a person to a website. That click usually comes fr...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Of Course Facebook Is Putting a Snapchat Clone Inside WhatsApp
Karissa Bell, writing for Mashable: Facebook is about to start pushing its next Snapchat clone on a new set of 1 billion+ users. WhatsApp is now starting to roll out its own version of Stories with an...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Google and Microsoft To Crackdown On Piracy Sites In Search Results
Google and Microsoft pledged on Monday to crack down on sites hosting pirated content that show up on their search engines. In what is being called a first of its kind agreement, Google and Microsoft'...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Has Cancelled the Second-Gen HoloLens, Working on Third-Gen For 2019 Launch
Citing several unnamed sources, long-time blogger Brad Sams is reporting that Microsoft has canceled the second iteration of the HoloLens in an attempt to focus on even more advanced HoloLens. The com...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Former Engineer Says Uber Is a Nightmare of Sexism; CEO Orders Urgent Investigation
An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: A former Uber engineer has published an explosive account of sexism and power struggles in the workplace, with allegations beginning from her very fir...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket
An anonymous reader shares a report on NASA's ongoing work on a manned trip to the moon. From the report: Without a new administrator even nominated yet, NASA's acting head Robert Lightfoot on Wednesd...
12:00 pm - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms
"Scientists have extracted long-dormant microbes from inside the famous giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves in Mexico -- and revived them," reports the BBC. An anonymous reader writes:"The orga...
10:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot 'Counter-Strike' Gets Invaded By An Unblockable Chat-Bot
An anonymous reader writes:"At least one intruder is taking advantage of a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive exploit to flood lobbies (even private ones) with text from chat bots that can't be kicked,"...
06:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Kim Dotcom Can Be Extradited, Rules A New Zealand Court
Kim Dotcom -- and Megaupload's programmers Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, as well as its advertising manager Finn Batato -- could soon be in a U.S. courtroom. A New Zealand judge just ruled th...
04:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot ZDNet: Linux 'Takes The World' While Windows Dominates The Desktop
ZDNet editor-in-chief Steve Ranger writes that desktop dominance is less important with today's cloud-based apps running independent of operating system, arguing that the desktop is now "just one comp...
02:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Linux Kernel 4.10 Officially Released With Virtual GPU Support
"Linus Torvalds announced today the general availability of the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which add a great number of improvements, new security features, and support for the newest hardware component...
12:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Google Discloses An Unpatched Windows Bug (Again)
An anonymous reader writes: "For the second time in three months, Google engineers have disclosed a bug in the Windows OS without Microsoft having released a fix before Google's announcement," reports...
12:00 am - Mon, February 20, 2017
Slashdot Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays
The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that "For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our ...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Some Recyclers Give Up On Recycling Old Monitors And TVs
An anonymous reader writes:"In many cases, your old TV isn't recycled at all and is instead abandoned in a warehouse somewhere, left for society to deal with sometime in the future," reports Motherboa...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Krebs: 'Men Who Sent SWAT Team, Heroin to My Home Sentenced'
An anonymous reader quotes KrebsOnSecurity:On Thursday, a Ukrainian man who hatched a plan in 2013 to send heroin to my home and then call the cops when the drugs arrived was sentenced to 41 months in...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Self-Driving Car Speed Race Ends With A Crash
An anonymous reader writes:On a professional track in Buenos Aires, fans watched the first Formula E auto race with self-driving electric cars. "Roborace's two test vehicles battled it out on the circ...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Used Cars Can Still Be Controlled By Their Previous Owners' Apps
An IBM security researcher recently discovered something interesting about smart cars. An anonymous reader quotes CNN:Charles Henderson sold his car several years ago, but he still knows exactly where...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot New Free O'Reilly Ebook: 'Open Source In Brazil'
An anonymous reader writes: Andy Oram, who's been an editor at O'Reilly since 1992, has written a new free report about how open source software is everywhere in Brazil. The country's IT industry is b...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Alaska Gets 'Artificial Aurora' As HAARP Antenna Array Listens Again
Freshly Exhumed quotes Hackaday:The famous HAARP antenna array is to be brought back into service for experiments by the University of Alaska. Built in the 1990s for the US Air Force's High Frequency ...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot A Source Code Typo Allowed An Attacker To Steal $592,000 In Cryptocurrency
An anonymous reader writes: "A typo in the Zerocoin source code allowed an attacker to steal 370,000 Zerocoin, which is about $592,000 at today's price," reports BleepingComputer. According to the Zco...
02:00 pm - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Fans Choose A New Football Team's Plays With Their Smartphones
A new arena-league football team plays on a 50-yard field and uses a mobile app that allows fans to vote on the team's next play. An anonymous reader writes:Slate describes a receiver tackled for a sh...
10:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Techdirt Asks Judge To Dismiss Another Lawsuit By That Guy Who Didn't Invent Email
Three months ago Shiva Ayyadurai won a $750,000 settlement from Gawker (after they'd already gone bankrupt). He'd argued Gawker defamed him by mocking Ayyadurai's claim he'd invented email, and now he...
06:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: Are Remote Software Teams More Productive?
A recruiter with 20 years of experience recently reported on the research into whether remote software teams perform better. One study of 10,000 coding sessions concluded it takes 10-15 minutes for a ...
04:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Web Comic 'Pokey The Penguin' Celebrates Its 19th Anniversary
It's one of the longest-running comics on the internet. (Slashdot is approaching its 20th anniversary, and in its first year ran two stories about Pokey.) Open source developer Steve Havelka of Portla...
02:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Should International Travelers Leave Their Phones At Home?
Long-time Slashdot reader Toe, The sums up what he learned from freeCodeCamp's Quincy Larson: "Before you travel internationally, wipe your phone or bring/rent/buy a clean one." Larson's article is ti...
12:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot Software Goes Through Beta Testing. Should Online College Courses?
"Testing online courses is not standard practice at traditional colleges," points out a new article at EdSurge -- though beta-testing is part of the process for other online learning sites. jyosim sum...
12:00 am - Sun, February 19, 2017
Slashdot RSA Conference Attendees Get Hacked
The RSA Conference "is perhaps the world's largest security event, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a secure event," reports eSecurityPlanet. Scanning the conference floor revealed rogue ac...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot SAP License Fees Also Due For Indirect Users, Court Rules
SAP's licensing fees "apply even to related applications that only offer users indirect visibility of SAP data," according to a Thursday ruling by a U.K. judge. Slashdot reader ahbond quotes Network W...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot German Government Tells Parents: Destroy This WiFi-Connected Doll
It's illegal in Germany now to sell a talking doll named "My Friend Cayla," according to a story shared by Slashdot reader Bruce66423. And that's just the beginning. The Verge reports:A German governm...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot SpaceX's Next Launch Carries Colonies Of A Drug-Resistant Superbug
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:SpaceX is preparing to launch a lethal, antibiotic-resistant superbug into orbit...to live its days in the microgravity environment of the International Spa...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot New Kit Turns A Raspberry Pi Into A Robot Arm
An anonymous reader writes:A new kit turns your Raspberry Pi into a robotic arm. It's controlled by an on-board joystick, or even a web browser, and "because it's connected to the Pi you can program i...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Thousands Of Disabled People Are Living In 'Virtual Utopias' In Second Life
"For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world," reports Backchanel. "Fo...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Lost Package Derails Project To Preserve Super Nintendo Games
A developer's quest to preserve (and validate) every game ROM for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System has hit a glitch -- thanks to the U.S. postal service. Byuu, the creator of the Higan SNES emu...
04:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot MAME Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
After years of work, a fan has finally completed a MAME version of Atari's unreleased game Primal Rage II this week, one more example of the emulator preserving digital history.Long-time Slashdot read...
02:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Congressman Calls For Probe Into Trump's Unsecured Android Phone
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: President Donald Trump regularly makes news because of his tweets. Now a congressman is making news because of the device the president reportedly uses t...
12:00 pm - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Genetically-Modified 'Surrogate Hens' Could Lay Eggs of Rare Chicken Breeds, Scientists Say
In an effort to preserve rare varieties of chicken breeds and diversify the chicken gene pool, scientists at the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute have come up with a plan to breed geneticall...
08:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Juno Jupiter Probe Won't Move Into Shorter Orbit After All
NASA announced today that their Juno spacecraft will not move into a closer orbit around Jupiter as originally planned. "Juno slipped into a highly elliptical, 53-Earth-day-long orbit around Jupiter w...
04:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Bill Gates: The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes
In a recent interview with Quartz, Bill Gates said he believes that governments should tax companies that use robots who are taking human jobs, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of auto...
04:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot How Atari's Nolan Bushnell Pioneered the Tech Incubator In the 1980s
harrymcc writes: After Nolan Bushnell founded Atari and Chuck E. Cheese in the 1970s, he had so many ideas for new tech products that he started a tech incubator called Catalyst to spin them off into ...
02:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot GM Plans To Build, Test Thousands of Self-Driving Bolts In 2018
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: General Motors Co plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets in partnership with ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, beginnin...
02:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Mozilla Thunderbird Finally Makes Its Way Back Into Debian's Repos
prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla ...
02:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Researchers Discover Security Problems Under the Hood of Automobile Apps
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Malware researchers Victor Chebyshev and Mikhail Kuzin examined seven Android apps for connected vehicles and found that the apps were ripe for m...
12:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot EU Moves To Bring In AI Laws, But Rejects Robot Tax Proposal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: The European Parliament has voted on a resolution to regulate the development of artificial intelligence and robotics across the European Union. Bas...
12:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot Japan Unveils Next-Generation, Pascal-Based AI Supercomputer
The Tokyo Institute of Technology has announced plans to launch Japan's "fastest AI supercomputer" this summer. The supercomputer is called Tsubame 3.0 and will use Nvidia's latest Pascal-based Tesla ...
12:00 am - Sat, February 18, 2017
Slashdot SoftBank Is Willing To Cede Control of Sprint To Get T-Mobile Merger Done, Says Report
According to Reuters, SoftBank is willing to cede control of Sprint to make a T-Mobile-Sprint merger happen. The company controls 83 percent of Sprint, but it'd reportedly be willing to surrender cont...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot YouTube Will Kill Unskippable 30-Second Ads Next Year
YouTube is planning to do away with the non-skippable 30-second ads that appear before a YouTube video. From a report: In a statement first given to Campaign then confirmed by The Verge, a Google spok...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Deleting Your Yahoo Email Account? Yeah, Good Luck With That
In the wake of security breach revelations, many of you might have considered deleting your Yahoo account. Many of you might be thinking about doing so soon. Heads up, it turns out, deleting a Yahoo e...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot 70 Percent of Young Swedish Men Are Video Pirates, Study Says
A new study from Sweden has found that just over half of all young people admit to obtaining movies and TV shows from the Internet without paying, a figure that rockets to 70 percent among young men, ...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot HTC To Stop Making Budget Android Phones This Year
An anonymous reader shares a report: During HTC's quarterly earnings call for Q4 2016, the company confirmed that it will not be producing new budget Android phones beginning this year. Instead, the c...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Your Personal Facebook Live Videos Can Legally End Up on TV
Kitty Knowles, reporting for the Memo: Think you control what happens to your personal videos? Think again. One father who live-streamed his partner's labour on Facebook last May, has found out the ha...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot System76 Refreshes Ubuntu Linux Laptops With Intel Kaby Lake, NVIDIA GTX 10 Series, and 4K
Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: System76 is refreshing three of its laptops with some high-end parts. The Oryx Pro, Serval WS, and Bonobo WS are now all equipped with 7th generation Intel Kaby La...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Breakthrough in Alphabet's Balloon-Based Internet Project Means It Might Actually Wor
Loon, the balloon project that aims to deliver internet to parts of the world that lack reliable connectivity, announced this week that due to advancements in the machine learning software, it can now...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Mozilla Will Deprecate XUL Add-ons Before the End of 2017
Artem Tashkinov writes: Mozilla has published a plan of add-ons deprecation in future Firefox releases. Firefox 53 will run in multi process mode by default for all users with some exceptions. Most ad...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Accenture To Create 15,000 Jobs In US
Accenture said on Friday it would create 15,000 "highly skilled" new jobs in the United States, as IT services firms brace for a more protectionist U.S. technology visa program under President Donald ...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Zuckerberg Shares Facebook's Plan to Bring Community Together, Edits Out a Questionable Sentence Minutes Later
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring people closer together. He published a 6,000-word letter on his Facebook page Thursday to outline his vision for the kind of world he thinks Fac...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot BlackBerry Sued By Over 300 Former Employees
An anonymous reader shares a report: BlackBerry is facing a class-action lawsuit from more than 300 former employees across Canada, according to a news release from law firm Nelligan O'Brien Payne LLP...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot No CEO: The Swedish Company Where Nobody Is In Charge
Katie Hope, reporting for BBC: Three years ago, Swedish software consultancy Crisp decided that the answer was no. The firm, which has about 40 staff, had already trialled various organisational struc...
02:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot 99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS
The latest smartphone figures from Gartner show how much iOS and Android are dominating the smartphone market. According to the report, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sal...
12:00 pm - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot B Vitamins Reduce Schizophrenia Symptoms, Study Finds
A new study published in the journal Psychological Medicine finds that high doses of B vitamins reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia. Researchers found that using B vitamins, including B6, inositol, a...
08:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Woolly Mammoth On Verge of Resurrection, Scientists Reveal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a r...
04:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab
A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research "designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from ...
02:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Scottish Court Awards Damages For CCTV Camera Pointed At Neighbor's House
AmiMoJo quotes a report from BoingBoing: Edinburgh's Nahid Akram installed a CCTV system that let him record his downstairs neighbors Debbie and Tony Woolley in their back garden, capturing both image...
02:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot McDonald's Hires Project Ara Design Team To Reinvent the Drinking Straw
An anonymous reader writes: McDonald's has hired the creators of Google's Project Ara to reinvent the drinking straw. Their new invention, the "Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal" (STRAW for sh...
02:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Samsung Chief Lee Arrested In Corruption Investigation
According to Reuters, Samsung chief Jay Y. Lee was arrested on Friday over his alleged role in a corruption scandal that led parliament to impeach South Korean President Park Geun-hye. From the report...
02:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot PewDiePie Calls Out the 'Old-School Media' For Spiteful Dishonesty
New submitter Shane_Optima writes: After losing his Youtube Red show and his contract with Disney, the owner of the most subscribed channel on Youtube, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (aka "PewDiePie"), has...
12:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot FCC Chairman Wants It To Be Easier To Listen To Free FM Radio On Your Smartphone
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Your smartphone has an FM radio in it, only it's unlikely that you're able to use it. That's because in the U.S., less than half of phones actually hav...
12:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot Swedish Court Rules: 'Block the Pirate Bay For Next 3 Years'
"In 2014, many film studios teamed up to force the Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget to block the popular torrent website The Pirate Bay," reports Fossbytes. "It was also said that ISPs should be blocked i...
12:00 am - Fri, February 17, 2017
Slashdot AT&T Is the Latest Carrier To Offer Unlimited Data For All Its Customers
Earlier this week, Verizon announced it is bringing back unlimited data plans after years of selling capped data packages. Now, ATT will be doing the same. ATT will let any current or potential custom...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot CloudFlare Puts Pirate Sites on New IP Addresses, Avoids Cogent Blockade
Earlier this month, several users worldwide reported that they were unable to access pirate websites including the Pirate Bay. It was because the internet backbone network of Cogent Communications had...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Tech Jobs Took a Big Hit Last Year
Barb Darrow, writing for Fortune: Tech jobs took it on the chin last year. Layoffs at computer, electronics, and telecommunications companies were up 21 percent to 96,017 jobs cut in 2016, compared to...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Google Fiber Sheds Workers As It Looks to a Wireless Future
Mariella Moon, writing for Engadget: Alphabet is making some huge changes to steer Google Fiber in a new, more wireless direction. According to Wired, the corporation has reassigned hundreds of Fiber ...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Sprint's New Unlimited Plan Adds HD Streaming, Four Lines For $90
Take that, Verizon! Sprint's unlimited data plan now has HD video too. From a report: On February 16, Sprint upped its unlimited plan, launching the "best unlimited HD plan ever", according to its pre...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot EU Privacy Watchdogs Seek Assurances on US Data Transfer Pact
European Union data privacy watchdogs will seek assurances from U.S. authorities that a move by U.S. President Donald Trump to crack down on illegal immigration will not undermine a transatlantic pact...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot YouTube Has 1 Billion Videos With Closed-Captioning (But Not All of Them Are Accurate)
Over a billion videos on YouTube are accessible to viewers with difficulties in hearing, thanks to the video giant's automated captions, it said Thursday. From a report on Variety: That certainly soun...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done
Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The ...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Google Releases TensorFlow 1.0 With New Machine Learning Tools
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: At Google's inaugural TensorFlow Dev Summit in Mountain View, California, today, Google announced the release of version 1.0 of its TensorFlow open sou...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Valve 'Comfortable' If Virtual Reality Headsets Fail
VR headset developer Valve is "comfortable" with the idea that the technology could turn out to be a complete failure. Gabe Newell, head of the game studio, made the statement in an interview with new...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Elon Musk Is Really Boring
Sometimes it is hard to tell if Elon Musk is serious about the things he says. But as for his "boring" claims, that's really happening. In a wide-range interview with Bloomberg, the billionaire talked...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Apple Announces WWDC 2017, To Be Held in San Jose On June 5-9
Apple said today it will kick off this year's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5. Much like every year, the developer conference is the place where we can expect to see what's coming to iOS, ma...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Check Your Privacy Filters: Facebook Wants To Be the New LinkedIn
From a report on CNET: Facebook isn't just for wasting time in the office. It can now help you find a new job entirely. The social network has unveiled a Jobs page, which allows businesses to list all...
02:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Apple's iPhone 8 To Replace Touch ID Home Button With 'Function Area'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: Apple will ditch the home button when it debuts a new 'iPhone 8' model later this year, and will dedicate the extra screen real estate to an are...
12:00 pm - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Astronomers Discover 60 New Planets Including 'Super Earth'
schwit1 quotes a report from New York Post: An international team of astronomers has found 60 new planets orbiting stars close to Earth's solar system, including a rocky "super Earth." The experts als...
08:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Lost Winston Churchill Essay Reveals His Thoughts On Alien Life
"A newly discovered essay by Winston Churchill shows that the British statesman gave a lot of thought to the existential question that has inspired years of scientific research and blockbuster movies:...
04:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Ethicists Advise Caution In Applying CRISPR Gene Editing To Humans
New submitter Baron_Yam quotes a report from Washington Post (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source): Ethicists have been working overtime to figure out how to handle CRISPR, the revolutionary g...
02:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot JavaScript Attack Breaks ASLR On 22 CPU Architectures
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Five researchers from the Vrije University in the Netherlands have put together an attack that can be carried out via JavaScript code and bre...
02:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Autism Starts Months Before Symptoms Appear, Study Shows
A new study published this week in the journal Nature suggests there is evidence of autism in the brain well before symptoms start to appear. Typically, the earliest that children are diagnosed with t...
02:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Bipartisan Bill Seeks Warrants For Police Use of 'Stingray' Cell Trackers
Tulsa_Time quotes a report from USA Today: A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers introduced legislation Wednesday requiring police agencies to get a search warrant before they can deploy po...
12:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Utilities Vote To Close Largest Coal Plant In Western US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At 2.25 gigawatts, Arizona's Navajo Generating Station is the biggest coal-burning power plant in the Western U.S. The plant, and the nearby Kaye...
12:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot MariaDB Fixes Business Source License, Releases MaxScale 2.1
Creator of The Open Source Definition and longtime Slashdot reader Bruce Perens writes: MariaDB is releasing MaxScale 2.1, a new version of their database routing proxy, and has modified its timed-tra...
12:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute
According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "The ruling com...
12:00 am - Thu, February 16, 2017
Slashdot Nearly 56,000 Bridges Called Structurally Deficient
schwit1 quotes a report from USA Today: Nearly 56,000 bridges nationwide, which vehicles cross 185 million times a day, are structurally deficient, a bridge construction group announced Wednesday. The...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Brazil Judge Rules Uber Drivers Are Employees, Deserve Benefits
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: A Brazilian judge ruled that a driver using the Uber ride-hailing app is an employee of the San Francisco-based company and is entitled to workers' benefit...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Yahoo Notifying Users of Malicious Account Activity as Verizon Deal Progresses
Kate Conger, writing for TechCrunch: Yahoo is continuing to issue warnings to users about several security incidents as it moves toward an acquisition by Verizon. Users are receiving notifications tod...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Dutch Town Pilots Lightlines To Help Distracted Smartphone Users Cross the Road
An anonymous reader writes: A Dutch municipality has introduced pedestrian traffic lights specifically designed to help smartphone users avoid stepping into traffic by displaying a colorful strip of l...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Apple Explains Why Its R&D Spending Is On the Rise
Apple has steadily increased its spending on research and development over the past few quarters. An executive with the company explained why that's the case. From a report on CNBC: Company's financia...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Now Get Weather Alerts Even When Your Mobile Networks Are Down, Thanks To IBM's Mesh Networking
Communicating news of severe weather events or natural disasters is something mobile phones are well suited to, but if there's limited or disrupted network coverage the message may fail to get through...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Voice Calls May Be Coming To the Amazon Echo and Google Home
Amazon and Google are interested in adding the ability to make and receive phone calls to their popular home speaker devices -- Echo and Home, reports WSJ, adding that telecom regulations and privacy ...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot China's Huawei Catching Up With Apple, Samsung Smartphone Sales
From a report: Chinese smartphone maker Huawei managed to gain ground on Samsung and Apple in terms of global market share last year, following the problems encountered by the two giants, the Gartner ...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot 'Electric Buses Now Cheaper Than Their Diesel or CNG Counterpart, Could Dominate the Market Within 10 Years'
An anonymous reader shares a report: Transit vehicles today are mostly powered by gasoline, diesel, and CNG, while batteries only represent about 1 percent of the market. It is currently a small part ...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot IT Decisions Makers and Executives Don't Agree On Cyber Security Responsibility
Sead Fadilpasic, writing for BetaNews: There's a severe disconnect between IT decision makers and C-suite executives when it comes to handling cyber attacks. Namely, both believe the other one is resp...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Russian Cyberspies Blamed For US Election Hacks Are Now Targeting Macs
You may recall "APT28", the Russian hacking group which was tied to last year's interference in the presidential election. It has long been known for its advanced range of tools for penetrating Window...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot BlackBerry Files Patent-Infringement Suit Against Nokia
An anonymous reader writes: BlackBerry has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Nokia, demanding royalties on the Finnish company's mobile network products that use an industrywide technology s...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Google's Not-so-secret New OS
According to reports late last year, Google is working on a new operating system called Andromeda. Much about it is still unknown, but according to the documentations Google has provided on its websit...
02:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot New Study In Mice Shows That Increasing Serotonin Affects Motivation, But Only In Certain Circumstances
New submitter baalcat quotes a report from Neuroscience News: A new study in mice shows that increasing serotonin, one of the major mediators of brain communication, affects motivation -- but only in ...
12:00 pm - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Iron Age Potters Accidentally Recorded the Strength of Earth's Magnetic Field
Solandri writes: We've only been able to measure the Earth's magnetic field strength for about two centuries. During this time, there has been a gradual decline in the field strength. In recent years,...
08:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot ISRO Makes History, Launches 104 Satellites With Single Rocket
neo12 writes: Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) made history by launching 104 satellites in a single launch. The lift-off of PSLVC 37 at 9.28 am from Sriharikota was a perfect one. In 28 minut...
04:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Propose Plan To Re-Freeze the Arctic
Kristine Lofgren writes: In case you've been under a rock for the past 20 years, the Arctic is melting super fast. Certain *ahem* governments are dragging their feet doing anything about it, which mea...
04:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot How Algorithms May Affect You
New submitter Muckluck shares an excerpt from a report via Phys.Org that provides "an interesting look at how algorithms may be shaping your life": When you browse online for a new pair of shoes, pick...
02:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Disney, YouTube Cut Ties With PewDiePie, Top YouTube Submitter, Over Anti-Semitic Videos
jo7hs2 writes: Disney's Maker Studios has cut ties PewDiePie, the YouTube submitter with 53 million subscribers, over anti-Semitic clips the submitter released earlier in the year. The clips, three vi...
02:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Is IoT a Reason To Learn C?
itwbennett writes: Whether or not beginning programmers should learn C is a question that has been roundly debated on Slashdot and elsewhere. The general consensus seems to be that learning it will ma...
02:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Apple Will Fight 'Right To Repair' Legislation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple is planning to fight proposed electronics "Right to Repair" legislation being considered by the Nebraska state legislature, according to a s...
12:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Delays February Patch Tuesday Indefinitely
UnderAttack writes: Microsoft today announced that it had to delay its February Patch Tuesday due to issues with a particular patch. This was also supposed to be the first Patch Tuesday using a new fo...
12:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot AI Software Juggles Probabilities To Learn From Less Data
moon_unit2 quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: You can, for instance, train a deep-learning algorithm to recognize a cat with a cat-fancier's level of expertise, but you'll need to feed it ten...
12:00 am - Wed, February 15, 2017
Slashdot Facebook To Autoplay Videos With Sound On By Default
Currently, Facebook videos autoplay on your News Feed as you scroll up and down. While they eat data and various resources, the saving grace is that they are silent -- that is, until now. Facebook has...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Big Week For Drones: Dubai Permits Passenger-Carrying Drone; Kenya Finally Approves Commercial Use
It's shaping up to be a major week for drone enthusiasts. A pilot-less drone designed to carry one passenger at a time is set to start making regular trips in Dubai later this year. In some other news...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Canada Remains a 'Safe Haven' For Online Piracy, Rightsholders Claim
The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups are calling out Canada, claiming that it remains a "safe haven" for copyright infringers and pirate sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About a year ago, in a widely reported story, journalists at British newspaper the Telegraph found little black boxes installed under their desks. T...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Calls For 'Digital Geneva Convention'
Microsoft is calling for a digital Geneva Convention to outline protections for civilians and companies from government-sponsored cyberattacks. In comments Tuesday at the RSA security industry confere...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Facebook is Bringing Its Social Network To TV, Video App Announced For Apple's and Amazon's Set-Top Boxes
Facebook is making perhaps its biggest push yet to turn the social network into a destination for watching video with a new Facebook Video app for smart TVs. From a report on Recode: The social networ...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Around 2.2 Million Deaths in a Year in India and China From Air Pollution
India is on the verge of overtaking China as the country with the most deaths caused by air pollution, the world's biggest environmental killer, according to research published on Tuesday. From a repo...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Launches Outlook.com Premium Email Service, Costs $20 Per Year
Outlook.com Premium email service, which Microsoft began testing in October, is now available to all. You get the following features with this paid service, via a report: Outlook.com Premium provides ...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft's 'Forza' Video Game Francise Tops $1 Billion in Sales
Here's another area where Microsoft, whose cloud services are doing very well, continues to make a lot of money: video games. Microsoft has minted its fifth billion-dollar video-game franchise. The "F...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Delays, Confusion as Toshiba Reports $6 Billion Nuclear Hit and Slides To Loss
Makiko Yamazaki, reporting for Reuters: After a day of delays and confusion, Japan's Toshiba said on Tuesday it expected to book a $6.3 billion hit to its U.S. nuclear unit, a writedown that wipes out...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Story Of a Country Which Has Built a Centralized Biometrics Database Of 1.1B People But Appears To Be Mishandling It Now
In a bid to get more Indians to have a birth certificate or any sort of ID card, India announced Aadhaar project in 2009. At the time, there were more Indians without these ID cards than those with. A...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Skype Gets A New Competitor: Amazon Announces Chime
Amazon has released new service to make voice and video calls and share screen. Called Chime, the service is aimed at business users. It directly competes with well-known players such as Skype, Google...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Iconic Feature Phone Nokia 3310 Coming Back this Month, VentureBeat Says
The iconic Nokia 3310 feature phone is all set for a return, according to a report. VentureBeat adds: HMD Global Oy, the Finnish manufacturer with exclusive rights to market phones under the storied N...
02:00 pm - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Father of Driver In Violent Tesla Crash Blames Sedan's 'Rocket-Ship' Acceleration
"A Tesla crash that resulted in the deaths of the driver and a passenger in Indianapolis last November is drawing new controversy after the father of one of the victims made comments regarding the rol...
10:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot US National Weather Service Suffered 'Catastrophic' Outage; Website Stopped Sending Forecasts, Warnings
jo7hs2 quotes a report from Miami Herald: On a day when a blizzard is pasting Maine and Northern California faces a dire flooding threat, several of the National Weather Service's primary systems for ...
06:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Michael Flynn Resigns As Trump's National Security Adviser
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: President Donald Trump's embattled national security adviser Michael Flynn, who faced questions about a call to the Russian ambassador prior to the i...
04:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Playboy Is Featuring Naked Women Again -- After Dropping Nudity a Year Ago Due To the Internet
mi quotes a report from New York Post: The 63-year-old legendary men's magazine is bringing back nude models in its upcoming issue -- one year after banning naked photos in an effort to boost circulat...
04:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Banned Chemicals From 1970's Persist In Deepest Reaches of the Pacific Ocean, Study Shows
walterbyrd quotes a report from BBC: Scientists were surprised by the relatively high concentrations of pollutants like PCBs and PBDEs in deep sea ecosystems. Used widely during much of the 20th Centu...
02:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Engineers On Google's Self-Driving Car Project Were Paid So Much That They Quit
According to a new report from Bloomberg, most of the money Google spent on it self-driving car project, now spun off into a new entity called Waymo, has gone to engineers and other staff. While it ha...
02:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot H-1Bs Reduced Computer Programmer Employment By Up To 11%, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: There would have been up to 11% more computer science jobs at wages up to 5% higher were it not for the immigration program that brings in foreign...
02:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot T-Mobile Responds To Verizon By Improving Its Own Unlimited Data Plan
It didn't take long for T-Mobile to respond to Verizon's recently announced unlimited data plans. T-Mobile's CEO John Legere announced two improvements to the carrier's T-Mobile One unlimited plan tha...
12:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Ending Emails With Certain Variation Of Thank You Vastly Improves Response Rate, Study Finds
An anonymous reader shares an Inc article: The folks at Boomerang, a plug-in for scheduling emails, did a little study to see how the language people use to close their emails has any effect on the re...
12:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Chrome's Sandbox Feature Infringes On Three Patents So Google Must Now Pay $20 Million
An anonymous reader writes: After five years of litigation at various levels of the U.S. legal system, today, following the conclusion of a jury trial, Google was ordered to pay $20 million to two dev...
12:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Ransomware Insurance Is Coming
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: As bad as the ransomware problem is right now -- and it's plenty bad -- we're likely only at the beginning of what could become a crisis, experts say. "L...
12:00 am - Tue, February 14, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft's Open-Source Graph Engine Takes On Neo4j
An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: Sometimes the relationships between the data you've gathered are more important than the data itself. That's when a graph processing system comes in...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Researchers Working on Liquid Battery That Could Last For Over 10 Years
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget: If Harvard researchers have their way, you may not have to worry about replacing power backs quite so often. They've developed a flow battery (that is, a battery that...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot 188,000 Evacuated As California's Massive Oroville Dam Threatens Catastrophic Floods
Mr D from 63 quotes a report from The Washington Post: About 188,000 residents near Oroville, Calif., were ordered to evacuate Sunday after a hole in an emergency spillway in the Oroville Dam threaten...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Apple Suspends Sales of LG's UltraFine 5K Monitor Over Hardware Issues
Roger Fingas, writing for AppleInsider: Apple has temporarily stopped sales of LG's UltraFine 5K monitor, due to technical problems associated with a lack of proper shielding from wireless interferenc...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Nobody Is Moving, Especially Millennials
For a fun new entry into millennials are lazy, consider this: According to new data tracked down by Richard Fry for Pew Research, just 20 percent of 25- to 35-year-olds (Old Millennials, if you will) ...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Getting All Your News From Facebook Is Like Eating Only Potato Chips, Flipboard CEO Says
In a wide-ranging interview, Mike McCue, CEO of news curator app Flipboard, talked about how -- and from where -- people get their news nowadays and how it shapes their worldview. From a report: McCue...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Apple Joins Wireless Power Consortium Amid Rumors of iPhone With Wireless Charging
If you've been holding out hope for wireless charging to come to the iPhone, chew on this: Apple joined the Wireless Power Consortium. From a report: Last week, a leaked note suggested that Apple is w...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Elon Musk: Humans Need To Merge With Machines Else They Will Become Irrelevant in AI Age
Billionaire Elon Musk is known for his futuristic ideas. So it didn't come as a surprise when on Monday at the World Government Summit in Dubai, he predicted that over time we will see a "closer merge...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Encrypted Email Is Still a Pain in 2017
Bristol-based software developer James Stanley, who used to work at Netcraft, shares how encrypted emails, something which was first introduced over 25 years ago, is still difficult to setup and use f...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Story of Two Developers Who Are Reporting Growth in Revenue After Leaving Apple's App Store
John Biggs, writing for TechCrunch: In what amounts to one of the purest and most interesting experiments in assessing the value of Mac OS's App Store, the founder of Rogue Amoeba posted a description...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Angry Birds Is the Most-Banned Mobile App By Businesses
Barb Darrow, writing for Fortune: Corporate IT pros face the unenviable task of trying to protect valuable data from threats that change all the time. One vector of attack is clearly smartphones and t...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Bay Area Tech Job Growth Has Rapidly Decelerated
An anonymous reader shares a MercuryNews report: Job growth in the tech industry used to zoom like a race car, but these days, hiring by this principal driver of the Bay Area's economy chugs along mor...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Qualcomm's New 802.11ax Chips Will Ramp Up Your Wi-Fi
Your home Wi-Fi performance could soon get much better thanks to new Wi-Fi chips that Qualcomm announced today, the IPQ8074 system-on-chip (SoC) for broadcasters (routers and access points) and the QC...
02:00 pm - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot 34 'Highly Toxic Users' Wrote 9% of the Personal Attacks On Wikipedia
Researchers used machine learning to analyze every single comment left on Wikipedia in 2015. An anonymous reader shares their results: 34 "highly toxic users" were responsible for 9% of all the person...
10:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Things That Every Hacker Once Knew?
Open source guru Eric Raymond turns 60 this year, prompting this question from an anonymous reader:Eric Raymond's newest writing project is "Things Every Hacker Once Knew," inspired by the day he lear...
06:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot LinuxQuestions Users Choose Their Favorite Distro: Slackware
ZDNet summarizes some of the surprises in this year's poll on LinuxQuestions, "one of the largest Linux groups with 550,000 member". An anonymous reader quotes their report:The winner for the most pop...
04:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot US-Born NASA Scientist Detained At The Border Until He Unlocked His Phone
Sidd Bikkannavar works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After racing solar-powered cars in Chile, he had trouble returning to America.mspohr quote The Verge:Bikkannavar says he was detained by U.S...
02:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Face Recognition Mandatory Police Body Cameras = Mass Surveillance?
Facial recognition software is already in use, and it has privacy advocates worried. An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup.Southern California-based FaceFirst sells its facial recognition ...
12:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Gravity-Detecting LIGO Also Found To Be Creating Gravity Waves
LIGO is a large-scale physics experiment to detect "ripples in spacetime," as well as gravity waves from outer space. But it turns out that it's also creating gravity waves, according to a team of phy...
12:00 am - Mon, February 13, 2017
Slashdot Shamed In Super Bowl Ads, Verizon Introduces Unlimited Data Plans
A surprise announcement Sunday revealed that tomorrow Verizon will begin offering introductory plans with unlimited data.* * Customers "will get full LTE speeds until they reach 22GB of usage," report...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot 223 Stranded Whales Rescue Themselves
More than 650 whales beached themselves in New Zealand, and more than 350 of them died. But now an anonymous reader shares NPR's report about a surprising result for the second group of whales.When vo...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot How Beer Brewed 5,000 Years Ago In China Tastes Today
schwit1 quotes The South China Morning Post: Stanford University students have recreated a Chinese beer using a recipe that dates back 5,000 years. The beer "looked like porridge and tasted sweeter an...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Three Privacy Groups Challenge The FBI's Malware-Obtained Evidence
In 2015 the FBI took over a Tor-accessible child pornography site to infect its users with malware so they could be identified and prosecuted. But now one suspect is challenging that evidence in court...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Netflix Geoblocking Loosened Under New EU Law
An anonymous reader writes: "The European Parliament is now finalizing legislation which will allow EU residents to access their paid subscriptions for online media -- such as video streaming, games a...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Can We Pollinate Flowers With Tiny Flying Drones?
An anonymous reader writes:An engineer in Japan has built a 1.6-inch "pollinator-bot" and successfully tested it in his lab. The drone's creator "has armed it with paintbrush hairs that are covered in...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Magic Leap CEO Defends His AR Company After Leaked Photo
Saturday Business Insider claimed that augmented reality company Magic Leap was "scrambling to finish a working prototype before an important board meeting next week," publishing a photo described by ...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Space Junk-Fighting Cable Fails To Deploy
New Scientist reports:It's a rubbish start for the world's first space clean-up experiment. A cable designed to drag space junk out of orbit has failed to deploy from a Japanese spacecraft... A 700-me...
02:00 pm - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot CS Professor Argues Silicon Valley Is Exploiting Both H-1B Visas And Workers
schwit1 quotes Norm Matloff, a CS professor at the University of California at Davis, on H-1B visa programs:The Trump administration has drafted a new executive order that could actually mean higher w...
10:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Trend Micro's Own Cybersecurity Blog Gets Hacked
Mickeycaskill quotes Silicon:Just to illustrate that you can never be too careful, cybersecurity specialist Trend Micro has confirmed that one of the blogs it uses to communicate with customers was it...
06:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Finland's Universal Basic Income Called 'Useless' By Trade Union Economist
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:Finland's basic income experiment is unworkable, uneconomical and ultimately useless. Plus, it will only encourage some people to work less. That's not the view of...
04:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Twitter Announces (More) Hate-Speech Fighting Tools (Again)
Building on anti-harassment tools announced in November, Twitter is now "trying to shake its reputation as a haven for online harassment" with still more new internal algorithms and features, reports ...
02:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot GitHub Commits Reveal The Top 'Weekend Programming' Languages
An anonymous reader writes:Google "developer advocate" Felipe Hoffa has determined the top "weekend programming languages," those which see the biggest spike in commit activity on the weekends. "Clear...
12:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot Mission Possible: Self-Destructing Phones Are Now a Reality
drunkdrone quotes the International Business Times: Self-destructing gadgets favored by the likes of James Bond and Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt have taken one step closer to reality. Researchers ...
12:00 am - Sun, February 12, 2017
Slashdot College Network Attacked With Its Own Insecure IoT Devices
An anonymous reader writes:An attacker compromised over 5,000 IoT devices on a campus network -- including vending machines and light sensors -- and then used them to attack that same network. "In thi...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Oracle Refuses To Accept Android's 'Fair Use' Verdict, Files Appeal
An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:The seven-year legal battle between tech giants Google and Oracle just got new life. Oracle on Friday filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals ...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Four of Iceland's Main Volcanoes Are All Preparing For Eruption
Vulcanologists always watch Iceland carefully -- it's the one exposed place on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, with 130 different volcanoes -- and something big may be brewing. Applehu Akbar writes: Now that ...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot PayPal's 'Policy Update' Includes Price Hikes
"Buying and selling items on the internet is about to get a bit more expensive if you use PayPal to transfer money," reports MLive, noting that some of PayPal's fees will be increasing on March 29. Sl...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot The City Of Munich Now Wants To Abandon Linux And Switch Back to Windows
"The prestigious FOSS project replacing the entire city's administration IT with FOSS based systems, is about to be cancelled and decommissioned," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. TechRepubl...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot TeraHertz Transmitter Can Push 100Gbps Wireless Speeds Via a Single Channel
Mark.JUK writes:A team of Japanese scientists working jointly for Hiroshima University and Panasonic have managed to develop a TeraHertz (THz) transmitter that is capable of transmitting digital data ...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Ford Just Invested $1 Billion In Self-Driving Cars
An anonymous reader quote USA Today:Ford Motor is betting $1 billion on the world's self-driving car future. The Detroit automaker announced Friday that it would allocate that sum over five years to a...
04:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Hundreds of Stonehenge-Like Monuments Found In The Amazon Rainforest
turkeydance quotes The Telegraph: Hundreds of ancient earthworks resembling those at Stonehenge were built in the Amazon rainforest, scientists have discovered after flying drones over the area. The f...
02:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Senators Push Trump Administration For Clarity On Privacy Act Exclusions
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: A group of influential lawmakers, including Sen. Ed Markey and Sen. Ron Wyden, are pressing the Trump administration for answers about how an executive o...
12:00 pm - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Valve Is Shutting Down Steam's Greenlight Community Voting System
Valve's crowdsourced Greenlight submission program, which let the gaming community select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam, is shutting down after nearly five years. It will be replac...
08:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Nanorods Emit and Detect Light, Could Lead To Displays That Communicate Via Li-Fi
schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Ever since 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, quantum dots have been in a market struggle to displace light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for li...
04:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Excessive Radiation Inside Fukushima Fries Clean-Up Robot
"A remotely-controlled robot sent to inspect and clean a damaged reactor at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant had to be pulled early when its onboard camera went dark, the result of excess radiation," r...
04:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot First Gene Drive In Mammals Could Aid Vast New Zealand Eradication Plan
wisebabo writes: Say goodbye to our little whiskered friends! There is an effort to wipe out not just any species, (there's been discussions to wipe out the mosquitos that carry Malaria), but a mammal...
02:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Russia Considers Sending Snowden Back To US As a 'Gift' To Trump
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: U.S. intelligence has collected information that Russia is considering turning over Edward Snowden as a "gift" to President Donald Trump -- who has c...
02:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Spammer Faces Decades In Prison For Sending More Than 1 Million Spam Emails
mi quotes a report from Chicago Sun-Times: A man has been indicted on federal fraud charges for allegedly sending more than a million spam emails. The indictment charges 36-year-old Michael Persaud of...
02:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Amputees Control Virtual Prosthetic Arm Using Nerve Signals
CanadianRealist writes: Current prosthetic arms are usually controlled by detecting signals from the user twitching muscles in the shoulder or arm. This allows only a limited number of possible moveme...
12:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Former CIA Analyst Sues Defense Department To Vindicate NSA Whistleblowers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: In 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior employee at the National Security Agency, was charged with espionage for speaking to a reporter from the ...
12:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster
Jason Koebler quotes a report from Motherboard: The scourge of ticket bots and the immorality of the shady ticket scalpers using them is conventional wisdom that's so ingrained in the public conscious...
12:00 am - Sat, February 11, 2017
Slashdot Lockheed Martin Screwup Delays Delivery of Air Force GPS Satellites
schwit1 writes: Incompetence by a Lockheed Martin subcontractor will delay the delivery of 32 new Air Force GPS satellites and will likely cost the government millions. Bloomberg reports: "Lockheed ha...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Allowed To Sue US Government Over Email Surveillance
A judge has ruled that Microsoft is allowed to sue the U.S. government over a policy that prevents the tech company from telling its users when their emails are being intercepted. From a report on Blo...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Google Might Be Gearing Up To Remove Millions of Play Store Apps Next Month
An anonymous reader shares a PCWorld report: Take a look at the digital shelves of the Google Play Store and you're likely to come across a bevy of so-called zombie apps. These apps typically take the...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Australia's Retailers Join the Local Giant Banks in Their Battle With Apple Pay
More trouble for Apple in Down Under. The $300 billion retail sector has hit back at Apple, saying the global tech giant is trying to freeload on the payments infrastructure built by banks and retaile...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot How UPS Trucks Saved Millions of Dollars By Eliminating Left Turns
Some people probably already know this, but for those who don't: UPS truck drivers don't take left turns, and despite this usually resulting in longer route, they are saving millions of dollars in fue...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot State-sponsored Hackers Targeting Prominent Journalists, Google Warns
State-sponsored hackers are attempting to steal email passwords of a number of prominent journalists, Google has warned. The hackers are suspected to be Russians, reports POLITICO. Some of the journal...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Apple Fails To Remove 'Deleted' Safari Web Browser Histories From iCloud
Reader BrianFagioli writes: Apple was storing Safari browsing histories in iCloud, even after they had been 'deleted' by the user, with such records being kept going back to 2015 -- although apparentl...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds
From a report: On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media. As a result,...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other 'Pirate' Sites
Several Pirate Bay users from ISPs all over the world have been unable to access their favorite torrent site for more than a week. Their requests are being stopped in the Internet backbone network of ...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot More Than 20,000 AT&T Workers Are Getting Ready To Protest Nationwide
Aaron Pressman, reporting for Fortune: Some 21,000 workers in AT&T's wireless business have overwhelming voted to authorize a strike just ahead of the expiration of their contract on Saturday. The...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: How Do You Know a Developer is Doing a Good Job?
An anonymous reader writes: One of the easiest ways to evaluate a developer is keeping a tab on the amount of value they provide to a business. But the problem with this approach is that the nature of...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection
Dan Luu, hardware/software engineer at Microsoft, writes in a blog post: While it's easy to blame page authors because there's a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there's just as much low-han...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Intel Confirms 8th Gen Core On 14nm, Data Center First To New Nodes
Ian Cutress, writing for AnandTech: Intel's 8th Generation Core microarchitecture will remain on the 14nm node. This is an interesting development with the recent launch of Intel's 7th Generation Core...
02:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Tesla Employee Calls For Unionization, Musk Says That's 'Morally Outrageous'
"In a Medium post published today, Tesla employee Jose Moran detailed working conditions at the company's Freemont factory and called for the factory workers to unionize with United Auto Workers (UAW)...
12:00 pm - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot A Guide To Friday's Comet-Eclipse-Full-Moon Triple Feature
SonicSpike quotes a report from CNET: Even if you aren't a space nerd whose idea of a good time is craning your neck to stare into the vast nothingness of space on a frigid evening, this Friday the he...
08:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Attacks On WordPress Sites Intensify As Hackers Deface Over 1.5 Million Pages
An anonymous reader writes: "Attacks on WordPress sites using a vulnerability in the REST API, patched in WordPress version 4.7.2, have intensified over the past two days, as attackers have now deface...
04:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Genetically Modified Salmonella Destroys Cancer By Provoking An Immune Response, Study Finds
schwit1 quotes a report from San Diego Union-Tribune: A genetically modified bacterium destroys tumors by provoking an immune response, according to a study published Wednesday. Using mice and culture...
02:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Republicans Are Reportedly Using a Self-Destructing Message App To Avoid Leaks
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Trump administration members and other Republicans are using the encrypted, self-destructing messaging app Confide to keep conversations private in ...
02:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot All Three New 2017 iPhones To Feature Wireless Charging, Says Analyst
In late October, Nikkei Asian Review released a report claiming Foxconn was testing wireless charging modules for the iPhone 8. Another report has surfaced recently that further reinforces those claim...
02:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot eBay Founder Pledges $500,000 To Test Universal Basic Income Program In Kenya
"Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept [of universal basic income]," reports Mashable. "His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wedn...
12:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Watchdog Group Wants Uber's Self-Driving Trucks Off the Road
New submitter Kemtores quotes a report from USA Today: A few months ago, the ride-hailing giant announced that it would begin testing self-driving Volvo SUVs in this hilly city, but a day later that p...
12:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot Arby's Probes Possible Data Breach Affecting 355,000 Credit Cards
Brian Krebs is reporting that Arby's "recently remediated a breach involving malicious software installed on payment card systems at hundreds of its restaurant locations nationwide." The breach is sai...
12:00 am - Fri, February 10, 2017
Slashdot RSA: Ban On Booth Babes Has Been No Big Deal
netbuzz quotes a report from Network World: In March 2015, RSA Conference organizers made news by contractually insisting that vendors pitch their security wares without the help of "booth babes," a f...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot 86 Percent of New Power in Europe From Renewable Sources in 2016
Renewable energy sources made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe's electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent's rapid shift away from fossil fuels. From a report on The Gu...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Maybe It's Time For Jack Dorsey To Pick a Company
To Jack Dorsey, running two high-profile companies -- Twitter and Square -- at the same time doesn't seem like a problem. In an earlier interview with The New York Times, he said, "I can split my time...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Teases Windows 10's Upcoming 'Project Neon' Design Language
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Microsoft just gave developers a sneak peek at Project Neon, Microsoft's upcoming design language for Windows 10 that aims to add fluidity, an...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Overeager Investors Seeking Snap Buy Snap Interactive Instead
Stephen Shankland, writing for CNET: Investors eager to cash in on the initial public offering of Snap, makers of the popular Snapchat app, have instead been buying shares of Snap Interactive, maker o...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Cortana Now Reminds You To Do the Things You Promised in Emails
From a report: Microsoft is adding a new feature to Cortana today that will remind you to keep your promises. Suggested reminders lets Cortana remind you when you've promised to do something in an ema...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Jeff Bezos Talks About Music Streaming, and His Political Ambitions
In a wide-ranging interview with Billboard, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, Blue Origin, and owner of The Washington Post, talked about music streaming business. He also talked about whether he...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot NSA Contractor Indicted Over Mammoth Theft of Classified Data
Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: A former National Security Agency contractor was indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges he willfully retained national defense information, in wha...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Tor's Ooniprobe, Now Available On Android and iOS, Helps People Track Internet Censorship
In 2012, researchers at Tor announced Ooniprobe, an open-source tool to collect data about local meddling with the computer's network connections, and also whether the government was censoring somethi...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Human Resources Startup Zenefits Is Laying Off Almost Half Its Employees
An anonymous reader shares a report: Zenefits will lay off 45% of its employees in an effort to slash costs, according to an internal memo this morning that was obtained by BuzzFeed News, a stark ackn...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Developer Explains Why All Windows Drivers Are Dated June 21, 2006
For years, people have wondered why all Windows drivers are dated June 21, 2006. Long time developer at Microsoft, Raymond Chen explains (much of the entire post in summary): When the system looks for...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot This Blog Is Republishing All the Animal Welfare Records the USDA Deleted
Last year, thousands of animal welfare records were removed from the web by the Department of Agriculture. Now, a government transparency blog is on a mission to recover and republish as many of these...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Apple CEO Tim Cook Tackles Truth in the Digital Age
Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the University of Glasgow yesterday to be awarded an honorary doctorate. During the Q&A session, one audience member asked Cook to tell what the future looks like. Follo...
02:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Verizon and T-Mobile Are In a Virtual Tie For the Best Network In the US
Verizon has tied T-Mobile for the fastest carrier in the United States and both carriers are virtually tied for the "best" in overall LTE download speeds, according to Open Signal's State of Mobile Ne...
12:00 pm - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Tesla To Start Pilot Production of Model 3 This Month
According to Reuters, Tesla is planning to "begin test-building its Model 3 sedans on February 20, a move that could allay concerns about the company meeting its target to start production in July." T...
08:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Glass From Nuclear Test Site Shows the Moon Was Born Dry
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: We can't recreate the giant impact that led to the moon's formation in a lab, but humans have made some other big explosions. By examining resid...
04:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Successfully Decode the Genome of Quinoa
Gr8Apes writes: Scientists have successfully decoded the genome of quinoa, a hugely popular "super-food" because it is well balanced and gluten-free. They have pinpointed one of the genes that they be...
02:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Facebook Is Closing 200 of Its 500 VR Demo Stations At Best Buy Stores Across US
According to Business Insider, "Facebook is closing around 200 of its 500 Oculus Rift virtual-reality demo stations at Best Buy locations across the U.S." The reason has to do with "store performance,...
02:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Android Wear 2.0 Is An Evolutionary Update To Google's Smartwatch OS
Google is officially launching Android Wear 2.0 today -- the biggest update to the company's wearable operating system since its launch in 2014. While Android Wear 2.0 will be launching with two new f...
02:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Linux Kernel 3.18 Reaches End of Life
prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: Linux kernal 3.18.48 LTS is here and it's the last in the series, which was marked for a January 2017 extinction since mid-April last year. According to th...
12:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Programmer Develops Phone Bot To Target Windows Support Scammers
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: The man who developed a bot that frustrates and annoys robocallers is planning to take on the infamous Windows support scam callers head-on. Roger Anders...
12:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Comcast Should Stop Claiming It Has 'Fastest Internet,' Ad Board Rules
The advertising industry's self-regulation body said Comcast should stop saying in advertisements that it "delivers the fastest internet in America" and the "fastest in-home Wi-Fi." The evidence Comca...
12:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Police Arrest Five Men For Selling Kodi Boxes 'Fully Loaded' With Illegal Streaming Apps
Five people have been arrested in early morning raids for selling "fully loaded Kodi boxes," which are set-top boxes modified to stream subscription football matches, television channels and films for...
12:00 am - Thu, February 9, 2017
Slashdot Wikipedia Bans Daily Mail As 'Unreliable' Source
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Wikipedia editors have voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group ...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot We Finally Have a Computer That Can Survive the Surface of Venus
Planet Venus is one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. The surface temperature there is 470C (878F). This has been one of the key challenges that has prevented us from deeply explori...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot E3 Will 'Officially' Open To The Public this Year
E3 has traditionally been a media-only event -- at least in theory. But starting in 2017, you won't even need a WordPress account to get access to the latest and greatest in gaming. From a report: The...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Pioneering Data Genius Hans Rosling Passes Away At Age 68
An anonymous reader writes: On Tuesday, Sweden's prime minister tweeted that Hans Rosling "made human progress across our world come alive for millions," and the pubic educator will probably best be r...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Now Offers Patent Troll Defense For Azure Customers
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft Azure will now offer customers protection against patent trolling, via Redmond's considerable collection of 10,000 legal patents. The practice of patent trolling ...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Why Has Cameroon Blocked the Internet?
It has been over three weeks since English-speaking parts of Cameroon, a country on the west coast of Africa between Nigeria and Gabon, has had no internet connectivity. Residents believe, according t...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Intel To Invest $7 Billion in Factory in Arizona, Employ 3,000 People
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich met with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, where the company announced it will invest $7 billion in a factory employing up to 3,000 people. From a report: The factory will ...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Story Of a Founder Who Burned Through $21M While His Social App Fling Crashed
London-based social media app Fling, which never brought in any revenue, burned through $21 million in less than three years. According to a Business Insider report, the founder splashed out on 1st cl...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Apple Seeks To Position Metal as Part of New 3D Graphics Standard For Web
Mikey Campbell, writing for AppleInsider: Apple's WebKit team on Tuesday proposed a new Community Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that will focus on developing a new standard API, perhaps...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Samsung Factory Fire Caused By Faulty Batteries
A fire that drew out 110 firefighters and 19 trucks to a factory operated by Samsung Galaxy Note 7 battery supplier, Samsung SDI, was caused by discarded faulty batteries, the company has said. From a...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot EU Agrees To Cross-Border Access To Streaming Services
Putting in place the first piece of its hoped-for unified digital market, the European Union has agreed on new rules allowing subscribers of online services in one E.U. country access to them while tr...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot US Visitors May Have to Hand Over Social Media Passwords: DHS
People who want to visit the United States could be asked to hand over their social-media passwords to officials as part of enhanced security checks, the country's top domestic security chief said. Fr...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot The Most Mentioned Books On StackOverflow
An anonymous reader writes: People over at DevBooks have analyzed more than four million questions and answers on StackOverflow to list the top of the most mentioned books. You can check out the list ...
02:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot NYC Fines Airbnb Hosts For 'Illegal' Home Rentals
In October, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law one of the nation's toughest restrictions on Airbnb, which includes hefty fines of up to $7,500 for people who rent out space in their apartments...
12:00 pm - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Sony's Latest Smartphone Camera Sensor Can Shoot At 1,000fps
Sony has taken the wraps off of its latest smartphone camera sensor which it says can shoot 1080p slow-motion video at 1,000 frames per second. "The new 3-layer CMOS sensor -- an industry first -- can...
08:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot A Supermassive Black Hole Has Been Devouring a Star For a Decade
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: A massive black hole devoured a star over a 10 year period, setting a new record for the longest space meal ever observed, according to new research...
04:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot There Are Now Twice As Many Solar Jobs As Coal Jobs In the US
According to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, the solar industry now employs more than 260,000 people even though solar power provides just 1.3 percent of America's electricity. Last ...
02:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images Available For Free
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that more than 375,000 of its "public-domain artworks" are now available for unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our ima...
02:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot 72% of 'Anonymous' Browsing History Can Be Attached To the Real User
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Researchers at Stanford and Princeton have succeeded in identifying 70% of web users by comparing their web-browsing history to publicly available i...
02:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Battlestar Galactica Actor Richard Hatch Dies At 71
New submitter computerman413 writes: TMZ reports that Richard Hatch has passed away at 71 from pancreatic cancer. Hatch played Apollo on the original Battlestar Galactica, and had a recurring role as ...
02:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Goldman Sachs Automated Trading Replaces 600 Traders With 200 Engineers
Goldman Sach's New York headquarters has replaced 600 of its traders with 200 computer engineers over the last two decades or so, thanks to automated trading programs. (Though, the effort to do so has...
12:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail
Mickeycaskill quotes a report from Silicon.co.uk: Rail passengers could use fingerprints or iris scans to pay for tickets and pass through gates, under plans announced by the UK rail industry. In its ...
12:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot Google Brain Creates Technology That Can Zoom In, Enhance Pixelated Images
Google Brain has created new software that can create detailed images from tiny, pixelated images. If you've ever tried zooming in on an image, you know that it generally becomes more blurry. You'd ju...
12:00 am - Wed, February 8, 2017
Slashdot World of Warcraft Gold Can Now Be Used To Buy Other Blizzard Games
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been almost two years now since Blizzard began letting World of Warcraft players pay for their monthly game-time subscriptions using in-ga...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot You Can Make Any Number Out of Four 4s Because Math Is Amazing
Andrew Moseman, writing for Popular Mechanics: Here's a fun math puzzle to brighten your day. Say you've got four 4s -- 4, 4, 4, 4 -- and you're allowed to place any normal math symbols around them. H...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Nintendo's Engineers Have Embraced Unreal Engine
Tom Regan, writing for Engadget: If there's one thing that Nintendo has struggled with, it's enticing third-party developers to create games for its consoles. But according to VentureBeat, the company...
10:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Apple's Ultra Accessory Connector Dashes Any Hopes of a USB-C iPhone
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Among all the iPhone 8 concepts and daydreams, my favorite scenario has always been to see Apple replacing its proprietary Lightning connector with ...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite Podcasts? And Why?
Are podcasts finally starting to go mainstream? Are they the future of radio? Who knows. Over the weekend, a reader asked us if we listen to podcasts -- and if yes, which ones? I started listening to ...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Debuts Customizable Speech-To-Text Tech, Releases Some Cognitive Services Tools To Developers
Microsoft is readying three of its 25 Cognitive Services tools for wider release to developers. From a report on GeekWire: Microsoft's AI and Research Group, a major new engineering and research divis...
08:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Grew 17 Miles in the Last Two Months
Jugal K Patel, writing for the NYTimes: A rapidly advancing crack in Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf has scientists concerned that it is getting close to a full break. The rift has accelerated t...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot If You Owned a PC With a DVD Drive You Might Be Able To Claim $10
If you owned a PC with a DVD drive more than 10 years ago, you're probably owed $10. From a report on The Verge: A class-action lawsuit is now accepting claims after Sony, NEC, Panasonic, and Hitachi-...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot SpaceX Plans to Start Launching Rockets Every Two To Three Weeks
Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, plans to launch its Falcon 9 rockets every two to three weeks, its fastest rate since starting launches in 2010, once a new launch pad is put in...
06:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Movie Industry Wants Irish ISPs To Block Pirate Movie Streaming Portals
The Motion Picture Association is trying to have three popular streaming portals blocked by Irish Internet providers. In a new court case, the movie studios describe movie4k.to, primewire.ag and onwat...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Intel's Atom C2000 Chips Are Bricking Products -- And It's Not Just Cisco Hit
Thomas Claburn, reporting for The Register: Intel's Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct. But the semic...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Facebook Shareholders Urge Company To Replace Mark Zuckerberg With 'Independent' Board Chair
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: Facebook is being pressured by a group of shareholders seeking the removal of company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg from the board of the directors. ...
04:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot 'Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones'
Michael Seibel, a partner at Y Combinator, writes in a blog post: I'd like to make the point that success isn't the same as raising a round of financing. Quite the opposite: raising a round should be ...
02:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot FBI Will Revert To Using Fax Machines, Snail Mail For FOIA Requests
blottsie writes: Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via email. Instead, the U.S. agency will largely require requests be made via fax machine...
12:00 pm - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Have Invented Paper That You Can Print With Light, Erase With Heat, and Reuse 80 Times
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Nearly 1% of carbon emissions annually can be attributed to paper production, even though we recycle much of the paper we produce. Yadong Yin has a sol...
08:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Dozens of Popular iOS Apps Vulnerable To Intercept of TLS-Protected Data
Researchers at Sudo Security Group Inc. discovered seventy-six popular applications in Apple's iOS App Store that had implemented encrypted communications with their back-end services in such a way th...
04:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Discover Evidence of a 'Lost Continent' Under the Indian Ocean
Scientists at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa say they've discovered evidence of a "lost continent" beneath the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. According to EarthSky, the eviden...
02:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Western Digital Unveils First-Ever 512Gb 64-Layer 3D NAND Chip
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: As great as these solid state drives are now, they are only getting better. For example, SATA-based SSDs were once viewed as miraculous, but they are now lo...
02:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot US House Passes Bill Requiring Warrants To Search Old Emails
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Monday to require law enforcement authorities to obtain a search warrant before seeking old emails from tec...
02:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot DC Inauguration Protestors Are Being Hit With Facebook Data Searches
During the protests over the inauguration of Donald Trump, more than 230 protestors were arrested -- many of which were charged with rioting and had their phones seized by Washington, D.C., police. On...
02:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot French Politician Uses Hologram To Hold Meetings In Two Cities At the Same Time
neutrino38 writes: The French presidential election is approaching fast. One of the candidates, Jean-Luc Melanchon, used a hologram to hold two public meetings at once. With a political program that i...
12:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot Overwatch Director Speaks Out Against Console Mouse/keyboard Adapters
Striek quotes a report from Ars Technica: Regardless of where you fall in the long-running debate between keyboard/mouse and analog stick controls, you could historically be relatively sure that every...
12:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot 'We Need Robots To Take Our Jobs,' Veteran Tech Reporter John Markoff Explains Why
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was ...
12:00 am - Tue, February 7, 2017
Slashdot China Is Now the World's Largest Solar Power Producer
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Not only is it the world's most populous country, it's now also the world's biggest producer of solar energy. On Saturday, the National Energy ...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: How To Get Started With Programming? [2017 Edition]
Reader joshtops writes: I know this is a question that must have been asked -- and answered -- on Slashdot several times, but I am hoping to listen from the community again (fresh perspective, if you ...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Uber Hires a Nasa Veteran Who Thinks We'll Start Seeing Flying Cars In Next Three Years
Uber is getting serious about its intentions of building a flying car. Uber's plan involves airborne taxis that will travel 50 to 100 miles between "vertiports" that connect passengers between their h...
10:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot US Navy Decommissions the First Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carrier
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Navy has decommissioned the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The vessel launched in 1961 and is mainl...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Chrome 56 Quietly Added Bluetooth Snitch API
Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register: When Google popped out Chrome 56 at the end of January it was keen to remind us it's making the web safer by flagging non-HTTPS sites. But Google made littl...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Vizio Settles With FTC, Will Pay $2.2 Million and Delete User Data
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that smart TV maker Vizio has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a case involving the TVs' data collection techniques. From a report on Ventur...
08:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot RethinkDB Gets Acquired By the Cloud Native Compute Foundation; Joins the Linux Foundation
An anonymous reader writes:The Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) today announced that it has acquired the RethinkDB copyright and assets, including its code, and contributed it to The Linux Found...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot China To Add More than 50 Million New urban jobs in 2016-2020
China is striving to create more than 50 million new jobs in urban areas over the five years to 2020, the cabinet said in an employment promotion plan on Monday. From a report on Reuters: It will also...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Are Robots Coming To Take Investor Jobs on Wall Street?
From an article on NYPost: More investors are warming to the cold, steely embrace of the increasingly sophisticated, low-cost automated robo-advisers. The primary reason is to save money on those fees...
06:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Patent Troll With Good Record in Past Sues Netflix, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Others Over Offline Downloads
Netflix added the ability to download movies and TV episodes for offline viewing in November last year. Music streaming service SoundCloud, and video hosting service Vimeo have had this feature for qu...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot 97 Tech Companies Including Apple, Google, Microsoft Call Travel Ban Unlawful In Rare Coordinated Legal Action
An anonymous reader shares a WashingtonPost report: Silicon Valley is stepping up its confrontation with the Trump administration. On Sunday night, technology giants Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot 'The End Of The Level Playing Field'
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson writes in a blog post: When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we saw something completely different. Here was a level playing field where anyone could launch a b...
04:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot The Leap Week: Did Apple Really Have a Record Quarter?
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Apple stated that Q1 FY2017 was an all-time record for quarterly revenue. The media dutifully and mostly uncritically spread this "great" news for Apple. Techni...
02:00 pm - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot DRM Company Denuvo Forgets To Secure Its Server, Leaks Two Years Of Emails
Denuvo "left several private directories on its website open to the public," TorrentFreak wrote Sunday, calling it "an embarrassing blunder" for the digital rights management company. "Members of the ...
10:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot The Brief, Bumbling Tech Careers of Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, and Will.i.am
"Four years ago this week, Blackberry named Alicia Keys its global creative officer... Keys was really going to work for Blackberry -- to participate in weekly calls addressing product development; de...
06:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: Why Do You Care About Tech Conferences?
An anonymous user is "just starting a programming career," and has several questions for Slashdot's readers:What exactly is the role of tech conferences? I always assumed they were mostly for exhibito...
04:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Studies Link Some Stomach Drugs To Alzheimer's Disease and Kidney Problems
While the recommended dosage for Nexium, Prevacid and Prilose is just two weeks, doctors often advise patients to continue taking them for years. But now Scientific American reports that "Chronic use ...
02:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot A Super Bowl Koan: Does The NFL Wish It Were A Tech Company?
Are tech companies cashing in on the popularity of Super Bowl -- or is the Super Bowl trying to get into the world of tech? An anonymous reader writes: The NFL hosted a startup pitch competition befor...
12:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot Disney Thinks High Schools Should Let Kids Take Coding In Place of Foreign Languages
theodp writes:Florida lawmakers are again proposing a contentious plan that would put coding and foreign language on equal footing in a public high school student's education. Under a proposed bill st...
12:00 am - Mon, February 6, 2017
Slashdot How Open Sourcing Made Apache Kafka A Dominant Streaming Platform
Open sourced in 2010, the Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform is now used at more than a third of Fortune 500 companies (as well as seven of the world's top 10 banks). An anonymous reader writ...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns?
gthuang88 reports on a talk titled "Will Robots Eat Your Job?" Bill Gates and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm "too aggressively" over artificial intelligence's potential negative consequences for soc...
10:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot 14,000 Domains Dropped Dyn's DNS Service After Mirai Attack
chicksdaddyNew data suggests that some 14,500 web domains stopped using Dyn's Managed DNS service in the immediate aftermath of an October DDoS attack by the Mirai botnet. That's around 8% of the web ...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Can The Mayhem AI Automate Bug-Patching?
"Now when a machine is compromised it takes days or weeks for someone to notice and then days or weeks -- or never -- until a patch is put out," says Carnegie Mellon professor David Brumley. "Imagine ...
08:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Anonymous Takes Down 10,613 Dark Web Portals
An anonymous reader writes: Anonymous hackers have breached Freedom Hosting II, a popular Dark Web hosting provider, and have taken down 10,613 .onion sites. In a message left on all Freedom Hosting I...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Which US Cities Have The Worst Malware Infection Rates?
A new report from Enigma Software Group identifies the American cities with abnormally high infection rates for malware. An anonymous reader quotes TechRepublic: In 2016, Tampa, Orlando, and St. Louis...
06:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Mozilla To Drop Support For All NPAPI Plugins In Firefox 52 Except Flash
The Netscape Plugins API is "an ancient plugins infrastructure inherited from the old Netscape browser on which Mozilla built Firefox," according to Bleeping Computer. But now an anonymous reader writ...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Google, Unlike Microsoft, Must Turn Over Foreign Emails, Rules Judge
Every year Google receives more than 25,000 requests from U.S. authorities for "disclosures of user data in criminal matters," according to a U.S. judge's recent ruling. But this one is different. An ...
04:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Report Finds PFAS Chemicals In One-Third of Fast Food Packaging
dryriver quotes CNN:Most of the time, when you order fast food, you know exactly what you're getting: an inexpensive meal that tastes great but is probably loaded with fat, cholesterol and sodium. But...
12:00 pm - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Reporter Pans Open Source Laptop Kit TERES-I
The Verge's Paul Miller has some harsh words for the $242 open source DIY laptop kit TERES-I from Olimex.Instead of buying one hyper-integrated board that has all of the laptop's brains and I/O on it,...
08:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Developer Argues For 'Forgotten Code Constructs' Like GOTO and Eval
mikeatTB quotes TechBeacon:Some things in the programming world are so easy to misuse that most people prefer to never use them at all. These are the programming equivalent of a flamethrower... [But] ...
06:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Massive Study Links IP Addresses Per Capita To GDP
Three researchers "decided to scan the entire IPv4 address range every 15 minutes between 2006-2012 to work out what insights they could gain from humanity's mass connection to the internet," reports ...
04:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Aggressive Forum Users?
Slashdot reader dryriver writes:I've noticed a disturbing trend while trying to resolve a rather tricky tech issue by asking questions on a number of internet forums. The number of people who don't he...
02:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot New Book Describes How AirBNB Influenced City Laws
"For years, Airbnb was the friendly foil to Uber, aiming to work with cities rather than against them," writes Slashdot reader mirandakatz. "But as it grew and regulatory challenges mounted, the start...
12:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Privacy-Centric Linux Distro Tails 3.0 Will Drop 32-Bit Processor Support
All of its outgoing connections are routed through Tor, and it even blocks non-anonymous connections. You can carry it around on a USB stick, and Edward Snowden uses it. But a big change is coming wit...
12:00 am - Sun, February 5, 2017
Slashdot Pong's Inventor Unveils Three New VR Arcade Games - Including Pong
Pong's creator is now "a grizzled guy in his mid-70s" who believes there's a market for people who'd prefer to try out virtual reality headsets at videogame arcades. An anonymous reader quotes MIT Tec...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Kaspersky Lab Promises New Backup Tool To Help Unhappy Social Media Users Quit
Kaspersky Lab surveyed 16,750 people and concluded that often negative experiences on social experience overpower their positive effects -- and they're doing something about it. JustAnotherOldGuy poin...
10:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot 16 Years of GPS Space Weather Data Made Publicly Available
"It's not often that a scientific discipline gains a 23-satellite constellation overnight," reports Science magazine, describing 16 years worth of radiation measurements from GPS satellites finally re...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot A Hacker Just Pwned Over 150,000 Printers Exposed Online
Last year an attacker forced thousands of unsecured printers to spew racist and anti-semitic messages. But this year's attack is even bigger. An anonymous reader writes: A grey-hat hacker going by the...
08:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Peter Thiel Thinks There's Not Enough Sex In Silicon Valley
Peter Thiel recently complained parts of Silicon Valley are "hyper-politically correct" about sexual activity, and shared a friend's theory that conservative parts of America tolerate Silicon Valley "...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot OPNsense 17.1 Released, Based On FreeBSD 11
An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: OPNsense 17.1 is now available as the newest release of this network-focused FreeBSD-based operating system forked from pfSense. It's now been two years since the ...
06:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Mozilla Binds Firefox's Fate To The Rust Language
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:After version 53, Firefox will require Rust to compile successfully, due to the presence of Firefox components built with the language. But this decision may restr...
04:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Is Disabling Older Versions of Skype For Mac and Windows On March 1
If you're using an older, outdated version of Skype, you may want to consider updating soon. Microsoft said today that starting on March 1 people will no longer be able to sign in to version 7.16 of S...
02:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Sweden Pledges To Cut All Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 2045
Sweden has announced ambitious plans to completely phase out greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The nation also reaffirmed the urgency of tackling climate change and called for all countries to "step u...
12:00 pm - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft's H-1B Workers Cited In Motion That Successfully Blocked Trump's Travel Ban
"President Trump's travel ban is on hold," reports WGN. "A federal judge in Seattle blocked the executive order banning travelers from seven predominately Muslim countries." But Slashdot reader theodp...
08:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Misophonia: Scientists Crack Why Eating Sounds Can Make People Angry
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Why some people become enraged by sounds such as eating or breathing has been explained by brain scan studies. The condition, misophonia, is far more than...
04:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Lawsuit Claims Apple Forced Users To iOS 7 By Breaking FaceTime
According to Apple Insider, a class-action lawsuit has been filed in California that claims Apple broke FaceTime in iOS 6 to force users to upgrade to iOS 7. The lawsuit says Apple forced users to upg...
04:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality
jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemption...
02:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Nintendo Halts Wii U Production In Anticipation of Switch Launch
New submitter Shane_Optima writes: The Guardian reports that Nintendo has ceased production of the Wii U after a little more than four years. From the report: "In late January it was announced that Ni...
02:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Zero-Day Windows Security Flaw Can Crash Systems, Cause BSODs
Orome1 quotes a report from Help Net Security: A zero-day bug affecting Windows 10, 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and 2016 can be exploited to crash a vulnerable system and possibly even to compromise it. ...
02:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Google Will Reportedly Remove Google Now Launcher From Play Store
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police: Google currently has two launcher apps in the Play Store; Google Now Launcher and Pixel Launcher. In a few months, there will only be one. Acco...
12:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot Google To Force Basic HTML Gmail On Older Chrome Versions
Earlier this week, Google quietly announced that Gmail will only be partially supported on older versions of Chrome browser soon. From a report: Users of Chrome version 53 and older editions of the br...
12:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot First Screenshots of Microsoft's Windows 10 Cloud OS Leak Online
The first alleged screenshots of Microsoft's Windows 10 Cloud operating system have leaked, courtesy of Windows Blog Italia. "The screenshots seem to show a coming version of the operating system that...
12:00 am - Sat, February 4, 2017
Slashdot IMDb Is Shutting Down Its Long-Running, Popular Message Boards After 16 Years
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: After 16 years, IMDb's message boards and the ability to privately message other users is shutting down, with many members of the community openly mou...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot LG Confirms 5K Mac Monitor Has Issue When Placed Near a Router, Says New Batch To Have Enhanced Shielding
Late last month, we learned that LG's UltraFine 5K Display, which was designed in part by Apple to work with the new MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display, would flicker, discon...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Google Is Integrating Progressive Web Apps Deeper Into Android
Yaron Friedman, a software engineer at Google, writes on Chromium blog: In 2015, we added a new feature to Chrome for Android that allows developers to prompt users to add their site to the Home scree...
10:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Apple To Start Making iPhones In India, Says State Government
vasanth quotes a report from BBC: Apple is to start making iPhones in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, the state's government has said. Ministers said Apple would start an initial manufacturing...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Government Watchdog Says SpaceX Falcon 9s Are Prone To Cracks
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget article: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets apparently have a serious issue that could delay the company's manned missions. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Gove...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Cutting H-1Bs Could Mean More Competition From China and India, Says GoDaddy CEO
Silicon Valley companies continue to express their concerns about the restrictions on H-1B visa program. The H-1B visa program -- which enables U.S. companies to hire foreign workers -- has become a p...
08:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say
Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. From a report on NYTimes: Some have argued that it's a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides a...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot False News, Absurd Reality Present Challenges For Satirists
Between reality and the bubble of fantasy news stories, these are tough times for satirists. From a report on AP, submitted by several readers: The New Yorker magazine recently took steps to distingui...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Facebook's AI Unlocks the Ability To Search Photos By What's in Them
An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: Initially used to improve the experience for visually impaired members of the Facebook community, the company's Lumos computer vision platform is now po...
06:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot 'To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics'
Excerpts from an article on Quanta Magazine, rearranged for clarity and space: Math conferences don't usually feature standing ovations, but Francis Su received one last month in Atlanta. In his talk ...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Amazon Now Has More Than 341,000 Employees -- Added 110,000 People Last Year
Amazon added more than 110,000 employees during the past year, topping 341,000 people as of the end of 2016 thanks largely to a significant increase in the Seattle-based tech giant's network of fulfil...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Introduces GVFS (Git Virtual File System)
Saeed Noursalehi, principal program manager at Microsoft, writes on a blog post: We've been working hard on a solution that allows the Git client to scale to repos of any size. Today, we're introducin...
04:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Sony PlayStation 4 Is Finally Adding Support For External Hard Drive
The Sony PlayStation 4's next system update, out now for beta testers, will allow users to connect an external USB hard drive. From company's blog post: It's easy to upgrade the HDD that came with you...
02:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Nvidia Stops Promotional Game Resales By Tying Codes To Hardware
Nvidia is putting a stop to the resale of bundled promotional game keys by tying them to a specific graphics card purchase, according to Ars Technica. Users will now have to redeem codes via the GeFor...
12:00 pm - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Electric Car Battery Prices Fell By 80% In the Last 7 Years, Says Study
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hardavenue: According to the study made by McKinsey, the cost of electric car batteries has decreased by 80% since 2010. Tesla offers much lower cost batteries...
08:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Hacker Dumps iOS Cracking Tools Allegedly Stolen From Cellebrite
Last year, when Apple refused to unlock the security on an iPhone 5c belonging to the San Bernardino shooter, the FBI turned to an Israeli mobile forensics firm called Cellebrite to find another way i...
04:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Researchers Develop Compact Breathalyzer That Detects the Flu
Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have created a prototype breathalyzer-style device capable of detecting the influenza virus in its early stages -- before you start to show symptoms...
04:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Mexican Surgeon Uses VR Headset To Distract Patients During Surgery
dryriver writes: The BBC has a longish story on a Mexican surgeon who makes his patients wear a VR headset that distracts them from the surgical procedure being performed on them. While Dr Mosso cuts ...
02:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Ransomware Completely Shuts Down Ohio Town Government
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In another interesting example of what happens when you don't manage your backups correctly, the Licking County government offices, including the p...
02:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot The Netherlands Opts For Manual Vote-Count Amid Cyberattack Fears
Bruce66423 writes: Following revelations about the lack of security of the software, the Dutch government has decided to abandon the use of it to count the ballots at the forthcoming election in March...
02:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Windows DRM-Protected Files Used To Decloak Tor Browser Users
An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: Downloading and trying to open Windows DRM-protected multimedia files can deanonymize Tor Browser users and reveal their real IP addresse...
12:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Reddit Bans Far-Right Groups Altright and Alternativeright
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Social media site Reddit has banned two of the largest far-right "subreddits" groups it hosts, altright and alternativeright. The subreddits have...
12:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Snapchat Files For a $3 Billion IPO
Snapchat has filed for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange today, picking the ticker symbol "SNAP." The company hopes to raise $3 billion and says it has 158 million daily active...
12:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Hackers Take Over Unsecured Radio Transmitters, Play Anti-Trump Song
Ars Technica is reporting that "a certain model of Low Power FM radio transmitter with known vulnerabilities has been targeted in a new wave of radio-station hacks this week." Hackers have taken advan...
12:00 am - Fri, February 3, 2017
Slashdot Cisco Patches 'Prime Home' Flaw That Allowed Hackers To Reach Into People's Homes
Orome1 quotes a report from Help Net Security: Cisco has patched a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that could allow attackers to completely take over Cisco Prime Home installations, and t...
10:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Firefox Fail: Layoffs Kill Mozilla's Push Beyond the Browser
So much for Mozilla's quest to bring Firefox to new and different places. From a report on CNET: The nonprofit organization told employees Thursday that it is eliminating the team tasked with bringing...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Film Industry's Latest Search Engine Draws Traffic With 'Pirate' Keywords'
A new search engine launched by the Dutch film industry is targeting 'pirates' specifically, reports TorrentFreak. Every movie or TV-show page lists legal viewing options but also includes pirate keyw...
08:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Seeks Trump Order Exemption for Workers With Visas
Microsoft is asking U.S. officials to grant exceptions for law-abiding, visa-holding workers and students from President Donald Trump's immigration order, channeling the outrage expressed by many in t...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot GitLab Says It Found Lost Data On a Staging Server
GitLab.com, the wannabe GitHub alternative that went down hard earlier this week and reported data loss, has said that some data is gone but that its services are now operational again. From a report ...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Gives Windows Device Makers Their 2017 Marching Orders
Microsoft officials have some fairly specific ideas about what they want their Windows-device-making partners to build in calendar 2017. From a report: Microsoft wants its OEMs and ODMs to make more W...
06:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot The FAA Gave the First Ever Go-Ahead For a Drone To Fly at an Airport
It's not legal to fly your drone anywhere near an airport -- at least not without a special waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration. From a report: For the first time under the FAA's commercia...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot US Probes Panasonic Unit For Alleged Bribery Violations
A Panasonic inflight entertainment and communications systems subsidiary is under investigation by U.S. authorities for allegedly breaking bribery and securities laws. From a report: Panasonic Avionic...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Google Vows To Build Leading Cloud For Enterprise Windows, Swiping at Microsoft's Core Business
Google is going after a core part of Microsoft's cloud business, aiming to expand Google Cloud Platform's appeal to big companies that run the classic combination of Microsoft's Windows Server and SQL...
04:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Valve and Game Publishers Face EU Probe For Geo-Blocking; ASUS Faces Probe For Online Price-Fixing
Valve, the company behind games distribution platform Steam, is being investigated by EU antitrust regulators. Agreements in place between Valve and five game publishers that implement geo-blocking in...
02:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Amazon To Build $1.5 Billion Air Cargo Hub In Kentucky, Creating Around 2,000 New Jobs
Amazon is planning to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in a spot that crossed the Cincinnati and Kentucky border, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the project is completed, it will eventua...
12:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Marvel At 'Increasingly Non-Natural' Arctic Warmth
mmell writes: Recognizing that this is a dreadfully old story (at least by Slashdot standards), current developments make this once more a current story. Scientists studying the Arctic environment are...
12:00 pm - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Barnes and Noble Recalls 147,000 NOOK Tablet 7 Power Adapters Due To Shock Risk
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: Want to know something shocking? Like, literally shocking? Barnes and Noble is recalling 147,000 faulty NOOK Tablet 7 power adapters due to shock risk. In o...
08:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Milky Way Is Being Pushed Across the Universe
dryriver quotes a report from CNN: Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is being pushed across the universe by a large unseen force, according to new research. Although it may not seem like a friendly gest...
04:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Researchers Unveil First Ever Blueprint To Construct a Large Scale Quantum Computer
haruchai quotes a report from Phys.Org: An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, ...
04:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Apple Developing Custom ARM-Based Mac Chip That Would Lessen Intel Role
According to Bloomberg, Apple is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel processors. The chip is a variant of the T1 SoC App...
02:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot 2.5 Million Xbox and PlayStation Gamers' Details Have Been Leaked From Piracy Forums
Xbox360ISO.com and PSPISO.com have been hacked by an unknown attacker in late 2015 and the details of the 2.5 million users affected have been leaked online. The leaked information contains email addr...
02:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Police Use Pacemaker Data To Charge Homeowner With Arson, Insurance Fraud
JustAnotherOldGuy writes from a report via Network World: If you're dependent upon an embedded medical device, the device that helps keep you alive may also be used to incriminate you in a crime. Ross...
02:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot New York Sues Charter Over Slow Internet Speeds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: New York filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing Charter Communications Inc of short-changing customers who were promised faster internet speeds than it...
12:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Airbus Is About To Build A Self-Flying Electric Robo-Taxi
Airbus said today it is building a prototype of an electric self-flying plane for a single passenger, which it is calling the Vahana. The autonomous plane can fly a single passenger on trips of around...
12:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Tim Sweeney Dislikes Windows 10 Cloud Rumors, Calls OS 'Crush Steam Edition'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The rumor that Microsoft is building a version of Windows 10 that can only install apps from the Windows Store has drawn criticism before it's ev...
12:00 am - Thu, February 2, 2017
Slashdot Tokyo 2020 Olympic Medals To Be Made From Recycled Phones
Mickeycaskill quotes a report from Silicon.co.uk: The medals for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be made from recycled mobile phones in an effort to engage the Japanese nation and mee...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Leaked Video Shows New 'Nightmare-Inducing' Wheeled Robot From Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics has a reputation for building robots which push the boundaries of robotics technology, although with a slightly creepy persona. Its latest robot is no different. From a report on The V...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot EU Announces Deal To End All Wireless Roaming Charges
The European Union took a big step toward creating a Digital Single Market today with the announcement of a deal that would end roaming charges for mobile consumers across the continent. From a report...
10:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Jury Orders Oculus To Pay $500 Million In ZeniMax Lawsuit
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: A Dallas, Texas jury today awarded half a billion dollars to ZeniMax after finding that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, and by extension Oculus, fail...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot LibreOffice 5.3 Released, Touted As 'One of the Most Feature-Rich Releases' Ever
An anonymous reader shares a report: A new month, and a brand new version of open-source office suite LibreOffice is now available to download. And what a release it is. LibreOffice 5.3 introduces a n...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Tesla Drops 'Motors' From Name As CEO Musk Looks Beyond Cars
Tesla Motors changed its name to "Tesla Inc" as Chief Executive Elon Musk looks to transform the Silicon Valley firm from an electric car maker to a diversified energy products company. From a report ...
08:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Reached Via a Mind-Reading Device, Deeply Paralyzed Patients Say They Want to Live
Neuroscientists have designed a brain-reading device to hold simple conversations with "locked-in" patients that promises to transform the lives of people who are too disabled to communicate. Details ...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot HTTPS Adoption Has Reached the Tipping Point
Security expert Troy Hunt, who is perhaps best known for creating Have I Been Pwned data breach service, argues that adoption of HTTPS has reached the tipping point, citing "some really significant th...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot It's Time To Admit Apple Watch Is a Success
At company's quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the holiday period was the company's "best quarter ever" for Apple Watch -- both units and revenues -- "with holiday demand so strong that...
06:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Annual Hard Drive Reliability Report: 8TB, HGST Disks Top Chart Racking Up 45 Years Without Failure
Online backup solution provider Backblaze has released its much-renowned, annual hard drives reliability and failure report. From a report on ArsTechnica: The company uses self-built pods of 45 or 60 ...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Google Chrome Engineer Says Windows Defender 'the Only Well Behaved Antivirus', Cites 'Tons of Empirical Data'
Days after former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan said that antivirus security suites are not necessary, and AV vendors are of little help. A Google Chrome engineer has echoed the same message, re...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot The Future of iOS is 64-Bit Only -- Apple To Stop Support For 32-Bit Apps
Your ability to run 32-bit apps on an iOS device is coming to an end. As several other Apple news sites have reported, Apple has updated the pop-up warning in the iOS 10.3 beta to say that the 32-bit ...
04:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot 'Australia Is Stubbing Out Smoking'
Australia was the first country in the world to introduce mandatory plain packaging for tobacco products. Now it is taking another strong stand, but will other countries follow suit? From an article o...
02:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Facebook Changes Feed To Promote Posts That Aren't Fake, Sensational, Or Spam
TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is prioritizing "authentic" content in News Feed with a ranking algorithm change that detects and promotes content "that people consider genuine, and not misleadi...
12:00 pm - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot NASA's Cassini Captures Photos of Saturn's Rings In Unprecedented Detail
NASA's Cassini probe has captured news images of Saturn's rings in unprecedented detail. The images were captured by the probe in its penultimate mission phase of its mission that includes "20 orbits ...
08:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups. On...
04:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot 2K Games Wins the Right To Store and Share Your Biometric Facial Data
In October 2015, two gamers who used face-scanning tech found in 2K Games' NBA series to create more realistic avatars filed a lawsuit against the company as they were concerned about how 2K would sto...
02:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot AI Decisively Defeats Four Pro Poker Players In 'Brains Vs AI' Tournament
Halfway through the "Brains vs. AI" poker competition, it was pretty clear the artificial intelligence named Libratus would end up victorious against its human opponents, who are four of the world's t...
02:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Researcher Develops Explosion-Proof Lithium Metal Battery With 2X Power of Lithium-Ion
MojoKid writes: Tufts University professor and founder of Ionic Materials, Mike Zimmerman, hopes that his resilient ionic battery technology will finally replace Lithium Ion. The reason scientists and...
02:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Touch Bar MacBook Pros Are Being Banned From Bar Exams Over Predictive Text
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When it launched late last year, the new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar was largely reliant on first-party applications to show off what it could do. Sinc...
12:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot KDE Plasma 5.9 Released
KDE has announced the release and general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems. While it only took a few months to develop and isn't a long-term suppo...
12:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Secret Rules Make It Pretty Easy For the FBI To Spy On Journalists
schwit1 shares with us a report on a 11-part series led by The Intercept reporter Cora Currier: Secret FBI rules allow agents to obtain journalists' phone records with approval from two internal offic...
12:00 am - Wed, February 1, 2017
Slashdot Apple Sets a New Record For iPhone Sales
Apple has reported strong financial results for the first quarter of 2017. According to CEO Tim Cook, the "holiday quarter results generated Apple's highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple ...
10:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot US Judge Rejects Suit Over Face Scanning for Video Game
Two athletes whose images were scanned for a video game have been bounced from court on their claim that the game maker violated a law protecting biometric information. From a report: Brother-and-sist...
10:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Elon Musk Thinks We Will Have To Use AI This Way To Avoid a Catastrophic Future
Elon Musk has long said that artificial intelligence will have to augment human abilities, rather than compete with them, in order to avoid a portentous future. He has been active in trying to find wa...
10:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Roku Owners: Comcast Is About To Sell You Cable TV Without the Cable Box
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Comcast is making its Xfinity TV service available to subscribers with Roku set-top players via a new app, paving the way for customers of the natio...
08:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Google Hands Over $3M in Bug Bounties as Payouts Soar For New Android Flaws
Google paid researchers over $3m last year for their contributions to its vulnerability rewards programs. From a ZDNet report: Payouts in 2016 take Google's total payments under its bug bounty schemes...
08:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Microsoft Sells $17 Billion in Second Bond Deal in Six Months
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Microsoft found ample demand for its $17 billion bond offering, allowing it to cut borrowing rates on its second multibillion note offering in six months...
08:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Google Open-Sources Chrome For iOS
Google has uploaded its Chrome for iOS code into the open-source Chromium repository. In other words, Chrome for iOS has now been open-sourced like Chrome for other platforms, letting anyone examine, ...
06:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Swedish Govt Mulls Tougher Punishments To Tackle Pirate Sites
Authorities in Sweden are mulling new measures to deal with evolving 'pirate' sites. As part of a legislative review, the government wants to assess potential legal tools, including categorizing large...
06:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass
Tesla is all set to cut the ribbon on a massive battery storage facility in the California desert -- the biggest of its kind on earth. It joins similarly huge facilities built by AES and Altagas, whic...
06:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Even Sprint Beat AT&T and Verizon in Customer Growth
Customers are turning to Sprint again. From a report on CNET: In fact, they're starting to look to the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier over stalwarts like AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The c...
04:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot 'It's Tricky': Apple Misses the Deadline To Pay $13.9 Bn To Ireland in Illegal Tax Benefit
Apple has not fully paid the 13 billion euros ($13.9 billion) it owes to Ireland in illegal tax benefits even though the deadline has passed, the European Union's competition said on Tuesday. From a r...
04:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Netgear Exploit Found in 31 Models Lets Hackers Turn Your Router Into a Botnet
An anonymous reader shares a report: You might want to upgrade the firmware of your router if it happens to sport the Netgear brand. Researchers have discovered a severe security hole that potentially...
04:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Indian IT Sector Warns Against US Visa Bill
India's IT lobby warned on Tuesday that a bill before the U.S. Congress aimed at imposing tougher visa rules unfairly targets some of its members and will not solve a U.S. labor shortage in technology...
02:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Why An LSD High Lasts For So Long
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) has been credited, in part, for the creation of the iPhone, the polymerase chain reaction, as well as some pretty abstract artwork. Since the drug is classified as a S...
12:00 pm - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Create Electronic Glasses That Can Automatically Focus On Whatever You're Looking At
mmell writes: University of Utah scientists have created a prototype electronic lens which uses several technologies to customize the lens optics focusing on whatever the wearer is looking at. [Just l...
08:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Oxygen From Earth's Atmosphere May Be Traveling To the Moon's Surface
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: New research shows that oxygen from Earth could be journeying all the way out to the Moon, where it then gets lodged inside the lunar soil. It's a p...
04:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Trump's Next Immigration Move To Affect H-1B Visas; Require Tech Companies To Try To Hire Americans First: Bloomberg
AdamnSelene writes: A report in Bloomberg describes a draft executive order that will hit the tech industry hard and potentially change the way those companies recruit workers from abroad. The H-1B, L...
04:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials
schwit1 quotes a report from Digital Trends: In this generation of self-starters and self-made women and men, do-it-yourself isn't just an option, it's a way of life. And if there's not an app for tha...
02:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Google Quietly Makes 'Optional' Web DRM Mandatory In Chrome
JustAnotherOldGuy quotes a report from Boing Boing: The World Wide Web Consortium's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a DRM system for web video, being pushed by Netflix, movie studios, and a few br...
02:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Scientists Find 'Oldest Human Ancestor' -- A Big-Mouthed Sea Creature With No Anus
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Researchers have discovered the earliest known ancestor of humans -- along with a vast range of other species. They say that fossilized traces of the 540-...
02:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot LG's UltraFine 5K Display Becomes Useless When It's Within Two Meters of a Router
The LG UltraFine 5K Display was designed in part by Apple to work with the New MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display, which was discontinued late last year. According to 9to5Mac...
02:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Razer Buys Nextbit
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: Today, startup Nextbit announced that it has been acquired by PC accessory maker Razer. True, it seems like an odd acquisition, but not any stranger than Ra...
12:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot Former Fed Employee Fined $5,000 For Installing Bitcoin Software On Server
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A former Federal Reserve employee was sentenced Friday to 12 months probation and a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty in October to installing unaut...
12:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot 'Father of Pac-Man,' Masaya Nakamura, Dies At Age 91
AmiMoJo writes from a report via The Japan Times: Masaya Nakamura, the founder of game developer Namco and known as "the father of Pac-Man," has died at age 91. He founded Nakamura Seisakusho in 1955,...
12:00 am - Tue, January 31, 2017
Slashdot FDA Confirms Toxicity of Homeopathic Baby Products; Maker Refuses To Recall
Last year in November, the Federal Trade Commission issued an enforcement policy statement that requires over-the-counter (OTC) homeopathic drugs and product makers to disclose in their advertisement ...